We, too, have culpability for school shootings in the US
Harry Reid
The evil that came to a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania on Monday was the latest in a long and lamentable litany of school killings in the US. The most notorious recent atrocity came at Columbine High School in Colorado seven years ago. But even in the previous seven days there had been two other incidents of school killings in the US.
Whatever terrible demons came into the diseased mind of Charles Carl Roberts, for us in Europe a particularly horrendous – and peculiarly American – aspect of the Amish tragedy was the grotesque personal arsenal of weaponry that this sick man had been able to accumulate legally. One of our responses, here in Europe, to the intolerable and continuing catalogue of school killings in the US is to ask how Americans can go on tolerating a gun-carrying culture that is rooted in theconstitutional theorising that accompanied the birth of their nation away back in the eighteenth century. Even worse, the culture reflects the simplistic myths of the frontier, which seem imbued in the American psyche.
I have, over the past 48 hours, heard many people point out that after the ghastly events in Dunblane 10 years ago, an inquiry under Lord Cullen was quickly set up and as a result access to guns was made more difficult. Thus people in Britain are not just appalled by the frequency of school shootings in the US; they are understandably indignant about the indifference to calls for tougher gun control in that country.
Certainly I find the idea of an armed citizenry abhorrent. But before I get too indignant, I have to reflect: does the European response to yet another school shooting in the US not, as so often, contain at least some element of
hypocrisy? The world is awash with weapons, many of them small arms, and many of them come from Europe. Millions of tonnes of weapons are moved around the globe in a frenzied and enormously lucrative clandestine mass industry, and much of this grisly trade is rooted in Europe.
The total global spend on arms is about 15 times more than the sum contributed for international aid. More money is being spent on weapons than at the time of the Cold War. And at least the Cold War was, in a sense, regulated. The world arms industry is now wholly globalised and largely privatised, with weapons and parts being cannibalised and reassembled and shipped round the world, and, as often as not, ending up in the hands of systematic and serial abusers of human rights.
Amnesty International has done sterling work in exposing the secretiveand byzantine nature of this traffic in arms. For example, it tracked partially hundreds of thousands of weapons, and millions of rounds of ammunition that were moved, allegedly to Iraq, from Bosnia, but then simply became "lost". UK interests are often involved. Last year huge shipments of explosives and ammunition were transported by a UK carrier from Brazil, en route to Saudi Arabia. The shipments, which included 1.6 million rounds of ammunition, were intercepted by South African agents before they reached their destination.
The global arms trade – and this, of course, includes the transporting of small arms around the world – is utterly out of control. Rogue entrepreneurs, including many Europeans, make huge profits from international arms-trafficking. As a nation, the British, as with most others in the developed world, are for the most part complacently indifferent to thisterrible trade, partly because the evil consequences are generally visited on citizens far away from our own shores.
Obviously a few conflicts are well publicised, including the recent war in Lebanon. But many other ongoing conflicts are hardly publicised at all, and in many parts of the world the freelance and disorganised, but intensive and persistent, abuse of civilians is part of everyday life, and death. One of the problems is that, as the arms trade has gone global as never before, the operators are often not governments (though they may have, at one or two removes, government sanction) but private businesses, backstreet "brokers", international crooks with scant regard for borders and international regulations, and even legitimate logistics firms and freight transporters.
In other words, human rights abusers, who are everywhere, have increasingly
easy access to ever more powerful tools of abuse, and these weapons are as often as not manufactured or transported by Europeans.
We are rightly determined to make the availability of guns more difficult in this country. We deplore the idea of armed citizens freely roaming our streets and our country lanes. The slaughter of innocent young girls by a lone gunman in a remote rural schoolhouse horrifies us as an unusual act of repellent wickedness. But, in the context of what is happening all over our planet, it is not at all unusual or aberrant. Because such events so rarely occur in Britain, we must not think glibly that they are somebody else's problem.
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/71448.html
puke-worthy rhetoric most assuredly. it's all been said before, but frequently we need to be reminded of what many in the world would like to see happen to our rights and our country. i hope you read this and it makes you frustrated and sick, and helps to fuel your fire when it comes to ANYBODY misrepresenting and attacking the one right that ensures our freedom.
