Lack of Gun Control

For a country that basically makes everything that is fun illegal, the US is incredibly stupid when it comes to guns, as I've pointed out before.

From Salon

America is a violent country – our homicide rate is four to 12 times higher than that in more civilized parts of the world – and Aurora, Colo., is more violent than the average American town. A down-market suburb of Denver, it sees an average of about 20 of its 325,000 residents murdered each year.
This fact is a matter of almost total indifference to the local – let alone the national – media, since the murders are rarely considered noteworthy by the news business, which is to say the victims are rarely either sufficiently rich or telegenic to garner more than cursory attention.
A lot of people – about 15,000 at present – get murdered in the United States every year. Most of these people get killed in places that, roughly speaking, look something like Aurora: places where the people are poorer and less white than in America in general, and who are therefore by definition not very interesting or important.
Of course these rules don’t hold if some lunatic kills a dozen people at once, especially in a normally innocuous public space, such as a multi-screen movie theater, which interesting and important people can picture themselves within. So today murder in Aurora, Colo., is an interesting and important topic.
Among other things, this kind of crime highlights the absurdity of “security theater” – the almost wholly symbolic rigmarole to which Americans subject ourselves in a few symbolic places, such as airports, government buildings and the like. Anybody in this country who wants to kill a lot of people in a crowded public space can do so fairly easily. The fact this almost never happens – and that when it does happen the act almost never has a political motive – indicates how wildly overstated the threat of terrorism is in America today.

 And I totally love and respect Jason Alexander's epic tweets about Gun Control. My favourite bit:

Then I get messages from seemingly decent and intelligent people who offer things like: @BrooklynAvi: Guns should only be banned if violent crimes committed with tomatoes means we should ban tomatoes. OR @nysportsguys1: Drunk drivers kill, should we ban fast cars?
I’m hoping that right after they hit send, they take a deep breath and realize that those arguments are completely specious. I believe tomatoes and cars have purposes other than killing. What purpose does an AR-15 serve to a sportsman that a more standard hunting rifle does not serve? Let’s see – does it fire more rounds without reload? Yes. Does it fire farther and more accurately? Yes. Does it accommodate a more lethal payload? Yes. So basically, the purpose of an assault style weapon is to kill more stuff, more fully, faster and from further away. To achieve maximum lethality. Hardly the primary purpose of tomatoes and sports cars.
Then there are the tweets from the extreme right – these are the folk who believe our government has been corrupted and stolen and that the forces of evil are at play, planning to take over this nation and these folk are going to fight back and take a stand. And any moron like me who doesn’t see it should…
a. be labeled a moron
b. shut the fuck up
c. be removed
And amazingly, I have some minor agreement with these folks. I believe there are evil forces at play in our government. But I call them corporatists. I call them absolutists. I call them the kind of ideologues from both sides, but mostly from the far right who swear allegiance to unelected officials that regardless of national need or global conditions, are never to levy a tax. That they are never to compromise or seek solutions with the other side. That are to obstruct every possible act of governance, even the ones they support or initiate. Whose political and social goal is to marginalize the other side, vilify and isolate them with the hope that they will surrender, go away or die out.
These people believe that the US government is eventually going to go street by street and enslave our citizens. Now as long as that is only happening to liberals, homosexuals and democrats – no problem. But if they try it with anyone else – it’s going to be arms-ageddon and these committed, God-fearing, brave souls will then use their military-esque arsenal to show the forces of our corrupt government whats-what. These people think they meet the definition of a “militia”. They don’t. At least not the constitutional one. And, if it should actually come to such an unthinkable reality, these people believe they would win. That’s why they have to “take our country back”. From who? From anyone who doesn’t think like them or see the world like them. They hold the only truth, everyone else is dangerous. Ever meet a terrorist that doesn’t believe that? Just asking.

Still, perhaps we should simply give everyone in the US a gun and unlimited ammo. There certainly would be a lot less stupid Americans.