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Americans continue to be rocked by gun violence.

When does it become recognised as a national emergency and when will they finally implement what would be a very simple solution? Limit access to guns. Four words and yet they just can’t put them together.

Approximately 40,000 deaths are caused by firearms in the US every year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. If 40,000 people were killed by rabid dogs, how long would they let those animals run around their parks and cities?

The liberty to carry arms is worth it to many, quite obviously. 110 people are murdered every day in America and that amount of bloodshed and horror is worth the liberty to carry a gun? 

For the rest of the world, it is insanity, plain and simple.

Comedians always nail a subject down. Simon Brodkin asked an American lady in the audience why can’t Americans see what the problem is? He went on to give her an analogy:

“If I was to give you a mobile phone, do you think you would be more or less likely to make a telephone call?” The lady laughed, the audience laughed and he turned away and joked, “she still doesn’t get it.”

If 40,000 people were killed in the US every year by a certain make of car that had faulty brakes, 

would that car still be on the road? If 40,000 people were killed by exploding big macs, would MacDonald’s still be free to sell them?

President Joe Biden vows to keep fighting “the epidemic of gun violence.” 

Last week, he signed the first significant federal bill on gun safety in decades, just days after the Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a fundamental right to carry a handgun in public.

There were two gun massacres in May 2022.

TEN Black people were gunned down at an upstate New York supermarket and 

NINETEEN children and TWO teachers were slain at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

It was described as the worst school shooting in a decade.

Then, on July 4th, Independence day for most of white America, seven people were shot dead and dozens were injured at an independence day parade in Highland Park, Illinois.

Dressed as a woman, so he could make his escape through the mayhem of the crowd, a 21-year-old man found a vantage spot on a roof and took aim with his automatic rifle. 

People thought the bangs were fireworks.

American Die by Stephen McLaren

Following the Texas school massacre in May, there was a mass rally across the US.

David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 shooting that killed SEVENTEEN students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, said this: 

“If our government can't do anything to stop nineteen kids from being killed and slaughtered in their own school, and decapitated, it's time to change who is in government.” 

A co-founder of the March For Our Lives organization that was created after the Florida shooting, Hogg led the crowd in chants of “Vote them out.”

Another Parkland survivor and group co-founder, Emma Gonzalez, delivered a powerful message to Congress. “We are being murdered," she screamed and implored Congress to 

“act your age, not your shoe size.”

 Meanwhile, the police keep shooting unarmed individuals as if they exist in a video game.

Caitlin Johnstone said this in her article on July 4th:

“America's armed goon squad filled a man's body with 60 bullets while he was unarmed and running away and the narrative managers are telling Americans to worry about Russia and China.”

It’s so obvious that it hurts and yet people in power, who should know better, pretend to show their horror by suggesting that America is no place for automatic assault rifles. Such weapons should only be available to the military, to use freely on people with dark skin elsewhere in the world. 

"Kill people, by all means, just don't kill them here!"

These hollow politicians want us to save the carnage for Africa or the Middle East.

Well, guess what? When you live by the sword, you die by the sword. When you supply weapons and war to every corner of the earth, your blind acceptance for the multi-billion dollar killing machine will come back home to roost.

If you back liberty for guns, you must also back liberty for machetes, knives, crossbows, swords and any other weapon you can imagine. Flame-thrower anyone?? 

The trouble is Americans are sold such a huge lie that they support the biggest weapon of all - nuclear weapons that will turn the whole planet into a graveyard. If you can buy into the myth of nuclear weapons, a handgun tucked away in your bedside drawer seems like a mere detail, an ornament that needs no licence and anyway, we all need a gun because it’s crazy out there!

There are so many Pandora’s boxes these days. Guns are one of them and the mass acceptance of violence, in all its forms, is probably the biggest Pandora’s box of them all.

Protest in peace and act without violence. 

Stephen McLaren