The Right to Bear Arms

I, like many other people read with horror the news of the massacre in the theatre in Colorado. I don’t think there’s anything I can say that probably hasn’t already been said and I can’t begin to imagine just how bad it must be for those that were involved or even remotely close to the incident.

However, having said that there was something that I read a couple of days later that truly blew my mind.

Following the shooting, applications for guns went up by 41% in Colorado (including applications to be able to carry a concealed weapon).

I can only surmise that this is a fundamental and significant difference between the psyche of Australia and the US.

After the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania there was almost universal agreement throughout the nation for better gun control and tighter gun laws. Sure there was protest within the gun community and objection to it, but all in all, the cry was there and the government acted upon it.

Yes in the US, even after such a significant and tragic incident, we have not a cry for greater control or to get guns off the street, but a deference to that much loved (?) line of the constitution about the right to bear arms.

I am astounded that the reaction to the event is to carry a gun. Would it truly have been better if more people in that theatre had been carrying concealed weapons? Would they have fired back at the intruder? Would they have been good enough to stop him before he inflicted tragedy? Would they perhaps have created even greater mayhem and potentially injury or death with the cross-fire they would potentially create.

It reminds me of a story told to me by a South African friend who said that he knew it was time to try and get out when he was almost accepting of the fact that there had been a shoot out in their street/compound. He joked that he thought that most of the firing had possibly been the two groups of security guards at each end who had probably ended up shooting at each other as the would-be burglars ran off somewhere else. That’s not an environment in which I’d like to live.

People say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but I still maintain that if there isn’t a gun about, or if it’s locked away, you take away that capacity to grab it in the heat of the moment and potentially change someone’s life forever.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that tighter gun laws will completely remove them from the streets, there will always be someone willing to go outside the law in an order to get ahead, but surely if the number of guns available even legally is reduced then the opportunity for those outside the law reduces as well. We’ve come to far from a world without guns but if every one of them was destroyed, no one could be shot.

I just don’t know that I’d feel safer in a cinema in Colorado today than I would have before the shooting.