The guns of America

The guns of America
By Gerry Warner
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Jan. 14, 2011
About a decade ago in the early years of the Bush presidency, I was driving late at night on a camping trip in Montana and idly turning the radio dial looking for something to keep me awake. Did I ever find it!
It was the “Savage Nation,” a late night talk show hosted by one Michael Savage, a Rush Limbaugh wannabe who was spewing hate and vitriol at all the real and imagined enemies of the U.S. including the “Islamo-fascists,” (his term, not mine), cowardly liberals who opposed the war in Iraq and left-wing pinkos who were undermining the power of the Great Republic.
He also threw in slurs about gays, pacifists, Muslims and anyone he imagined to be less than a super-patriot and devout believer in American “exceptionalism.”
There were times, after I returned home, I would again cruise the radio dial and come across Savage blistering the airwaves with his bile along with a host of others including the infamous Limbaugh and other members of “right-wing talk radio” as it has come to be called with its flag-waving emotionalism, incendiary language and toxic rhetoric playing on the fears and hatreds of its paranoid listeners.
Canada is no stranger to talk radio, but we don’t have anything as hateful and hysterical as this and I dubbed the over-wrought phenomena south of the line as “Fascist Talk Radio” and seldom listened to it again because any more than five minutes of it made me despair for the future of the human race, or at least the American part of it.
But the attempted assassination of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Saturday and the murder of six innocents around her sent my thoughts reeling again to the poison that has infected political discourse in the teetering empire south of the border and whether the U.S. can pull
back from the brink and again become a beacon of democracy instead of a democracy where bullets seem to matter more than ballots.
Some of you may think I’m becoming a little over-wrought about this myself. If you do, consider the following.
According to a 2007 New York Times story, the U.S. leads the world in gun ownership, 90 guns per 100 people. That's 270 million weapons in the hands of people like Jared Loughner, who was so mentally unstable he was forced to leave a junior college in Tucson yet was able to walk into a Tucson gun shop and legally buy a 9 mm Glock semi-automatic handgun with ease and you know the rest.
alf the gu Half the guns purchased in the world every year are bought by Americans and only 12 per cent of these are registered. Over 30,000 Americans die from gun violence every year. Most of the deaths are suicide, but more than 12,000 are homicides. That’s about twice as many deaths as the total of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Repeated studies show the U.S. is far and away the world’s leader in gun violence and gun deaths. No other developed country is even close.
Is there a need to say anything more? I don’t think so.
Ahh, but then there’s the Sarah Palin factor. Last year the darling of the Tea Party movement published a map on her web page with rifle scope cross- hairs around the ridings of more than 20 politicians she wanted to see defeated for supporting President Obama’s health care reform bill. One of the cross-hairs was on the seat of Congresswoman Gifford, who is now fighting for her life.
The blogosphere erupted with outrage at Palin, who lamely posted it was “surveyor scopes” on her infamous map even though she said at the time “conservatives don’t retreat; they reload.” Palin also accused her many critics of perpetrating a “blood libel” against her which will probably get her in more hot water because Palin apparently doesn’t realize a so-called blood libel is an anti-Semitic slur from medieval times. But what do you expect from someone who recently said North Korea was an “ally” of the U.S.
But the bigger question, of course, is can a gun-crazed nation ever truly be considered “democratic?” Chairman Mao once famously said that “democracy comes out of the barrel of a gun.” The last time I checked China was a fast growing country, but not a democracy.
The Second Amendment (after freedom of speech) to the U.S. Constitution gave Americans the right to bear arms for the purpose of raising a standing army when the country was threatened, not to slay presidents and nine-year-olds in the street.
The United States today is the most indebted country on the planet. Will arming every American solve that? Perhaps Americans should try to shoot down their debt instead of shooting each other.

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