Mass Murder|Gun Control

Two Silly, One Very Good, and One Genius Solution to Stop the Mayhem

A discussion of fingers, minds and triggers, and what to do about gun control.

The NRA and Two Silly Solutions

The NRA believes that guns aren’t responsible for mass shootings, but that people are. The logic is that a trigger cannot be pulled unless a human finger is involved. Fingers are attached to people and people’s brains tell them to kill.

Maybe all that is needed is early intervention in the minds of evil people to keep control of their fingers. Invade their brains and remove the parts that might want to commit mayhem. If you can find them.

Or.

If that can‘t be done, perhaps future gunmen should pre-emptively lose a trigger digit or two. Barbaric, but practical. Not quite as barbaric as mowing down little children with assault rifles, but still…

The One Very Good Solution

In the spirit of full disclosure, I live in Australia and we don’t have mass shootings as regular events. Any more. Occasionally bikie gangs get their knickers knotted about something and there’s a spate of gun takedowns. These deaths are revenge based and target other gang members. They are very good at it, so no-one really cares. Except the gang members and their families.

We had mass shootings in the past, but the largest took place in Tasmania in 1996, killing thirty-five and injuring twenty-three. Twenty-four if you count the gunman. But who cares about him?

Our then Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, said enough is too much. A lot of people didn’t love John Howard as a PM, including me. He was a strict conservative by nature, and like all politicians, probably wanted to hang onto his job as long as possible.

But you have to give the man credit for his resolve to control guns and ward off future mass mayhem.

Only a few days after the massacre, he enacted laws that significantly restricted private ownership of semi-automatic rifles, pump-action, and semi-automatic shotguns. He also created uniform licensing of firearms.

Yes, it’s not about fingers or any other part of human beings. It’s about giving the finger (pardon the phrase) nothing to kill with. If it gets itchy to kill en masse, just make that too damned hard.

The then UK Prime Minister, John Major, understood the guns or people conundrum. In 1997, as a reaction to growing British gun violence, he beefed-up gun ownership laws.

Jacinda Ardern, the shit-kicking, badass PM of New Zealand, massively tightened their gun laws one week, and again in six months, following the 2019 Christchurch massacre in which fifty-one people died.

So there it is. Three leaders who acted intelligently, and made rational choices about gun ownership. Granted, the countries concerned didn’t have a massively fuck-witted and politically driven gun lobby, or a crusty old second amendment to deal with, but the work was done without opposition, and swiftly.

Don’t get the wrong idea

There is a legitimate place for firearms in each of those three nations. However, that place, clearly, does not include places of worship, schools, and supermarkets.

The three leaders who took gun-control into their own hands, recognised and acted when enough was enough. You can do that in a parliamentary system, but not in a republic which is also a democracy.

Republicans have been enthralled by massive political contributions from the NRA. And although eighty-nine percent of the American people want gun reform, Republicans don’t have the ethical substance to bite the hand that feeds them and vote for the needed legislation.

US gun control is not as impossible as one imagines.

So here we are. You could remove fingers, and try to excise evil from brains, on the basis that they might, at some unknown time in the future, murder your loved ones.

Or, for a start, you can limit access to semi-automatic weapons and make everyone’s lives a helluva lot safer.

There is one final and genius solution

Stop ‘ownership’ of politicians by big corporations, and allow only private individuals to contribute. Then cap the amount of money any one entity can donate.

And that just might be the legislative shot in the kneecaps the NRA so justly deserves.

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