I originally drafted this comment in answer to a couple of other diary posters on the topic of Aurora and the spotlight again on The Second Amendment. I then realized that it probably deserved its own space, so here it is:
Fact of the matter is, these shootings occur with enough regularity to make them sickening. I lived in Canada for 3 years and the USA for 2 and ten years ago wrote a thriller which had gun control at its core in the same way that Grisham's The Chamber focused on the death penalty.
In that ten years we've seen Columbine and numerous other incidents. They can happen too in the UK. Andy Murray, our top tennis player, was a Dumblane school shooting survivor. Then just last year we had an even worse massacre in Norway, which has fairly strict gun laws. So the bottom line is: if a nutcase really wants to get hold of a gun for a wild shooting spree, they can.
What I addressed mainly in The Second Amendment was the easy availability of guns which can turn an average Satuday night bar or neighborhood argument more deadly when guns are too readily available. That's where the majority of the 10,000 killings a year in the USA stem from.
In the UK this year, our total murder rate was just over 600. About the same as a city like LA, but we have population of 65 million. So something is working.
I was pleased to see that Haiwaii has quite a low murder rate compared to 25 years ago, and that has largely come about through year by year stricter gun control.
Of course, the age old argument put up against this time and time again by the NRA and GOA is that you can't mess with The Second Amendment - which is true. It's in the Constitution.
But it struck me that The Second Amendment, with its main purpose to provide an efficient private national militia for defense, was not strictly adhered to. Far from it. And that's where the core thesis at the heart of the book, The Second Amendment, plays its part and starts to have wings.
So much so that when I reissued the book on kindle, I was urged to take it to the next stage, which I've now done. You might want to check it out.
http://www.indiegogo.com/...