2007-04-17 - 8:59 a.m.

Another school shooting! Man, I love America. 32 killed this time – that’s pretty good going. This was the lead story on the BBC news despite the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with my life as a UK citizen. The second story on the agenda was about a horrendous, twisted, evilistic hike in interest rates – news that does actually affect me - but who cares about that when there’s a far more glamorous death-spree going on in our big sister nation? This latest expression of delayed teenage angst occurred in Virginia, a state that has some of the most relaxed gun control laws, yet also happens to have one of the lowest gun-crime rates in America. ‘Go figure,’ as they say in Virginia. This didn’t stop the BBC reporter from storming into a gun merchant’s home and harumphing, ‘Oh, you think it’s good that anyone can just waltz in off the street and buy a machine gun and kill a Blair-load of innocent Christian virgins with it, do you? Eh? Do you?’ This aberrant occurrence was of such global importance that the news media, of course, had to let the cameras roll for hours on end just so we, the viewers, could begin to understand the importance of this tragedy. After all, why address the big questions when you can stick the mic into the face of a sobbing witness and get a ready-made soundbite? And to think he was Asian! Here was me thinking that all they cared about was their chances of becoming accountants. The clues were there: this window-licking fruitloop was a fourth year English student, described by his classmates as - no! - 'a bit of a loner' and had a penchant for professional wrestling... a disturbed young man by anyone's standards. Well, at least by not giving this alien wacko the attention he so evidently craved we’re not complicit in the crime. Poor baby, he had such a hard life, who can really blame him if he kills a fellow or three dozen?

It was the gun that made him do it, you see. If it hadn’t been for those nasty, awful guns then there’d be no such inadequate ‘loners’ trying to make a name for themselves. There was no violence or brutality before guns corrupted the human race with their siren song of killing one’s fellow man. Boy, am I glad that I live in a nation where guns are illegal and gun crime isn’t a problem! It’s a good thing that my government forbids me, a law abiding citizen, from owning a gun while ruling that drugs are illegal and thus creating an illegal underworld of armed drug suppliers who don’t particularly care much about the law anyway. Yep, they’ve got their priorities straight. Let’s not forget that guns are motiveless, inanimate molds of metal – do you trust yourself to own one without abusing the right to do so? I do. I’ve fired one and it didn’t spark any homicidal tendencies in me. In fact, I had a great time blasting away with a rifle at an old fridge in the Arizonan desert. I suspect those who jerk their knees whenever one of these mediafuckfest gunshows go down wouldn’t trust themselves to own a gun. There are several knives in this house, and yet – bizarrely – I have not once tried to stab anyone with one. Can the same logic be applied to guns, or are they magick items that cast a murderous spell upon their owner?

I know what you’re thinking: guns make it easier to kill people. Well, so what? Lots of objects make it easier to kill people, but it doesn’t give the government a right to make them illegal. Let us not forget that the homemade bomb will more often than not be the attention seeker’s weapon of choice, or, failing that, an aeroplane. Timothy McVeigh and Mohamed Atta weren’t too concerned about gun laws, to the extent that they didn't even bother with guns. A byproduct of this modern lifestyle is that there will always be frustrated ‘loners’ plotting revenge on the society that doesn’t have time to listen to them whine. It’s the price we pay for living in a technologically advanced, secular age where things like drugs and guns and deviant sexual lifestyles represent progress, at least if our human rationality is to mean anything. As soon as we stopped living in tribes, these ‘loners’ (would a loner attend university?) were always going to spring up. It’s woefully naïve, though, to say that guns are the cause of these isolated splurges, or that banning guns will change anything. Despite what that self-serving gastropod Michael Moore might bluster, guns are items of defense. You won’t hear it credited on the supposedly ‘unbiased’ thieving BBC, but the (much maligned) NRA representative made the salient point that if the victims of the Virginia shooting had been allowed to carry arms in the building, then one of them could have shot the gunman before his tally carried him into the history books. Yes, yes… guns don’t belong in schools in the first place. Well, the fact is that there are millions of guns out there and the bad guys, the pissed off guys, the criminals, will find a way of getting them, whether they’re legal or not. Or they’ll buy a petrol can and matches. Why should the psychos wield all the power?

What depresses me most about his whole farrago is the lack of originality. Schools have been done, maaan. All you can really add to the scene is a body count. What I'd like to see the next time is a woman, or - even better - a gang of old women, storming into a zoo or a museum and taking out the patrons with a series of covert pillow smotherings. Let's see how our sober and responsible television news deal with that one.

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