On Wednesday, August 7, 2019 at 8:39:46 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:

Well, when you're not busy look at the situation in Mexico
regarding firearms, regulation and actual incidence. If you
think USAians (a notoriously defiant bunch overall) will
comply any differently than with the heroin ban, think
again. For the interested reader, States and localities
with more restrictive firearms regulation experience greater
firearm mayhem.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Leaving aside your remark about Mexico, which is a poor analogue for orderly countries without its corruption and public incompetence...

You've put your finger on the firearms problem in the States. I hear natives of orderly European countries say, "Well, we have no guns, very strict licensing of hunting firearms, unarmed police, and as a result one-thousandth of the per capita murder rate of the Americans. All they have to do is to grow the balls to take away all those guns, and hey presto, a safe society.." When I say, "Have you considered the difficulties of a constitutionally bolshie populace empowered by centuries of moralising about the rights to form an armed militia (an outlook which incidentally the Swiss also share, without the American gun crime), a right to carry arms embedded in the founding documents, the fact that there are more guns at large than people, the statistical certainty that all these guns will never be confiscated, and even if hypothetically they can be, the cost in lives in the interim after all the law-abiding folk have given up their firearms and the only firearms are in the hands of criminals?" -- man, they look at me blankly, as if I'm some freak in favour of guns in the hands of the public, which I'm not: I'm just aware that the US has a huge problem because of the number of firearms already in circulation, an ab initio reality with consequences aggravated by the other ingrained factors I listed above. But it's the old, old problem of intellectuals, who're mostly on the Left*, disdaining the Americans as uncouth, even as barbarians; sometimes I think I must be the last European intellectual who actually likes America and Americans.

I feel for the pol put in charge of gun control in the States -- it's a sure career-killer, though perhaps Mr Trump could get away with it in his second term, but I can't think of anyone else who would survive the resulting furore. Anyway, I don't think even President Trump will go the whole way because in his now near-inevitable second term he'll be thinking of his posterity and will sense that an effective gun-controller will be abused as an anti-constitutional statist for centuries after he's dead and buried, and that incident alone will supersede all the good he did during his administration. In addition, since the deed will have to be done by presidential decree because there won't be a majority of votes for it even if the vote is a bipartisan issue, the next president will almost certainly reverse the measure(s) by a single signature, because it will be what he campaigned on. The nation will for a generation or more be so bitterly polarised that the present nastiness will seem like a softball friendly at the office picnic.

Practically, what should be a matter of principle either way (for or against), has over time become a near-insoluble problem.

Andre Jute
* But not only the gauche Left (who too often call themselves Democrats), pinkos, commies and fellow travellers. I once asked Enoch Powell, a considerable poet and as a politician Mr Conservative himself, winding down after an interview about the use of the language (he spoke what everyone considered the best English in his generation, and the ones before and after), why, since the Americans in the original 13 Colonies preserved the English he thought purest (Plymouth, 16/17thC), he then disdains Americans; he told me to think about President Eisenhower (it's also important to know that Powell was a distinguished soldier, rising in WW!! from private to brigadier) *for electoral gain* betraying the British, French and Israeli nations during the Suez Crisis of 1956.