I've not really paid a great deal of attention to the sad events in America in recent days. Bits of the news coverage have seeped through, it is very sad, and one can only feel for the families who have lost younger and older members.
What's provoked me today is the National Rifle Association's proposal to put armed guards in schools. I think this is a really terrible miscall on their part. It does nothing to address the fetishisation of guns in the NRA, nor to address the whole question of why anyone should have the right to own a high-powered weapon.
I was on a field trip to Edinburgh in 2007 when there was an attempt to bomb the airport at Glasgow. I remember the palpable change in the atmosphere after the event, but what really shocked me was arriving in at the train station in Birmingham a week later to find armed guards policing the platforms and exits. It just didn't seem like the mark of a free society to have heavily-armed police patrolling public spaces.
My feeling about the NRA proposal (and it's not the first time they've advanced it) is the same. Putting armed guards in any public place reduces its utility, and doing the same in schools can do nothing to promote social harmony.
The whole raison d'etre for the NRA is the Second Amendment. As an amicable watcher of the US, I seriously question whether this part of their constitution is even relevant in this day and age. It cannot be said to be a social good if constitutional rights are invoked as a means to own high-powered automatic or semi-automatic weapons. I can't see how worries about the government turning on its own citizens are at all justified, other than the electoral needs of the GOP during a time of being out of the White House. The idea of openly or covertly carrying a gun seems obscene to me, and harks to a mythology of the Wild West that only ever really existed in 1950s films. The US is not a lawless wasteland, but the continued use of the Second Amendment by the NRA creates the impression that such a situation could well come to pass. That sort of rhetoric really ought to be called out for the kind of dangerous crankiness it is.
While legislation to enhance gun control is all fine and good, I think there is a fundamental issue at stake. People have a right to live their lives in peace, without fear of random violence. The public good is not subservient to the rights of the individual to engage in destructive acts of nihilistic violence. More to the point, in a country where certain members of the judiciary are obsessed with the Ten Commandments, surely there can be no argument that people have the right to commit murder under any circumstances. The Second Amendment is certainly being used to continue the conditions in which this needless conflict of principles will continue. On this basis alone I think it is time for some real courage in raising a serious discussion about revoking the Second Amendment.
