My Stand on the American Gun Control Debate!

How I feel about gun control?  Let me illustrate with a couple of stories:

It would have been 15 years ago that old friend Vince had his first big Art Exhibition. I won't tell you where this took place, except to say that it was in Australia where there are strict gun control regulations.

His exhibition was wildly successful. We were at the Opening -- and it was the greatest fun.  Very interesting paintings and lots of good buzz from everyone, lots of art-lovers, media coverage, newspapers, TV, photographers and the resultant publicity resulted in a great many important sales. Kudos Vince.

Anyway, around lunchtime, a bunch of us, including an elated Vince, decided to go somewhere pleasant to eat, so we hauled ourselves down to a very nice river-side restaurant where we sat out in the winter sunshine in the courtyard at a big happy table and ordered ourselves lots of great food and wine.

You can visualise the scene: a very pretty bougainvillaea-filled courtyard with a low wall overlooking the river sparkling in the sun, lots of big white yachts, palm trees all along the river-banks, views of the surrounding parks, cool breezes off the water.  The tropical dream, right?

It was a glorious afternoon with lots of fun, laughter, many bottles of good wine, good mellow company, great stories. Then, around 4pm, it felt like it was time to go so the usual wind-down conversations began.

And it was right then that a big policeman in a S.W.A.T. flack-jacket came up to us saying "Do you mind moving away.  There's been a man shooting at you for the past two hours.  We're just about to take him out so I suggest you get out of our way."

Surge of adrenalin.  Looked out where the S.W.A.T. man pointed and there was indeed a man on a yacht with a shotgun taking potshots at all the people on the river-banks around. A lone yachtsman from somewhere else in the world who'd spent too much time alone at sea and had lost the plot being in a city full of people. His shots were pinging in the water immediately in front of us.

We all wanted to see what happened next so, not quite steady on our feet, moved enbloc into the restaurant and the party continued as we watched through the windows.  There were about a dozen men in that S.W.A.T. team and since they had significantly more powerful weapons the yachtee surrendered quietly and was taken away, much to the disappointment of the bunch of very funny children already in the restaurant, who'd obviously seen too many movies and immediately started to act out what they wished they'd seen happen.  Hilarious stuff and, along with Vince making a lot of very good jokes about irony, definitely a happy ending.

It would have been a very different story, yes?, if that man had been allowed to keep his more powerful weapons that had been confiscated for the duration of his stay in Australia.  Nothing, perhaps, would have changed what happened inside his own head but having no access to serious fire-power the outcome of that melt-down was pretty much harmless.  Maybe, at most, just the deaths of a great many barnacles on the rocks that lined the river.

So that's one story, and there's another more recent story along the same lines.  Last month in Hong Kong, which also has very strict and well-enforced gun control, a man had a similar melt-down and went on a shooting spree, hitting a great many people.  The S.W.A.T. team turned out and, yes, he went quietly, and his victims were raced to hospital where the doctors popped out the bullets, put in stitches and sent them all home.

It would have been a very different story, right?, in any country that didn't have such strict gun control in place.

So that's how I feel about gun control.  You cannot change what's in the hearts of men and you cannot stop strange lonely folk having these melt-downs, but you can significantly reduce their fire-power by NOT selling powerful weapons and by strictly enforcing these controls, and that alone has the effect of pretty well limiting the damage these men can do. 

Universal gun control everyone.  PLEASE?

I am still around!

Honeys, if you wonder where I've got to these days, I'm writing a novel.  It's a bad novel, sure, but with a Masters in Literature I feel I've paid my dues to the Higher Arts, and besides I've always thought bad literature was so much more fun.

Lots of stuff happening around me but I'm mostly not paying attention.

2013's HK7s starts in 27 hours but I haven't got tickets.

We are off to Osaka in a week for a week and I will try to blog the holiday.  Hopefully the novel will be finished by then and off on its journey, and my almost pathological need to write something/anything will again surface.

Fingers crossed for the poor sad wee thing.  My novel that is.

Oh, and we're also planning on being in London during July.  I am longing to see the "David Bowie is ..." Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

And Fiji is having its own Exhibition which has me almost breathless with excitement.  All the universities and museums are putting their entire Fiji collections into one place and it's all stuff that hasn't been seen in Fiji for well over a century.  These foreign collectors took all the best stuff too so it's just going to be sublime BIGTIME!

So that's what's going down at the moment.  All is well.

In fact, all is so well, let's listen to that song again: