John Baker’s Blog

Not everyone in America, of course, but listening to the interviews of students and others around the tragedy at Virginia Tech, it is quite clear that, for a significant number of people, the obvious and correct way to go is not even on the cards. And the pro-gun lobbyists are out in droves bolstering up their hopeless case, notwithstanding that the massacres will carry on happening until individuals decide to say no to guns.

What follows is only one example of the kind of mindless drivel that is being pumped through the American media at the present time:

In 2000, the rate at which people were robbed or assaulted was higher in England, Scotland, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Sweden than it was in the United States. The assault rate in England was twice that in the United States. In the decade since England banned all private possession of handguns, the BBC reported that the number of gun crimes has gone up sharply.

Some of the worst examples of mass gun violence have also occurred in Europe. In recent years, 17 students and teachers were killed by a shooter in one incident at a German public school; 14 legislators were shot to death in Switzerland, and eight city council members were shot to death near Paris.

The main lesson that should emerge from the Virginia Tech killings is that we need to work harder to identify and cope with dangerously unstable personalities.

It is a problem for Europeans as well as Americans, one for which there are no easy solutions — such as passing more gun control laws.

One can only hope that American citizens with open eyes, those who can see clearly, along with the rest of the world, that tight gun control laws are the only answer, will provide cogent and convincing arguments sufficient to draw their fellow countrymen back into the stream of reasonable opinion.

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The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has reportedly left his home country to live in America amid fears for his life.

The writer was tried in an Istanbul court in 2005 for the crime of insulting Turkishness. This came about after he talked openly about the mass killing of between one and two million Armenians in the early years of the twentieth century.

Talking about that event was a rather silly thing to do. It is self evident that no Turkish government would arrange for such a thing to happen. And even if a government like that of the Young Turks, who controlled the Ottoman Empire at the time, somehow did manage to get themselves implicated in the genocide, surely, by now, the democratic leaders of modern Turkey would have admitted the fact, paid reparations, and eaten humble pie?

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