The latest mass-shooting in Las Vegas has once again brought into focus the havoc caused by the anarchic proliferation of guns in America. Yet, the gun lobby remains stridently opposed to any reasonable gun control measures.
Gun lobby’s familiar refrain that guns don’t kill people, people kill people is transparent sophistry. Only with guns can a single person kill a large number of people. And only with an automatic rifle, not a shotgun, can anyone kill 59 and injure 520 people from the 32nd floor of a hotel as happened in Las Vegas.
In this context, it must be pointed out that the 18th-century Second Amendment, enshrining citizens’ right to bear arms, was enacted with 18th-century single-shot muskets, not 21st-century assault rifles capable of firing a hundred bullets per minute, in mind. America’s Founding Fathers didn’t have the faintest idea of an assault rifle.
So, if the Americans want to interpret the Second Amendment literally, they have the right to bear 18th-century muskets, not 21st-century automatic weapons. For personal defence, they can be allowed to carry pistols or shotguns, but not assault rifles.
With America’s psychopathic mass-shooters, armed with automatic weapons, slaughtering fellow Americans, the greatest threat to American security comes from inside, not from Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Kim Jong-un can be deterred by the threat of retaliation. But these psychopaths cannot be deterred as most of them are also suicidal.
And Las Vegas mass-shooter is not alone. In 2016, another American-born mass-shooter slaughtered dozens of people at an Orlando nightclub. Few years before, another American psychopath, armed with an assault rifle, slaughtered scores of children at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut. Before them, another psychopath mass-shooter slaughtered scores of people at a cinema in Arizona. Again the weapon used was an assault rifle.
With assault weapons legally available in many states, it is clear that American psychopaths will continue to slaughter fellow Americans with their weapons of mass destruction and Las Vegas will be just another tragedy.
However, one must ask again the pertinent question: “Why are Americans letting past, present, and future mass-shooters to easily and legally acquire their personal weapons of mass destruction?” Kim Jong-un must be delighted to see American psychopaths are killing their fellow Americans. As Napoleon once remarked: “Don’t obstruct when the enemy is doing your job.”