The Americans will give up their love affair with guns when we, the British, do the same with cars
Though our own kids are learning the trick of homicide fast, and can do pretty well with knives if knives are all they can lay their hands on, you strictly speaking need a gun to pull off a real spectacular. Hence our moral superiority. Because we make it that little bit harder for a college student without underworld connections to obtain a gun, we are able to shake our heads and wonder when those damn Yankees are ever going to learn.
I’m not saying they don’t make superiority easy for us. When the executive director of Gun Owners of America, Larry Pratt describes the massacre at Virginia Tech as an opportunity for the gun lobby, arguing that if only every student had been armed fewer of them would have died, we all but give up on Americans.
Arm everybody then nobody is a victim; kill before you can be killed — only in a universe of the insane is this a blueprint for a good society. Ask Pratt if it wouldn’t be safer if no one could get a gun, and he’ll laugh in your face, that’s if he doesn’t shoot you in it first.
In the past 10 years 57 college kids plus eight of their teachers have been mown down in episodes similar to Virginia Tech shooting. When, oh when, will America relinquish its love affair with the gun? So what, I ask in return, about our love affair with the motorcar? When, oh when, will we relinquish that? And if you wonder what the one has to do with the other, let the figures talk for themselves. Even as we were counting the American dead, articles were appearing in the same papers, often on the same pages, counting our own. Not victims of the gun, but victims of the car. In the past six months alone, 840 people were killed or maimed by drivers under 20.
You can’t, I accept, measure tragedy in numbers. The 32 dead of Virginia Tech do not become less dead because we lose as many to boy racers every week. Nor do I embrace the gun lobby argument that if a madman wants to kill he will find something else to kill with if he can’t easily obtain a gun.
But we might seize this opportunity to turn a little of our moral outrage on ourselves. Cars kill. Since we know that cars kill as surely as do guns why do we not do more to keep them out of the hands of those most likely to kill with them? You are too young at 17 to drive. The Association of British Insurers recommends putting up the minimum driving age to 18. Too modest a proposal. If the minimum age is to be determined by a brain unbefuddled by lyric poetry, eyesight unclouded by sperm, and an adequate imagination of disaster - that’s to say a recognition that not only yours but every car coming toward you is being driven by a killer - then 50 should be the minimum age. But as society is probably not yet ready for that, we could settle, with enormous benefit to ourselves, at 21.
Age is not the only issue. No car should have a speed capability, or an aesthetic denoting a speed capability, over what is legally permitted and what is legally permitted is already too high. Beyond 60 miles an hour we know not what we do.
For starters, then, no one under 21 to be allowed behind a wheel, and whoever breaks that law, or drives recklessly at any age, to be banned from driving for life. Not a fortnight, life. For our lives
If you find this too draconian, fine, but you cannot now occupy the moral high ground when it comes to Americans and their guns.
