Thursday 17 January 2013

Guns. And why I hate them.

When I think of guns I don't think of safety or of reassurance, I think of the violence and the misery they bring to so many of us. I've only ever held a gun once, at an adventure holiday aiming at paper targets, and even then I felt a little uneasy about holding the potential weapon. I felt so uncomfortable knowing that in my hands I held the potential power to kill or seriously injure another being. Granted I knew nothing about aiming and shooting but the power it possessed was an uneasy and nasty one. I didn't understand why people would use these for fun, why having such a head start with the weapon and aiming it at helpless animals was considered a sport. I knew for certain that if I kept a gun in my house I wouldn't feel safe, I would feel restless that such a violent object lay somewhere near me, that I owned such a thing. What a horrible thought, that with this thing you could easily, heartlessly and quickly end someone's life. That by owning a gun, you have the potential to play God. How utterly terrifying.

Which is why, and I say this with  unfaltering confidence, I am in full support of Obama's attempt at changing the laws of owning guns in the USA. The Connecticut school shooting was just tip of the iceberg in convincing almost the rest of the world that such casual ownership and sale of weaponry was a terrible and fatal mistake. The fact that in America it is easier to buy a gun than to have health insurance is surely a twisted statistic and an ironic view of priorities in the USA. Conservative Americans claim it to be the land of the free, but how free would you feel if anyone had the right to possess a dangerous weapon and you couldn't afford to be treated if you got shot? To me, that sounds extremely condemning.

I would feel safer in the knowledge that those who decided to own a gun had been checked and licensed and were more unlikely to go on a killing spree of innocent people than to know that I could buy the weapon if I so wished. I think that the 'right' to own a gun is quite frankly a very foolish right, you are essentially giving people the go ahead to play around with life, choose who may die. I simply find it a frightening thought, that people even feel they need this access to killing machines to feel secure. I personally feel that if I was in a situation when someone had broken into the house or put me in some kind of danger I wouldn't hesitate about killing them or not, because I just wouldn't do it. I would find another way around it because ending someone's life, no matter who they were, would be an unbearable thing to do. It is in no way my right to cause somebody's death, and I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did.

What kind of a person doesn't question killing a human being? Independent of whether you are in a life or death situation yourself I think you'd be more likely to do damage to your mental wellbeing if you made the decision to take another's life than you would be physically hurt in not doing so. So why would one fight for the right to have this horrible decision and to carry on the higher potential for more ghastly events like the school shooting? I do not normally condemn another person's right to make their own opinion known and to have that opinion but in this situation I believe that those clinging onto the Second Amendment are quite simply wrong. The people such as those trying to get Piers Morgan deported are to me exactly the type of person you wouldn't trust in anyway shape or form with a gun in any situation. To be frank, they appear in interviews to often have a screw loose, to be one sandwich short of a picnic, which is not giving me total reassurance that they are making the right decision in fighting for this right.

I am supporting President Obama in his decision to reevaluate the laws about the possession of guns because I believe them to be a great threat in the wrong hands, or quite often in any hands at all. I am not American, and I do not live in the USA but I believe that for the welfare of the citizens there this conservative view of such weaponry must be reviewed. So you can stick your Second Amendment, dear traditionalist, right up where the sun don't shine. Because it would be a safer world for everyone if we had a gun free nation to follow by.

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