On US gun control
Duncan Gilbey writes: Re. “What will happen with gun control under a Trump presidency?” (Tuesday)
The US could place a total ban all gun sales tomorrow and there would be no change to the number of shootings and massacres. There are over 200 million guns in private hands — some estimates state that there are more guns than people (over 300 million). Let those numbers sink in. Gun violence in America is endemic. It is not an issue that will be resolved by legislative or constitutional change. We have to face the fact that some problems don’t have a solution. This is one of them.
Just be glad you don’t live there.
On Spain’s place in European history
James Burke writes: Re. “On Catalonian independance” (Tuesday)
Desmond Graham’s assertion that Spain was “the driver of European civilisation … in the expansion of Europe from 1599 onwards” is baffling. “1599 onwards” marks what historians describe as the “decline” (sometimes, “collapse”) of Spanish imperial power. A hundred years later, the Habsburg kings had inbred themselves to extinction. By then they’d lost Portugal, barely retained Catalonia, and been forced to accept the independence of their former Netherlands territories, having wrecked the Castilian economy by raising taxes to fight a series of losing wars.
Did Desmond mean 1499? That’d be more accurate, if a bit icky. Spain’s Golden Age wasn’t so golden for the millions of people it murdered.
The gun dealer who seems to think that a customer who spent thousands on dozens of guns was in some sense ‘ normal’ is himself quite enlightening.surely a dealer who profits while others die should have some responsibility. Americans seem to be addicted to religion,guns and opioids .areligionthat mainly makes others responsible for ones actions.similarly gun dealers take no responsibility for their actions and doctors take no responsibility for their prescriptions.perhaps the doctors are afraid of the guns.
People who have not lived in the US, really have no appreciation of the sheer normalcy of owning guns.
I lived in Scottsdale, AZ, for a couple of years. Calling their (Arizona’s – it’s important to understand it differs a lot state to state) gun laws extremely liberal, is quite an understatement. It was not at all uncommon to see people wandering through the equivalent of Woolworths/Coles, doing their daily grocery shop, with a pistol on their hip. Heck, I saw people with shotguns slung over their shoulders several times.
Most of my US mates own at least one gun, some more than one, and a few of them a dozen or more. None of them are violent, irrational, or in any relevant way distinguishable from a random punter you’d walk past in an Australian street.
They are different they have a gun that can kill people .they also don’t understand statistics that show people that own / carry guns are dozens of times more likely to have a family member shot dead often a child.