The notion that no politician in the United States of America has the cujones to take on the National Rifle Association is underlined by the vapid flapping around by what appears to be a powerless President and by a Congress that appears to act more at the behest of the lobbies than the desire to serve in the public interest.
Thirty thousand US citizens die each and every year as a result of the free access to guns in a society evidently replete with issues. There are as many guns per capita in Switzerland and the country's gun crime figures pale into insignificance behind those of the United States of America, where massacres of schoolchildren and University students have become so commonplace that it seems every time you turn on a TV set, you see groups of people running screaming into the arms of their loved ones while some demented lunatic runs amok in a building.
It is challenging to count how many times President Obama has appeared on television after one of these massacres, just the tip of the iceberg in the total figures of victims, given that a gun crime occurs each and every day; it is equally challenging to imagine how Barack Obama manages to recraft his speeches on the issue without repeating himself. And it is challenging to believe that the latest (watery) measures will lead anywhere in practical terms.
But the message is the same: how can these crimes and massacres continue day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and yet still the NRA, the National Rifle Association, stands firm, reiterates the right of American citizens to bear arms and shoot people, invokes the Second Amendment and carries on as usual? Business as usual, with every tragedy, there are more sales, more money, more deaths, more families torn apart, more lives destroyed. Another sale, another statistic. Laughing all the way to the bank.
And here is the Satanic nature of the NRA, or the Gun Lobby, for in defending the status quo, the NRA is indirectly - or directly - bearing responsibility for what is happening. The stance of the NRA is paramount to employing a serial pedophile as a janitor at a kindergarten, paramount to employing a sadistic psychopath at an old people's home, paramount to employing an incompetent, spineless buffoon as Executive President of a corporation - or President of a country. Allowing the NRA to operate is like having Typhoid Mary working in a kitchen.
Each and every bullet that slams into the intestines, heart or skull of a child, spraying guts, blood and brains in a two-yard arc of murder around the fallen, innocent victim, has the letters NRA written on it, each and every firearm used in each and every act of wanton murderous abuse has the same three letters etched into its cold-blooded barrel.
If I sell a machete to a known Islamist fundamentalist with sociopathic tendencies and send him into the middle of a shopping mall on a crowded Saturday morning just before Christmas, surely I have some degree of responsibility? Then how can the NRA stand back in a study of callousness and negligence and claim that the responsibility lies with the individual?
And why is nothing done by Congress? Because Congress is not supposed to serve the People, otherwise it would. The fact of the matter is that Congress serves the Lobbies in a Corporatist model run by the elites, Democracy is a buzz-word, a flag raised like a banner at key moments for key speeches. Nothing will change in Corporatist America. Next year it will be 40,000 deaths and the year after, 50,000 in a country where God has lost His way, where Satan rules OK and the Satanic NRA governs the United States of America.
A President with cujones would ban the NRA and disarm the gun-toting cowards who hide behind their weapons.
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Pravda.Ru
(timothy.hinchey@gmail.com)
*Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey has worked as a correspondent, journalist, deputy editor, editor, chief editor, director, project manager, executive director, partner and owner of printed and online daily, weekly, monthly and yearly publications, TV stations and media groups printed, aired and distributed in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal, Mozambique and São Tomé and Principe Isles; the Russian Foreign Ministry publication Dialog and the Cuban Foreign Ministry Official Publications. He has spent the last two decades in humanitarian projects, connecting communities, working to document and catalog disappearing languages, cultures, traditions, working to network with the LGBT communities helping to set up shelters for abused or frightened victims and as Media Partner with UN Women, working to foster the UN Women project to fight against gender violence and to strive for an end to sexism, racism and homophobia. A Vegan, he is also a Media Partner of Humane Society International, fighting for animal rights. He is Director and Chief Editor of the Portuguese version of Pravda.Ru.