Another Day, another massacre.

Yep - not HAM related.

No doubt though, that I'll upset some Americans. Sorry, I'm not sorry. 

I'm not anti-gun. I'm fairly sure I was born with one in my hands. My wife never really believed how ingrained guns were in my childhood until my maternal grandfather died and she attended his funeral with me (they never got the chance to meet). 

Every photo of me with him had a gun in it. Every photo of him.. well, it had a gun in it. He was a gun guy. He simply loved to hunt. There was no crazy conspiracies or rubbish about protecting his home. He just loved to hunt. That was in his genes pre-dating distant relatives arriving here as convicts.

So to be honest, I've probably been around more guns than most Australians. I've even held an oxy torch while he melted old sinkers down to make his own shot. I've packed 12 gauge shells with the requisite amount of gun powder. Hundreds of times in one day.  And I done it plenty of times before I was a teenager.   

I've forgotten more about guns than most Australians ever knew. To be honest, I'm happy about that.

After Port Arthur and little Johnny Howards only useful contribution to sanity in this country - revising our gun laws, my grandfather was fairly unimpressed. Some of his weapons were now illegal. The rest, well he just needed to have some proof of why he still needed them. 

At the time, in my late teens, I still wasn't anti-gun. I was far more concerned about the obvious lack of mental health services available that allowed someone like Martin Bryant out in society.. much less let him have legal access to firearms. 

As I got older though, it became more apparent that the laws made a lot of sense. Allow those who have appropriate uses for guns to have access to suitable weapons for that purpose. I've spent most of my life in regional and rural Victoria - farmers need guns. They don't need high powered assault rifles or pistols. Reality of their world is that they need to kill things. Pests, injured and dying animals - all parts of their world where a gun is a necessary tool.

Everyone else - why do they need a weapon that has the sole purpose of killing? 

I appreciate at times - often at points where I'm frustrated and angry I've had thoughts of wanting a gun to protect our property from those who are happy to steal from us. But really, to what end? 

If it were easy for me as a suburbanite to obtain a gun, then it's just as easy for the meth-affected oxygen thief that I'm trying to defend against to have one. Then what? The balance of power hasn't changed. It just means instead of me chasing them off, one of us is probably going to die. For what? Some piece of material property that is insured? What if he misses, and goes through the glass door and hits one of the kids? 

I'm a big boy. There's a fair chance that I'm going to survive a slug in the guts. The kids.. not so much. 

The very fact that I don't have a gun is for the same reason that the average meth-head in Australia isn't walking around with one either. They're hard to get, illegal and quite simply they're the kind of thing that hardened criminals are normally using against hardened criminals - and that's about the only time in Australia that we hear about domestic gun violence. 

The gun laws we have never got rid of all of the guns. The farmers still have them. And yes, some criminals still have them. But - they're scarce so they're valuable. To the average drug addicted scum looking to do a break and enter or car jacking is after quick cash so they can score, a gun has too much value. If they had one, they'd have already sold it on so they could score. 

The majority of the people who have illicit arms here quite simply have "bigger fish to fry" than bothering the average family. 

That changes dramatically when your entire culture is built around guns and they're easy to access. Their value drops. Now it's an affordable tool to use against anyone and everyone to relieve them of their cash and valuables to fund that next hit. 

It means that there's something of a mutually assured destruction when an armed person attempts to break into the home of an armed family. Someone will get shot. And it may very well be the home owner. The mental functioning of a person who routinely breaks into houses at night, armed and ready to shoot is far different than the homeowner who is likely still trying to mentally wake up and assess the situation. If the invader sees a gun, they're more likely to shoot first. There are plenty of statistics floating around on this. 

It also means that every kid going through some kind of mental breakdown has easy access to guns. The US is up to it's 200th mass shooting this year. 

The United States has around 100x our population. We haven't had 2 this year. We haven't even had 2 in the past 10 years. Or 20 years. 

And tell me again exactly how does a high powered assault rifle serve the average home owner any protection? I mean, if you aimed it at someone at your front door and fired, it'd likely rip through them, through the front door across the street and straight through ole' Mrs Anderson the local busybody.  And that's just the first shot. 

They're also not that much use for hunting, so what's the point? 

The US constitution - a loved and well respected document that gives its citizens the right to bare arms to form well armed militias - was written during a time of muskets. Horrendous weapons, slow to reload, prone to misfires and of questionable accuracy at any distance. What I very much doubt its writers ever had in mind was its citizens having high powered military grade weapons for no other reason than because they've been granted the right to do so. 

Even the intent was that they would form militias - likely in defence of their country in the absence of it having a well organised military. Not form militias of 2 adults and 2.5 children who might use those weapons for murder suicide, killing black shoppers or massacring defenceless school children.

It is simply insanity. And it's supported by the NRA - the ultimate example of capitalism at its finest. Supported by those with financial interests in continued sale of guns and ammunition, it uses fear to keep the citizens armed and uses its money and membership to provide political leverage. 

It needs to take action. Even if it starts with baby steps. Getting rid of the assault and military grade weapons would be a good start. Scarcity will increase their value on the black market and that will at least keep them away from the average dead beat criminal. 

I doubt the US will ever give up its handguns - but at least getting the assault weapons out of circulation will start to limit the potential damage. Better control around handguns - and perhaps some legislative changes to make owners more responsible about how they keep their weapons secured might start to bring about changes that might start to limit the ability of angry kids to get access to them. 

It needs to do something, and more guns is certainly not the answer.

Guns aren't the real problem. People are. Clearly we can't trust people with them, so we either get rid of the people or we get rid of the guns. It can be pretty hard to predict the next person loosing their marbles and going on a rampage. It's pretty hard to shoot up a school if you don't have a gun though.