It's an absolute tragedy what has occurred in Las Vegas and it's impossible not to feel sorry for the victims and families of all the victims. No, I'm not American, I live in Australia where we suffered one of the world's worst mass shootings in 1996 at Port Arthur, Tasmania. The Australian government introduced gun control and reform after our tragedy, and thankfully we have never come close to experiencing anything like that again as a result. Secondly, I'm a cop, and the general public in Australia does not have access to semi-automatic rifles and the like, and to possess a firearm here you must have a genuine reason for doing, which is generally being a member of a competitive shooting club, or a letter from a rural land owner who gives you permission to hunt on their property. Anyway I digress, I thought I'd post the below article from a well travelled and respected Australian journalist, it's more of an outsider perspective looking in at your country but I feel he makes some valid points about the American way of life. I have several friends from Australia who live in the US, and several of them own guns, as is their right to do so but they were stunned at just how easy it is to acquire them.
Anyway, here is the article: [h=1]Why Americans will never give up their guns[/h]
AMERICA truly is the greatest nation on earth. But there is a reason why they won’t give up their guns and more people will die. Joe Hildebrand - www.news.com.au
AMERICA is the greatest country on earth. Indeed, in terms of sheer power, scale and sphere of influence it is probably the greatest country that has ever been.
No other nation could destroy the world as many times over should it so choose, nor has any other nation so charmed and enthralled the world with all it produces. It conquers its enemies with its armies and colonises them with its culture.
And that is because the United States of America isn’t just a people or a place. It’s an idea. And it is because of that idea that the United States seems determined to literally shoot itself to death.
There is probably no nation on earth whose foundations have been so idealised and mythologised. It was “discovered” by a great explorer so hopelessly lost he thought he had landed in India.
It was colonised by “persecuted” pilgrims who then killed people for witchcraft. And it was enshrined as a nation which cherished “liberty” by men who themselves owned slaves. Even the name America comes from a colourful Italian businessman who may have fabricated the very documents about the New World that now bears his name.
In this sense it was the perfect successor to the first great Western power, Rome — a city which was established as a haven for criminals and rogues and populated by the kidnapping and rape of women but which historians would later declare founded by two brothers raised by a she-wolf and a Trojan prince.
Little wonder that even in its earliest days America considered herself to be the New Rome and that Washington DC was carefully constructed to emulate the awe and spectacle of the ancient capital.
But this is neither scandalous nor surprising. All great powers need more than land and armies; they need the mythology and founding principles that an army will fight for. They need that ideal.
In Rome the ideal was the humble citizen who diligently ploughed his farm until he was called upon to serve his country. This was embodied in the form of Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus, an elder statesman who was called upon to defend Rome from an invasion that was set to wipe out the fledgling republic — an event which could have completely recast Western civilisation as we know it today.
Cincinnatus accepted the role of dictator, saved the city and then gave up near-absolute power to return to his plough.
That was Republican Rome’s great myth, its great idea: That no matter how much power a man was given he would always be grounded in humility, hard work and service. Just like Elton John, even when he was offered the Yellow Brick Road, he would always go back to his plough.
But what has Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus got to do with America you might ask? Well, the Americans liked him so much they named a city after him. And not just any city but the first major city founded after the American Revolution: Cincinnati, Ohio — often referred to as the first “purely American” city.
And as soon as the War of Independence ended in 1783 its leading officers got together and formed an elite order to preserve the ideals of the Continental Army. They called it the Society of the Cincinnati and its first president was none other than the first president of the United States of America, George Washington himself.
Then in 1789, with another revolution afoot in America’s oldest ally of France, the Second Amendment to the Constitution proposed this now famous decree:
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Just like in the Old Rome, the New Rome’s ideal hero was a farmer-citizen-soldier, a free man who, when duty called, would willingly down his tools and pick up a weapon in service of his country.
The only difference was that whereas the ideal Roman was supposed to down his weapon and return to his labours after the event, the ideal American was supposed to hold on to his weapon should the need arise again.
For Rome the national symbol was the plough, but for America it became the gun.
America’s latest shooting horror is little different to the multitude of previous mass shootings the nation has tolerated in the past, it is just bigger and more bloody. And thus there is little reason to think it will change America’s mind.
Personally, I still cannot contemplate anything more horrific than the Sandy Hook massacre in which 20 six and seven-year-old children were progressively shot dead by a young man wandering through a primary school with a bolt-action rifle.
