I’ve never owned a gun.
I am seventy-six and, outside of the military, I have never even seen a gun in England.
I am sure that people in the USA think that owning a gun keeps them safer. In actual fact they are 12 times more likely to be shot than in England.
Gun crime in England is very low. Gun crime in the USA is very high.
My own experience backs this up. The only times I’ve seen guns is in the States. In my first week of teaching in Los Angeles in 1979 a gun was pulled on me in my classroom.
I was taking role call and a girl said ‘Heeey!’
I looked up to find a girl standing in the aisle, legs apart, both hands holding a pistol aimed right at my head, like some Hollywood cop.
‘Heey!’ she repeated.
It’s amazing how quickly your mind works when you have a gun pointed at your head. I figured I’d only been in the school a matter of days; I hadn’t been there long enough to really piss anyone off sufficiently to shoot me. She was obviously wanting the new ‘English’ teacher to panic and dive under my desk.
I told her to ‘Sit down and put that away’ and went back to concentrating on my role call. At the end I looked up. She’d sat down and there was no sign of the gun.
I set the class working and strolled down to the back where she was sitting.
‘That was incredibly stupid.’
‘It wasn’t loaded,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know that. I could have had a gun in the drawer and blown you away.’
She laughed. ‘You didn’t though, did you?’
‘I could have pressed the button and summoned security and you’d be a police cell now.’
She shrugged.
It kind of made my year. It went round the school. I was cool.
But the reality of guns was all around me. The gang kids talked of their machine guns, hunting people down and shooting them. One morning we had the office windows shoot out with a drive by. Two of my students were shot on the way into school. All the people we were introduced to proudly showed me their gun collections. Myriad road signs were full of bullet holes. I witnessed an armed police raid on a van in the supermarket carpark.
In 1971 I’d come over to the States on a student work visa and worked in a Deli House in Boston on Massachusetts Ave.. The young native American dishwasher (Little Wolf) who I worked with had shot a guy in the stomach for grabbing his girlfriend. The Chef, Boris, a Russian American had shot three people, killing two of them, for being rude and abusive to him. A guy was shot and killed outside the Deli one night.
America is not a safe place! Guns sure do not make things safer. Arming criminals and psychopaths is nuts. Placing guns in the hands of angry people is dangerous. Having access to guns when someone is depressed is ridiculous. Arming religious fanatics is stupid!
Glad I live in a safer society. America is far too dangerous!
Too many gun nutters! Not enough restrictions!
