On March 13, 1995, in the small Scottish town of Dunblane, a forty-three-year-old man, Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school with four handguns and opened fire, methodically killing sixteen children and one adult teacher before killing himself. The unprecedented massacre of children led, within two years, to legislation that imposed a total ban on the private ownership of handguns in the United Kingdom. Today, no one in the United Kingdom can privately own a handgun or a semiautomatic weapon. (There are exceptions made for some historic and antique weapons, and the ban does not encompass Northern Ireland.) There was not much hand wringing or heated debate over this legislation. It was discussed, and enacted, with overwhelming public support, in response to the mood of national shame and grief over the killings.

There is still violence in Britain. In recent years, there has been a disquieting upsurge of violence amongst teen-agers in large British cities. Much of it is gang related, and almost all of it involves knives. Knives are not hard to obtain, but kill far fewer people than guns do. After the movie-theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the Guardian did the math, comparing gun homicides in the U.S. to England and Wales in one year: 9,146 to forty-one. Even taking into account the difference in population, the rates of gun homicide per a hundred thousand people are 2.97 versus .07.

In China, where private gun ownership is also banned, but where social alienation is clearly becoming a larger problem, there have been a distressing number of recent attacks by deranged knife-wielding men on schoolchildren. On Friday, in fact, as Evan Osnos writes, in an incident with uncanny similarities to the Newtown massacre, a young man walked into the Chenpeng Village Primary School near the city of Xinyang, south of Beijing, and attacked the schoolchildren with a knife as they arrived at school. Twenty-two children were injured before the assailant, said to be a thirty-four-year-old man, was subdued and arrested by police—but there were no deaths. If he had been using a gun, the likelihood is that most of those children would now be dead.

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Jon Lee Anderson - Guns in America and the Limits of Shame, New Yorker (via therecipe)

The figures speak for themselves 2.97 versus .07

Surely it is common sense that if guns are not freely available then gun crime and indeed gun related massacres by those whose sanity flips in an instant would be dramatically reduced. Americans, in my opinion, do not need guns to protect them but need to be protected from guns. The first step towards that surely must be a change to the current gun culture.

(via gindoc)

adialogue:

Tax his land, Tax his bed, Tax the table, At which he’s fed ..

Tax his work, Tax his pay, He works for peanuts anyway!

Tax his cow, Tax his goat, Tax his breeks, Tax his coat .

Tax his baccy, Tax his drink, Tax him if he tries to think .

Tax his car, Tax his gas, Find other ways…

Where does it all go…..?