WHEN TWO SIDES ARE EQUALLY UNAPPEALING WHO DO YOU SIDE WITH?  ANSWER?  NEITER OF THEM

So it was with interest and dismay that I read about US citizens signing a petition to have Piers Morgan deported.  Interest because of the subject he was commenting on with the  brains and subtlety of some kind of bovine creature in some kind of ornamental plate shop, but also dismay as that would mean he’d be heading back to the UK, but joking aside the debates that are going on in the US at the moment regarding gun control are debates that are going on in offices and homes around the globe as all people feel the torture of those parents whose children will never be coming home and the difficult questions that the country faces.

It is interesting to see the debate however go exactly the same way that the debate went after the 2008 credit crunch when many of the world’s huge financial institutions failed.  Then around the time the financial institutions said that the bonus structure was wrong and this needed to be changed ...Until it came time to reward it’s exec’s for their failure when they expected it to be business as usual.

What has happened this time?  Well immediately after the tragic event in Connetticut the NRA realised that if they say no to gun control immediately after the event they would look bad, and so stayed largely quiet, then of course we hear from them after they feel the fuss has died down and their solution is ...MORE GUNS.  Yep either arm the teachers or have armed guards at every school.  MORE GUNS.  Sadly the NRA seems both unwilling to change and unwilling to look at history to see what the actual effect of these things are, but when young children are gunned down mercilessly the question must surely be asked, why are the NRA so unwilling to look at more gun control?  Looking at America from the outside in I think I have some ideas on that subject.

But firstly let’s weigh up in all seriousness the suggestion of the NRA of putting guns in schools.  Obviously then the danger is that a guard will get depressed, kill his fellow guards and start killing kids as someone who is suffering a breakdown with a gun is already there.  The funny thing is to me this is the obvious problem with this solution, and yet on message boards everywhere we read NRA supporters suggesting that even mentioning such a likelihood is stupid because anything can happen! ...Which to me means that if anything can happen then putting guns in schools is a bad idea, but it is not the first time that weapons escalation has lead to more problems than it has solved.  In fact all around us at the moment the struggle for weapons is causing us constant problems in Iran, Korea and numerous other areas but the best historical evidence of the danger comes from the 1980’s.

Our tale begins with a cold-war spy named Oleg Gordievsky in the mid-eighties as Soviet and US relations started to breakdown.  The US had built up a huge amount of nuclear weapons to defend themselves against communist aggression (following to the letter the NRA matra) the USSR responded in kind to defend themselves against capitalist aggression (as you do) and after a series of disastrous faux pas and diplomatic catastrophe’s (Reagan’s radio broadcast when he thought he was off-air being one and the shooting down of an aircraft being another) tensions between the two nations were at a high not seen since the Cuban missile crisis.  In preparation for a possible Soviet attack the US created a number of computer simulation war games.  Soviet spies took these simulations as indications that the US were planning to attack and were considering launching a pre-emptive strike.

What happened next and the coming years, for me, is almost like a roadmap of what needs to happen in the US on a personal level.  

Oleg Gordievsky, due to his position as a spy knew that the computer simulation war-games were precisely that and not a preparation plan for war, because of this he was able to get America to reduce the simulation’s prominence in communications, scale down the inflammatory incursions towards Russian air-space and begin to open up a dialogue. 

To put it simply, escalation made it worse, stopping and stepping back made it better.

The parallels of history to what has just happened are astonishing.  The killer’s mum was (according to the news stories) was terrified of the  apocalypse and armed herself to fight it off but wound up creating it.  Guns in these places aren’t going to stop people whose grand plan is to put a bullet in their head at the end of their moment of madness, they know they’re going to die and so for them it doesn’t matter who they take with them.  Put guns in a school they’ll attack a library, put guns in a library they’ll attack a park.  

More guns will not stop insane people from acting as it only works as a deterrent on the sane. 

But from looking at the blogs, comments pages on news articles and such, clearly it is not just the number of guns in the US that is causing the problems, in Germany and France and Canada gun ownership is also relatively common. In Canada they watch the same TV shows, the same films and play the same violent video games but similar atrocities are rare.  This for America, for its news outlets, for its journalists and for anyone who gives a damn about the children who won’t see another Christmas should be telling.  

Guns in a room on their own can’t hurt anyone it is only in a highly paranoid culture they become like  paraffin on a bonfire.  What I have noticed is that many of the comments pages on the news stories about the NRA’s solution cite fear of Democrat’s taking away their rights and developing a police state, BUT, if armed police in shops, in public buildings, in banks, in schools isn’t a police state then what is?  Why would they want to actually encourage the very film they fear the most and it’s then I realised the one thing that you would not expect the NRA of all people to be.

They’re afraid.

Something has occurred that raises questions about the very nature of American gun culture, that asks the nation if the path it is on is the right one, that asks America what will it do to make things better for the future.  It should not be a case of the American government forcing change on the public it should be a case of the American public wishing to change.  The arms race within the country has brought about more of these apocalyptic moments that any country should bear but the only way forward now is back.

I’ve been Mister Chatable and no doubt I’ll be asked to be deported next.

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