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Bite the bullet?

IT IS incomprehensible why despite irrefutable and overwhelming evidence that has been so meticulously gathered over the years, gun control advocates in America have failed to impress upon enough lawmakers to initiate and impose some tough gun control measures.

Obviously, if sheer persuasion were enough, many of the estimated four million members of the National Rifle Association would have been more willing to admit (if not accept) that there is a direct link between easy access to dangerous firearms and the dangerous rise in deadly violence. At least on very many school and college campuses in very many states in the US, there is a clear graph to indicate this linkage. All that one has to do is to connect the dots.

And yet, the gun lobby continues to push its "guns-everywhere-and-anywhere campaign," on the premise that "there is no such thing as a good gun or a bad gun. There is such a thing as a good person or a bad person."

Not surprisingly, a news report from Washington that guns are as easy to find as ever is rather disturbing. And that, because this is still the state of affairs one year after the deadliest shooting in US history — the Virginia Tech massacre, last April, in which a mentally disturbed student killed 32 people on the university campus before turning the gun on himself.

What makes it worse as the report adds is that the Americans seem to like it that way. One would have thought that the reaction throughout the country after such senseless campus killings would have been ballistic. Far from it. Some states, such as the southern state of Florida, has instead passed a 'take-your-gun-to-work' measure last week. It allows employees, except at prisons, schools and nuclear power plants, to stash their guns in their cars on company property. Any such legislative police is incredible if not outrageous — to say the least.

But now is the time that a lot more needs to be said. And, at-gun-point, if that is what it takes to ensure that all those lawmakers who need to understand do understand — that easy access to guns threatens to further increase gun crime. If even now they refuse to realise and initiate new and more effective gun control laws, we fear there will be still more innocent victims who will have to pay a still heavier price for this folly.