On the basis that Amer­i­ca being hell-bent on re-brand­ing itself ‘Guns R U.S.’ isn’t real­ly any of my busi­ness, I’ve decid­ed I need to put aside nat­ur­al abhor­rence of mass mur­der, and look at the issue through the prism of a reporter’s six (in ran­dom order) basic questions…

WHY – do defend­ers of America’s gun cul­ture base their stance sole­ly on shout­ing that the Sec­ond Amend­ment — “A well reg­u­lat­ed mili­tia, being nec­es­sary to the secu­ri­ty of a free state, the right of the peo­ple to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” — con­fers an unde­bat­able “con­sti­tu­tion­al right”, with­out regard to mod­ern technology?
In the 18^th cen­tu­ry, “arms” were muz­zle load­ers. The effec­tive rate of fire was three rounds a minute. It would take a quar­ter of an hour for a trained marks­man to get off the num­ber of shots any­one who can pull the trig­ger on an AR-15 can let rip in one minute.

WHERE — is it decreed that the Sec­ond Amend­ment is like the Ten Com­mand­ments: set in stone? The First Amend­ment guar­an­tees free speech, but there are no few­er than nine excep­tions includ­ing, slan­der and liable, child pornog­ra­phy and ‘fight­ing words’. The amend­ment is also open to com­mon sense inter­pre­ta­tions, the sim­plest and san­est being that yelling “Fire” in a crowd­ed pub­lic venue when there is no fire does not con­sti­tute free speech. Wouldn’t the Sec­ond Amend­ment equiv­a­lent to that per­haps be high vol­ume magazines?

WHAT — is con­sid­ered an irra­tional basis for some­one own­ing a gun? By any civilised stan­dard, mass killers have some form of men­tal ill­ness, which goes some way to back­ing up the pro-gun con­tention that the U.S. has a “men­tal health cri­sis”. To that end “Local gov­ern­ments also hope to scrape togeth­er enough fund­ing to expand men­tal health ser­vices to try to reach trou­bled res­i­dents before they lash out in vio­lence.” Until they do, what’s sen­si­ble about allow­ing some­one to buy an assault rifle with­out first mak­ing an effort to deter­mine whether or not they are “trou­bled”?
I’m also a lit­tle unclear as to what Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Jor­dan (Rep) of Ohio bases his claim that Amer­i­cans have “God giv­en rights” to gun own­er­ship on.  I don’t recall guns being men­tioned in my Sun­day school lessons. But then, nobody ever shot up my school, Sun­day or oth­er­wise. Maybe that’s why I also don’t grasp the ‘car­ing and com­fort’ that’s sup­posed to be con­veyed by “thoughts and prayers” after every mass shoot­ing. One also has to won­der what the increas­ing­ly over­worked addressee of them makes of the idea of tak­ing guns away from “dan­ger­ous peo­ple” being “open to debate”?

HOW – did it come to pass that the issue is a clear-cut and seem­ing­ly unbridge­able chasm between Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats? Pub­lic safe­ty as a par­ti­san issue escapes me. To be fair, how­ev­er, my coun­try Cana­da, like most democ­ra­cies, has also had to suf­fer more than its share of fools, char­la­tans and wastes of space as polit­i­cal leaders.
But if a major news­pa­per has to edi­to­ri­alise that it may be a bad idea to allow teenagers to buy assault rifles, how can you think the polit­i­cal cli­mate is any­thing but bedlam?
Maybe we should all con­sid­er refus­ing to elect wil­ful­ly stu­pid or open-to-being bought politi­cians? It would seri­ous­ly restrict the can­di­date pool, but what the hell, it’s worth a try. (That said, Canada’s gun laws are being held up as a mod­el of how to deal with assault weapons and oth­er gun violence.)
Report­ing on more than a dozen wars made me quite used to being around guns, gun­fire and the kind of secu­ri­ty mea­sures they neces­si­tate. Once, when a young sol­dier guard­ing an entrance to the “Green Zone” in Bagh­dad asked me if I was car­ry­ing a weapon, mean­ing a gun, I replied truth­ful­ly: “No, but I can assure you, if I was, the per­son most in dan­ger would be me.”
The young grunt laughed and said: “Roger that, sir.”
Hav­ing spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time in rig­or­ous train­ing before he got to put a loaded mag­a­zine in the M‑16 that was his con­stant com­pan­ion, he knew exact­ly what I meant. A gun only belongs in the hands of some­one trained to use it.
Along with a require­ment for san­i­ty and matu­ri­ty, it seems to me to sum up what Pres­i­dent Biden meant by “com­mon sense mea­sures”. How­ev­er, attain­ing his prac­ti­cal ambi­tions — an assault weapons ban, restric­tions on high-capac­i­ty ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines and expan­sions of back­ground checks to cov­er pri­vate gun sales — seems to be on a par with a muz­zle-loader out­shoot­ing an AR-15.

WHEN – will those with the abil­i­ty to make change man­age to grasp that “com­mon sense” trans­lates as “respon­si­bil­i­ty”, a word, and con­cept, that when it comes to the debate over guns, is so far miss­ing in action.Which brings us to the sixth basic question:

 WHO — will have the courage to place respon­si­bil­i­ty and the com­mon good over ego, blind ambi­tion and gun lob­by cam­paign contributions?
To man­gle a bit of Bob Dylan: “The answer my friend/is blowin’ in the wind…” along with the smoke from gun muzzles.
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