Another Shooting

First off I must say that as a parent the one thing you don't want is for your children to die before you, whatever age you and they may be. My first reaction to the killings in the States last night wasn't so much "Why?" as "Why the surprise?"

A country that contains, in it's Constitution, the right to bare arms is asking for trouble. That doesn't mean that people will be forever running around killing each other but the fact that the State allows you to carry or own a weapon for your own protection indicates to me that not only is the United States of America a young country but that it is also mentally retarded. The NRA whose motto is "Gun's don't kill people, people kill people," is so far up its own barrel it can see daylight at the other end.

Is America so insecure and so immature that it cannot see the realtionship between having the right to carry a weapon and the right to use one? People in this country believe that owning a car gives them the right to do almost anything without question, imagine if we had the right and the lack of common sense to carry a firearm as well. We live quite close to a firing range and to be honest when Nathalie and me go for a walk on a Sunday morning a see grown men in combat gear firing rfiles at targets a hundred yards away I do wonder what progress society has made in the last sixty years.

We have been importing American culture into this country for years, most of it good, you think of Keaton, Bernstein, Dylan, Hewlett Packard, R.E.M - for the bad you can think of McDonald's, and er, that's it. Unfortunately we have also been importing the attractive, to young people, parts of South L.A culture, the derogatory comments about women, the lack of respect and the right to bear arms. We've had our Hungerford and our Dunblane, how long before a school in Peckham or Lewisham is the sight of a copycat shooting? At the moment it's just knives, but it wasn't long ago it was bravado. How long before somebody gets into an argument on a street corner and decides not just to kill the person responsible but all his classmates.