Late Flash: George Third dies

‘The National Rifle Association, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the US, has called for armed security guards to be posted in every school in the country’. (Guardian newspaper, UK)

When American friends began insisting to me over the last week that – surely this time – gun control should be put at the top of the US social agenda, I wrote back (trying heroically not to be a wiseass, which is very difficult for me) and recounted how I’d been listening to this liberal certainty now for almost exactly 49 years – to be exact, since JFK was taken out on that late November day in 1963 Dallas.

Nononononono, they insisted – this time it’s different.

Well, looks to me like it isn’t. For just as the political class’s answer to every problem is more politicians, so too the NRA’s answer to every gun problem is more guns. If you’re selling guns, this sort of follows. And ‘armed security guards to be posted in every school in the United States of America’ sounds to me like one helluva lot of new gun purchases.

Did you know that each time a campus/mall/school/old folks home massacre takes place, the aim of most US gun retailers is to get the exact model of the weapon used out there in the media? Regrettably, this is not an urban myth: it’s true. After each incident, the featured gun normally sees a sales uplift of at least 20%.

Are the buyers whacknuts? Not at all: more often than not, they’re scared Americans working on the basis of ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’. Independent gun-shop owners such as Austin Cook of Hoover Tactical Firearms in Alabama reported a stampede of customers anxious to buy assault rifles like the one used by Adam Lanza to kill 26 people, including 20 young children, at a Newtown primary school. Lanza also killed his mother and himself. “I can’t keep them in the store,” Mr Cook said of the weapons. It is a sad tradition in America that each mass shooting is followed by a surge in gun sales, in part because people calculate they need more firepower to protect themselves.

In fact, Obama’s threat of a Federal ban on domestic gun purchases has produced an even bigger rush to ‘beat the ban’.

But the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre finally broke his silence and delivered a defiant message to the American people today. Throwing down the gauntlet to Barack Obama, he declared: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

And der yoo know boy, the only good injun is a dead injun.

Look my American friends, I freely admit this is all our fault, but the NRA is implicated, OK? You demanded the right to bear arms because our odd King George III who was passing blue water at the time and going dibblydoobblydoougllaarano tried to keep you tied to the English Crown. So you bore arms against him.

I have news for you: King George is dead. He expired 192 years ago next month. The only real enemy you face now is your own Federal Government.

Related: Back to 2011, and the same circular debate all over again