A letter to America
No time is the right time to discuss your gun laws. After a catastrophe like Las Vegas it’s too soon. By the next time, (and we all know there will be a next time) it’ll be too late. In between time it’s all too hard.
In the eyes of the rest of the world America’s addiction to guns is no different to the addiction of the crack cocaine junkie.
The rest of the world knows, as I’m sure do all, or at least most Americans, that the second amendment was written in the context of a time when “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” with a musket above the fireplace in the frontier and family homes.
Of course this is no longer the case, but if that is your guiding logic why not resurrect any number of laws also written for the context of their time but which today are outdated and irrelevant?
Abraham Lincoln memorialised the sacrifices and virtues of the dead in the Gettysburg address to ensure the survival of America’s representative democracy: that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth..”
To an outsider from down under it seems quite apparent that this noble sentiment has been hijacked and Lincoln’s sentiments are in need of a rewrite:
“..Government of the people, by the NRA, for the NRA..”