Banning Books, Bearing Arms

WHAT WITH ALL the school shootings and all, you might think that even here, in the United States of Side Arms, we would by now have done something to stop them, or to at least reduce them. And, supposedly, we have. Armed cops in the hallways. Armed teachers in the calssrooms. Volunteer parents roaming the hallways and guarding the doors daily. Ten foot high barbed wire fances surrounding the school. Bullet proof doors, always locked. Cameras monitoring everything, everywhere. Student I.D.s, Visitor I.D.s, and identification badges while in the building. And perhaps, indeed quite likely, all this has contributed to deter and thus reduce the number of mass school shootings, in schools, and other places. But is it enough? A high percentage, perhaps even a majority of American citizens love firearms so much that the second amendment has become a sacred, holy scripture, indespensible to American freedom and safety, inviolable, untouchable. Whether it makes sense to equate a constitution with holy scripture is debatable. And, not coincidentally a majortity, a significant majority of Americans evidently own firearms, in many if not most cases, more than one, many more than one. In every society, every country in which firearams have either been eliminated or largely eliminated from public possession, the crime rate, the shooting rate, has dropped drastically. Especially good examples are Great Britain, Australia, and Japan, in which there are only a handful of shootings a year, while in the United States there are tens of thousands of shootings per year, a veritable blood bath. If the United States regulated firearms the same way these other countries do, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the number of gun shootings in America would decrease drastically, and would keep decreasing, year after year. No doubt whatever. The United States could practically eliminate school shootings, but, refuses to. The reason given by gun enthusiasts is that a country in which the general population is well armed is much safer than one in which only criminals are armed. This, of course, is sheer nonsense, demonstrably, provably so. Its an outright lie, a blatant, transparent lie. And yet, it works. This bogus argument suffices to capture enough minds to paralyze any possible action to regulate and remove guns from society. The real reason why gun lovers resist gun control so passionately is that they love guns. The same people who want to defend America's schools by arming them and turning them into impregnable fortresses are the gun lovers, the opponents of gun control, and they are conservative Republicans, evangelical Christians much of the time. Quite naturally they want to stop school shootings by injecting more gusn into the equation, insanely. These are the same people who ban books like "The Diary of Anne Frank", "The Grapes of Wrath", and the writings of Martin Luther King, because, ooh horror, they disuss progressive values. These are the same far right wing extremist religious fanatic Trump supporters who prohibit any mention of racism in history classes in American public schools, scrub all signs of gay and LGBTQ culture from society, and falsely claim that the United States of America was founded on Christian values, is a Christian country, and should be a Christian country. And, last but not least, they tend to deny climate change the reality of it, the cause of it, the urgency of it. The worst news of all is that they are about to come to power in the U.S., and in a way already have. And yet, a majority of Americans support none of this insanity. Since we the remaning sane Americans must resist all of it ferociously, beginning now, this fact might be auspicious.