When will the US gun lobby hold up its hand?

Firmly believing that a combination of

unbridled consumerism, trashy Hollywood films and rubbish TV has driven all Americans stark raving mad, I could easily dismiss mass murder with a gun as an endemic problem but this would be to ignore our own Hungerford and Dunblane tragedies.

Coming not so long after the Littleton school shootings, the Atlanta outrage further isolates the position of those who regard gun ownership as acceptable.

Contrary to what the Duke of Edinburgh thinks (if such a phrase is not an oxymoron) such murders could not be committed with any other weapon such as a club.

A maniac going mad with a knife or baseball bat would never be able to match the sheer scale of killings which can be achieved almost effortlessly with a gun.

Beating someone to death with a baseball bat is time consuming and takes some physical effort, giving other potential victims time to either arm themselves or run away.

It is not possible to outrun a bullet which takes a fraction of a second to kill and can be released with minimum effort.

Shooting enthusiasts say we should blame the person pulling the trigger for whatever massacres are committed rather than the gun they used. What rubbish.

Inadequate individuals who harbour such murderous fantasies are naturally drawn towards the aphrodisiac qualities of dangerous weapons available at gun clubs and the like.

Unlike the boy scouts and other youth movements which are a natural magnet for pederasts, there is no possible practical vetting procedure to keep nutters away from gun clubs.

An unbalanced individual not under stress at that moment can lie his or her way through a very basic psychiatric question and answer session with the local plods.

If guns are available potential maniacs will naturally be drawn to the place where they can get their hands on them.

Since the good-ole-boys in America are so in obsessed with guns they cannot bear to be without them, its about time they started looking into the reasons why people think shooting other people is such a good idea.

For one thing, almost the whole of American culture and foreign policy is based on the idea of dividing the world into good guys and bad guys and shooting or bombing the bad guys.

The difficulty arises with such an outlook when Mr Inadequate comes along, blaming everyone else for his own problems, and vowing to get even with whoever they perceive has slighted or crossed him.

Of course they lack the insight and objectivity to realise that their lives are no harder than anyone else's and their perceived 'enemies' are just other people struggling with their own difficulties.

When people live in society based on what is materially consumed rather than what is spirtually achieved, the resulting shattering of community results in dangerous and unstable individuals able to live seemingly normal lives until they are confronted with an unmanageable level of stress caused by such events as unemployment, money troubles, relationships or oppressive working practices.

Because social isolation is acceptable, unbalanced individuals remain perfectly convinced that their nights spent alone fondling weapons and bullets while fantasising about revenge on their enemies is perfectly normal behaviour - after all that's what Dirty Harry does when he isn't out shooting the bad guys.

We would all, at some point or other, like to kick the boss up the backside or drop an ice lolly down the traffic warden's trousers, but as long as we can plod on and muddle through as usual our wrath soon subsides.

Until society begins to recognise that many of its values are not just false but downright dangerous and begins to deal with the alienation generated among those left in the wake of the consumer capitalist greed juggernaut, the opportunity for great harm to be done to innocent people - in the form of readily avaiable weapons - should be removed.

In this country it is much harder to get hold of guns which leads to thankfully less massacres even though culturally and spiritually we seem hell-bent on following America down the road to nowhere, similarly dressed in stupid baseball caps and training shoes.

America, of course, will pursue neither suggestion, prefering to engage in yet another fruitless bout of hand-wringing and and solemn sentimentalising, which brings me to the true tragedy of the Atlanta killings.

I would bet my next year's wages they are soon to be repeated elswhere.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.