Eliminate Guns Now! (No to Rambo)

Among the 23 rifles he brought to Mandalay Bay in order to kill at least 59 people and injure another 527, Stephen Paddock used two AR-15s, a popular civilian version of the M-16, used in numerous shootings such as San Bernardino, Aurora and Newtown.

These guns can be bought by civilians in the U.S., but they are artificially limited to a semi-automatic shot — although this limitation can be removed illegally, transforming it into a machine gun. That’s why Paddock illegally modified his weapons and changed them when they overheated, since he had not been able to obtain machine guns capable of sustained fire.

Jimmy Kimmel, for example, the star of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC, editorialized that “A very sick person … started firing … into a crowd of 22,000 people.” Then his eyes filled with tears and he continued to say: “As a result … we have fathers without sons, mothers without daughters … devastated families … because one person with a violent and insane voice in his head managed to stockpile a collection of high-powered rifles.”

“The owner of the store that sold [those] rifles said he passed the government-mandated background check,” Kimmel added. “Because of that, because there weren’t any of the usual signs … ” Here is the first problem. What is clearly understood is that the gun shop owner wasn’t able to take any action or make a complaint because no one would have taken him seriously, given that the requirements established by the state were met. So we have to realize that the state is often wrong, and therefore we must regard it with doubt and not just allow it anything.

“Of course there’s something we can do about it,” Kimmel continued. “But we don’t … When someone with a beard attacks us, we tap phones, we invoke travel bans, we build walls.” It would appear that the government is overreacting with respect to terrorism, as more citizens die from other causes. And Kimmel continued his speech with a plea to Congress to ban guns.

Guns are bad and the government should ban all of them. But asking the state to prohibit them is incoherent and a tragic irony, because it implies more controls, more personnel and more police power when, according to The Washington Post, as early as 2015, 990 people have been murdered annually by the police in the United States. That is to say, they would have to begin by taking the guns from the police, who kill more than those who are crazy like Paddock.

We should start by halting the dissemination of “official history” which teaches children that war — in the style of World War II — is necessary; stop teaching them that “liberating” generals used their swords to slaughter others for “independence.” Hollywood, following this line, should stop glorifying violence in the style of Rambo.

In Canada, the homicide rate is 1.5 per 100,000 and in the United States it’s 4.7. But countries with more controls appear to be more violent, such as Venezuela, which has an index of 58, and Honduras, which is at 66.49. However, this is because crime is underground; that is, even if weapons were prohibited, they would continue to be used. The argument that after prohibition, homicides were reduced in some places, is not accurate. The reason is that in these countries, the crime rate is generally low, and thus, so is the number of homicides; such is the case in New Zealand, where not even the police carry firearms.