One of the many Trump catch phrases, which have much more powerful resonance with the American people than his opponents realise, is ‘Keep America Safe’. Well, the mass slaughter in Texas, coming on top of Las Vegas, with an endless string of senseless mass murders queuing up behind, demonstrate that the United States is the most dangerous developed country for civilians to live in anywhere in the world and ten times more dangerous than Europe. That takes account of terrorism from external forces like IS.
Calls for gun control are pointless. The enshrined principle in the US Constitution that citizens have a birthright to carry arms is a fatal fault in the structure of the American State. It is impossible to take it away, because too many would see it as an assault on the freedom which defines their country. Yet when it was enshrined the weapons of those days and their power to kill bore no relationship to the killing machines now available to be legally held in every hand.
On the present trajectory things can only get worse. They are approaching a point when the good people will have to be armed in the street to take down instantly the bad hell bent on killing. The cost of vast numbers of additional police will be beyond reason, so citizen deputies will be the last resort. The only thing that will reverse this unstoppable drift will be not regulation, but a sea change in social attitudes and a profound re-appraisal of what it is to be American and what freedom in fact means.
Americans must work this out for themselves. There is hope. The birthright of whites to own and trade slaves was dealt with. Now it is time for the guns. All 300 million of them. Dealing with the slavery issue cost hundreds of thousands of lives in a bloody civil war. Fixing the guns has to be not about taking life but about saving it. It is perhaps the greatest challenge in America’s history thus far, because it invades the sanctity and rights of every American home. But in America everything is possible. THAT is what America is.