Don't act surprised. Seeing the very lacklustre efforts of the
US to prevent another Columbine massacre, I cannot help but say
that the inevitable has happened. High schools across the US have
made conspicuous efforts to up security since the Columbine saga,
but there is only this much you can do to prevent the intrusion of
armaments into the campus. Surely there are better prevention
measures they could have taken to prevent a repeat of this
preposterous affair?
The answer is pretty straightforward and facile. It certainly
doesn't need a rocket scientist to figure out that a better
prevention would be to tighten legislations towards the ownership
of guns. If there is one group of gadgets ever invented to the
detriment of the global society, that would be guns and other
weapons which are made to take a life.
I believe that I represent a huge majority of the world's
population when I say that I totally cannot comprehend the need for
gun-ownership to be allowed in any society. Unlike our daily
staples of food, water or clothing, we can totally live without it.
In fact, we would live much better if such an inhumane invention is
dispensed of from our society.
Statistics don't lie. The US are have the highest number of
firearms-related death rates in the United Nations with more than
30,000 deaths a year, with Italy behind at around 10,000 deaths a
year. We're looking at arguable the most developed nation in the
world, and you would expect a tinge of rationality in the
government to curb this glaring problem. Instead, these figures
soar with each year.
One might wonder, what in the world is stopping the US from
implementing a nationwide ban on the ownership of guns? The fact is
that there are several social and political factors that make this
a very complicated legislation to be passed. There are huge group
of people who would actually prefer the false sense of security of
having a pistol to defend themselves against an assailant. There is
also a sense of national pride amongst the Americans for their
'glorious' conquest of the land they took from the native Indians,
in which their ownership of guns had a huge part to play. However,
the main obstacle of such a move would be the socio-economic
effects which would be synonymous with whether the current
political party would be re-elected for the next term. Imagine how
many hunters would require job-restructuring, how many ammunition
enterprises would have to relinquish their assets overnight, and
how the ammunitions black market would spin out of control. With
less violence to deal with, there would probably be a need to
retrench a considerable portion of the country's police force, and
the security service industry would definitely plummet. At the end
of the tunnel, an abysmal GDP figure awaits, and it would be
equivalent to political suicide for the ruling party.
Columbine was a wake up call. It got the nation thinking for a
moment, but as history doesn't fail to tell us, people make the
same mistakes, over and over again. Apparently in the US, for every
voice that crys out for the banning of armaments, there is more
than enough voices to cover it. It is all left to see how many more
innocent lives have to be lost before the nation finally realises
that it has been a folly to trade national security for economic
stability.
The Virginia Tech Massacre, which dwarfed the once-unparalleled
Columbine affair, will once again bring about a national outcry.
Once again, we will see them blaming one another for the incident,
and many heads would roll. But again, they will not look to tighten
their legislations for gun ownership, which seems almost taboo to
the American society.
We're still a long way from seeing a decrease in violence in the
US. There will be more public massacres to come, as long as
lunatics continue to be able to get their hands on these guns
readily.
Country roads leading to Virginia would never be the same
again......
