"Ohh, say can you see, by the..."

It's rare that I get personally political on this blog, but yesterday, perusing through the news on Yahoo, I came across the banner you see above.  The second story is about Texas lawmakers passing a bill that would allow people to carry guns openly in public with the proper licenses, blah, blah, blah.  The fifth story, as the byline reads, is about a few hundred Arizonians rallying against Muslims. And yes, people brought their guns, as Arizona is also a state you are allowed to openly carry with the proper licenses, blah, blah, blah.  Thankfully, nobody was shot.

I'm an American.  I do not have the stars and stripes tattooed on my forehead, but there are certainly aspects of America that I love.  I love the creativity, the energy, and the general state of freedom one has to spend most of their money as they see fit, including on traveling sea to sea to see some of the world's most beautiful places.  The gun thing, however, is just fucked up.  Another way of putting this is, what do you get when you cross mass weapon availability with the inherent characteristics of humanity?  Answer: a whole lot more death, violence, and grief that could be avoided were you to take away the guns.  Idiots do a lot less damage with only a knife - and its impossible to get rid of the idiots.



But the worse thing is, it's too late to take the guns away.  I don't know how many guns there are in US, but if the government were to come down with an edict: no more guns without a license, blah, blah, blah, we'll give you the appraised value of each gun you own (like bottle return or eminent domain, except with weaponry), it would cost billions of dollars - to a government that's already trillions in debt.

While I return to the US regularly, I spend most of my days living in Poland.  Poland is a country where guns are outlawed, save for those who have the proper permits.  In Poland, the blah, blah, blah amounts to a battery of tests, including psychological, marksmanship, written, and practical, a process which takes more than a year to pass.  In other words, you need to be dedicated.  After a fight with your girlfriend, you can't just walk into your local Walmart and buy a shotgun to blast her away.  You'd need the anger to last a year (possible, but significantly less so than the emotion in the moment). 

But the key factor is that in Poland I do not live in fear of a nutcase coming to my work, or my wife's work, or the street where I walk with my family and deciding today is the day I start randomly shooting people.  Why?  Doesn't matter.  I've got a gun.  Fuck the world.  Bang-bang, and then misery for everybody involved.  There are random idiots in Poland who do stupid things with guns (every country has such idiots; they transcend culture).  But it's the frequency that matters.  Whereas in Poland you will read once or twice per year of some idiot who got angry at a fan from a rival soccer club and shot at them, in the US every few months you read of some idiot walking into a school, their work, or a cinema and blasting away at unexpecting, innocent people - and you only hear about this because the evening news has given up on reporting urban and domestic violence due to how common it is.  Baah...
 
I realize this post is a chaotic rush of incoherent ideas, but I get so angry reading of gun policy in the US heading in the opposite direction of this notion we're supposed to be aiming at (har, har).  It's like the wild west still, but with mobile phones and Facebook and all the baggage of living in a globalized world that comes with...