American gun nuts often argue that arming the civilian population makes them safer, because if they had more reasonable gun controls in the US, regular people would be defenceless because the criminals would still have their guns, and that giving everyone the ability to arm themselves makes criminals think twice before attacking or robbing someone who might be armed and fight back.  Right!

How come then, whenever there is a gun massacre in the US, the only armed person there is the nut with the guns.  Never do you see any of the targets fight back.  Why is this?  Impeccable planning by the nuts who go on these rampages so they never pick any victims who are armed themselves and likely to defend themselves?  You’d think one lunatic at some stage in some attack would be unlucky enough to run into someone who fights back.  Just doesn’t happen in real life though.  Why?  Because the reality is that loose gun controls just make it easy for the nutjobs who have some gripe with the world, or some bizarre fantasy about themselves as some sort of guntoting super warrior, to arm themselves to the teeth admirably equipped to do their worst.

Sure, the gun advocates will say guns don’t kill people, people do.  Well, to a point thats right, but guns do make it a hell of a lot easier.  Maybe the nuts would take out their rages some other way without their guns, but how many mass knifing or baseball bat swinging rampages do we hear of where 6,8,10, 13, 20+ innocent victims get killed?

On Friday, someone with a grudge about his inability to speak English took out 13 people, and himself, in Binghamton, New York.  Authorities there identified the gunman who killed 13 people and himself at an immigrant services centre as Jiverly Wong, 41, a Vietnamese immigrant who had taken English classes there. Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski today no motive for the shooting had been determined, but he confirmed reports that Wong, who also went by the name Voong, had felt degraded by his inability to speak English and by a recent job loss.

"From the people close to him … this action he took was not a surprise to them,"

Mr Zikuski said.

"He felt degraded from his inability to speak English and he was upset about that,"

he added. Mr Zikuski said Mr Wong was "heavily armed" and had held a permit since 1995 or 1997 for two handguns recovered at the scene.

I wonder if any of those who subsequently thought his actions weren’t a complete surprise thought about telling the police that he was some sort of time bomb waiting to go off.  Perhaps reasonable gun laws would have empowered police to confiscate weapons from a person like this?

Then, yesterday, another guy, in Pittsburgh, started shooting at police who attended a domestic disturbance call, killing 3 of them and wounding another.  The gunman, 23-year-old Richard Poplawski, was arrested after a four-hour standoff. Friends say the gunman had recently been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.   He apparently lay in wait for the police, armed with an AK-47 assault-style rifle, a .22-caliber rifle and a revolver and wearing a bulletproof vest. Before surrendering, he exchanged hundreds of rounds of gunfire with SWAT officers from his bedroom window, while taking time to call friends and tell them he was going to die, that he had been hit in his bulletproof vest and leg, and that he loved them. 

Poplawski was a dishonourably charged Marine who adhered to a number of right-wing conspiracy theories and expressed fears of a "Zionist nation" revoking his right to own guns.  I heard a friend of his on the radio news this morning, ranting on about something like 30 states had declared sovereignty from the central government …I just love the paranoid rantings of the lunatic right in America – talk about bizarro world!

Again, it was evident the shooter was a nutcase with plenty of history of psychological/behavioural problems – how is it a good thing that the gun laws in America enable him to be armed to the teeth?  Someone please explain this to me.  And while you’re at it, what possible justification is there for civilians to be owning AK-47’s and similar assault weapons?  Worried about killer super rabbits and deer fighting back while you’re out hunting or something?

The shootings in Pittsburgh were the 6th mass shooting in the past month in the US, including one in Alabama (10 dead + the gunman), and another in Oakland, California (4 police killed).  All this in the land where guns make everyone safer!  Yet the US has something like 9 times the rate of gun murders than Australia, where guns are much less prevalent – and is way out in front of the rest of the civilised world.  Just where are all those citizens in America using their guns to defend themselves against the gun toting criminals? 

Why not try something radical in the US?  Loose gun controls, and widespread gun ownership are obviously failing to protect the people at large.  How about this?  Try doing what the rest of the western world does, and restrict gun ownership.  Its not like things are going to get worse than they have been, is it?

I don’t expect this to happen.  The gun lobby in the US seems to find it acceptable that a few thousand people a year are murdered by people using guns – and their politicians are so much in the pocket of that gun lobby that they are not willing to do anything but token gestures at the margins of gun control.  Clearly they think a few thousand murders a year are ok too?

You know something else I found disturbing in one of the articles I linked to.  The resigned acceptance of these murders.  This was said of the Oakland killings of the 4 police officers:

"We lose officers about every 57 hours in this country,"

"But seldom do you have one of this magnitude."

Thats about 150 police officers killed each year.  Fact of life in America!  Just something they accept as business as usual.  Wow!  I can’t find the equivalent numbers for Australia, other than that 731 officers have died in the course of duty since 1803 (which includes car accidents, plane crashes etc as well as criminal killings), and that 45 have died in the last 10 years, and in Victoria some 30 of the 150 who died since 1803 were murdered.