Harry Reid
The evil that came to a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania on Monday was the latest in a long and lamentable litany of school killings in the US. The most notorious recent atrocity came at Columbine High School in Colorado seven years ago. But even in the previous seven days there had been two other incidents of school killings in the US.
Whatever terrible demons came into the diseased mind of Charles Carl Roberts, for us in Europe a particularly horrendous – and peculiarly American – aspect of the Amish tragedy was the grotesque personal arsenal of weaponry that this sick man had been able to accumulate legally. One of our responses, here in Europe, to the intolerable and continuing catalogue of school killings in the US is to ask how Americans can go on tolerating a gun-carrying culture that is rooted in theconstitutional theorising that accompanied the birth of their nation away back in the eighteenth century. Even worse, the culture reflects the simplistic myths of the frontier, which seem imbued in the American psyche.
I have, over the past 48 hours, heard many people point out that after the ghastly events in Dunblane 10 years ago, an inquiry under Lord Cullen was quickly set up and as a result access to guns was made more difficult. Thus people in Britain are not just appalled by the frequency of school shootings in the US; they are understandably indignant about the indifference to calls for tougher gun control in that country.
Certainly I find the idea of an armed citizenry abhorrent. But before I get too indignant, I have to reflect: does the European response to yet another school shooting in the US not, as so often, contain at least some element of
hypocrisy? The world is awash with weapons, many of them small arms, and many of them come from Europe. Millions of tonnes of weapons are moved around the globe in a frenzied and enormously lucrative clandestine mass industry, and much of this grisly trade is rooted in Europe.
The total global spend on arms is about 15 times more than the sum contributed for international aid. More money is being spent on weapons than at the time of the Cold War. And at least the Cold War was, in a sense, regulated. The world arms industry is now wholly globalised and largely privatised, with weapons and parts being cannibalised and reassembled and shipped round the world, and, as often as not, ending up in the hands of systematic and serial abusers of human rights.
Amnesty International has done sterling work in exposing the secretiveand byzantine nature of this traffic in arms. For example, it tracked partially hundreds of thousands of weapons, and millions of rounds of ammunition that were moved, allegedly to Iraq, from Bosnia, but then simply became "lost". UK interests are often involved. Last year huge shipments of explosives and ammunition were transported by a UK carrier from Brazil, en route to Saudi Arabia. The shipments, which included 1.6 million rounds of ammunition, were intercepted by South African agents before they reached their destination.
The global arms trade – and this, of course, includes the transporting of small arms around the world – is utterly out of control. Rogue entrepreneurs, including many Europeans, make huge profits from international arms-trafficking. As a nation, the British, as with most others in the developed world, are for the most part complacently indifferent to thisterrible trade, partly because the evil consequences are generally visited on citizens far away from our own shores.
Obviously a few conflicts are well publicised, including the recent war in Lebanon. But many other ongoing conflicts are hardly publicised at all, and in many parts of the world the freelance and disorganised, but intensive and persistent, abuse of civilians is part of everyday life, and death. One of the problems is that, as the arms trade has gone global as never before, the operators are often not governments (though they may have, at one or two removes, government sanction) but private businesses, backstreet "brokers", international crooks with scant regard for borders and international regulations, and even legitimate logistics firms and freight transporters.
In other words, human rights abusers, who are everywhere, have increasingly
easy access to ever more powerful tools of abuse, and these weapons are as often as not manufactured or transported by Europeans.
We are rightly determined to make the availability of guns more difficult in this country. We deplore the idea of armed citizens freely roaming our streets and our country lanes. The slaughter of innocent young girls by a lone gunman in a remote rural schoolhouse horrifies us as an unusual act of repellent wickedness. But, in the context of what is happening all over our planet, it is not at all unusual or aberrant. Because such events so rarely occur in Britain, we must not think glibly that they are somebody else's problem.
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/71448.html
puke-worthy rhetoric most assuredly. it's all been said before, but frequently we need to be reminded of what many in the world would like to see happen to our rights and our country. i hope you read this and it makes you frustrated and sick, and helps to fuel your fire when it comes to ANYBODY misrepresenting and attacking the one right that ensures our freedom.
