That Endless Gun Debate !

Twenty-six worshippers were gunned down and died when a disgruntled man walked into a Baptist church in a small Texas town and sprayed the congregation with an assault rifle.  Twenty other people were wounded and the death toll is expected to rise further.  This was not a " lone wolf " terrorist attack in support of Islamic State.

The people who oppose any form of gun control repeatedly claim that the best defence of a bad guy with a gun - is the intervention of a good guy with a gun, and to some extent that was what happened in the little township of Sutherland Springs in Texas.   Except that the " good guy " was too late to save all those lives.  The " bad guy " escaped in his car and was later found dead.  It is unclear if he died from a shot from the man who intervened - or took his own life.

What is inescapable is that all those people died because their killer had the use of a military grade assault rifle capable of delivering automatic fire from a magazine designed for use on a battlefield. Such weapons are openly sold from gun shops in neighbouring towns and cost from under a thousand  dollars.  It is also inescapable that few restrictions apply that will stop people with a grudge against others from openly buying such weapons.

This killer is described as a white man in his md twenties who once served in the United States air force.   He faced a court martial while in military service for an assault on his spouse and their child and served a twelve month prison sentence and was given a dishonourable discharge.  It is suspected that members of his former wife's family were members of that slain church congregation.

A decade or so ago the problem in the United States was hand guns.  There are actually more hand guns in circulation that people and they featured heavily in homicides and suicides.  The American constitution protects the right for citizens to " bear arms " and any form of gun control is anathema to the powerful National Rifle Association.   The NRA  also opposes purchase waiting periods and restrictions on sales to those with criminal convictions.

This gun issue is also enshrined in politics.   The Republican party - presently holding both the presidency and the numbers in both houses of parliament - backs the NRA stance while some form of gun control is favoured by the Democrats.  It is now too late to close the flood gates on the flow of automatic weapons.  The numbers in private hands has been building steadily in recent years and legislators fear that any control measure would be ignored widely.  This delivers the assurance that massacres like that killing in Sutherland Springs and on a theatre audience in Los Vegas will continue on a  regular basis.

That is something the rest of the world fails to understand. It may be that the settling on the American interior was achieved with open warfare against its previous Indian tribes and settlers learned to live with a gun on their hip.  It may be that this gun culture has been exploited by Hollywood movies to the extent that our entertainment features gun use as " normal " and this is now firmly embedded in the American psyche.

The one thing that is certain is that America is unlikely to place meaningful restrictions on gun ownership in the near future.  It seems now that with a population of three hundred million the sacrifice of a few dozen in gun massacres from time to time is accepted as the price they pay for that cherished freedom to own a gun !