I mean honestly, just think about that.
If the mass murder of six year olds cannot persuade US lawmakers to tighten gun controls then God help a bunch of country music fans in Vegas.
The response of the gun rights brigade to this and other atrocities is typically to entangle the issue in absurd hypotheticals or childish logic.
For Sandy Hook they said that the teachers should have had guns so they could kill the gunman, yet clearly that would have done nothing to stop a sniper from a 32nd floor window above the Strip.
Or they will say that terrorists use trucks to kill people — should we ban them too? This is just as excruciatingly dumb as a certain infamous leftist argument that falling refrigerators kill more people in the US than terrorists.
It hurts my brain to have to say this but here we go: Trucks, much like refrigerators, have uses other than random assassination. They are not designed to kill. Guns and terrorists, on the other hand, are.
And of course there’s the famous “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” routine.
Well yes, people certainly do kill people, and they’re much more likely to kill them with a @#$%ing machine gun in their hand.
But all of these debates are actually completely beside the point. Because while the arguments of the American gun lobby are often painfully semantic, their basic position is in fact profoundly spiritual.
The belief among many Americans in the right to bear arms is an article of faith.That right, moreso even than the arms themselves, is part of the idea of America that they were born and raised to believe in. The idea of freedom, of the individual’s supremacy over government and of the need to resist any imagined tyranny that might be around the corner. This is pretty much unique to any Western country but it just so happens that the Western country it is unique to is the most powerful on the planet.
And so whereas many liberal Americans think about gun control as just throwing away a deadly piece of metal, many libertarian Americans see it as throwing away a fundamental cornerstone of the American ethos. As far as they’re concerned we might as well be asking them to stop being American at all.
The gun control debate will never be won unless we understand this chasm and bridge it but as usual the left and the right are arguing at cross purposes. Liberals think they’re talking about a machine and libertarians think they’re talking about an ideal.
Then there is the practical problem, and that great Catch-22 question of whether America needs more guns precisely because it has too many guns — almost as many as it has people.
Just today a senior correspondent told me about an American bloke he’d met who refused to drive through Maryland because state law required him to keep his gun in the boot of his car.
“How am I ever gonna get to it?” he asked, as though it was a rhetorical question.
And why would he need to get to it? Well in case someone pulled a gun on him of course.Indeed, it is impossible not to reason that many of the police shootings in the US that have sparked the Black Lives Matter campaign and torn the country in two have been fuelled perhaps not so much by blanket racism as skittish cops who never know when someone is going to pull a gun on them. How else to explain the equally bizarre shooting of a white Australian woman by a black police officer?
Thus America’s foundational obsession with the firearm isn’t just destroying people’s lives, it’s also destroying the very fabric of the union — which has always been stretched and frayed at best.
And this is deeply dangerous not just for Americans but for all of us.
Despite all its flaws and contradictions, America truly is the greatest nation on earth in terms of military might, economic prosperity and social, political and cultural capital.
There is still no power more vital to global security and stability and yet it is currently looking more insecure and unstable than at any other time in its century-long reign of influence.
More worrying is that this is occurring in a critical window of opportunity for China to become the dominant world superpower, Russia to reassert itself as a resurgent expansionist nationalist power and rogue elements such as North Korea and Syria to potentially spark seismic power shifts, if not all out war.
True American patriots might do well to wonder if continuing to allow unfettered access to all manner of firearms in this age of instability is really the best idea. They might also wonder if a bunch of innocent country music fans — of whom many were no doubt red-blooded Republican patriots themselves — deserved to be shot dead at random by a gun you can buy at a corner store.
If they really want to make America great again perhaps they could start by changing the laws so that Americans kill more terrorists than they do each other.
PS: The other thing about gun control is that it wasn’t always the NRA’s fault. Up until the mid-1970s the National Rifle Association was a group focused on hunting and sports shooting. Then in 1977 at a late-night meeting in a Midwestern city a group of gun rights activists launched a surprise coup and made it the undefeatable lobby group it is today.
They even had a name for that night. They called it the Revolt at Cincinnati.
"Cincinnatus accepted the role of dictator, saved the city and then gave up near-absolute power to return to his plough."
An interesting aside to this is tha t Washington coud have become a dictator. He was the only President elected unanimously...twice, and retired to his farm, Mt Vernon, by his own choice, just like Cincinnatus.
