Guns

It cannot have escaped anybody's notice that this week there was yet another mass shooting at a school in the USA - this time in Uvalde, Texas.

There's been enough said in other places, and this will undoubtedly be discussed until it fades from public discussion until it happens again in another place.

The Onion, the satirical news site, made a serious point by publishing the same story, over and over, with the same headline “‘No Way To Prevent This', Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”. Each story covered a different mass shooting, but the headline was the same. In satire, it makes a serious point.

Viewing this from afar, it's obviously dangerous to make statements, but it seems fairly obvious that the availability of assault weapons is the problem. Australia solved its problem after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, and we similarly took urgent action after the Christchurch Mosque attacks in 2019.

The Americans have their second amendment that protects their right to bear arms, but the advancement of armament technology since the constitution was written could not have been predicted.

I have read that each of the states has its own laws which are variously more or less restrictive on gun ownership, background checks, and other measures that affect the availability of weapons and into whose hands they make it. Unsurprisingly, the states which have the more restrictive laws have lower levels of gun violence.

The sceptical angle to this is, I think, in the response of those who would do nothing to prevent these incidents, suggesting more and more bizarre “solutions” to the problem. Apparently, doors are now the problem - that schools need to be “hardened” to prevent entry. Or, teachers need to be armed, and that a bad actor with a gun can be taken out by a good actor.

Given the response of the local police in Uvalde, we can be rightly sceptical that there are any good solutions to provide protection when prevention is a much more practical approach.

Anyway, that's enough of my soapbox rant!