Are mass killings becoming a new norm?

Was what happened at Sandy Hook Primary School normal? Considered from the perspective of what is the statistically most violent culture on earth it has to be ”yes”, but the vast bulk of Australians would say “no”.

Meanwhile, the sentiment that seeks armed guards in US schools is a manifestation of a culture that is out of context and out of time.

Stumbling about and reeling from the 18^th century revolution, residents intoxicated by the recent slaughter and with minds still afire with the rule of the gun, Americans cobbled together a constitution and then added a Bill of Rights.

The Second Amendment of that Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, protected the right of people to keep and bear arms.

Fresh from a national conflagration of death and destruction in which personal security seemed to hinge on owning and bearing a weapon, such a right seemed to make sense, at that time.

As with everything, times have changed, things are different now, we are different people, but that 18^th century mandate still has a vice-like grip on the minds of many Americans today.

Interestingly, a variation of that out of context and out of time inflection is apparent in the thinking of many Australians who put a high value on individualism, an independence that borders on anarchism, an idea that deplores governmental influence.

Oddly the right the keep and bear arms is a hierarchal government mandate, but one that appeals to the Americans distorted sense of freedom, a freedom bought at their local gun shop and secured through the elimination of that of another.

It was the late Chinese chairman Mao who said that ultimate political power comes from the barrel of a gun and it seems many, particularly Americans, see freedom coming from the same source.

Freedom is not however, to be found in the subjugation and intended or otherwise control of others, rather in your own thinking.

Personal security vanishes into the void the instant you arm yourself with a gun, or for that matter a stick, as no longer are “you” negotiating your imagined security for in reality you have delegated it to an artefact; an unemotional “thing” that knows neither right nor wrong.

Anarchy has arrived.

Australia has a wretched history in relation to guns, a claim that can easily be verified with a quick look at the treatment of our indigenous people, but there was a shift in the national consciousness soon after the Port Arthur shootings in Tasmania in 1996.

To his credit, the then Prime Minister, John Howard, bravely strode amid the controversial labyrinth of gun control and through buy-backs, restrictions on the types and number of guns people can own and tighter permit rules, made the country more secure.

Australia has been a safer and, I would argue, a freer place since those changes more than a decade ago and those who disagree would see their argument vanquished by the vanishing numbers of homicide and suicide gun deaths.