The American Nightmare

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed".

The Second Amendment US Constitution

Citizens of the United States are rightly proud of their Constitution and some of the greatest statesmen and thinkers of the age were involved in its conception, but even so it was a difficult birth.

More than 200 years later they are still debating what was intended by the framers of the Constitution and every word in the Second Amendment has been painfully scrutinised at great length and the outcome is that the right to bear arms has not been infringed, well not much.

The people who wish to bear arms do now have to apply for a license but further efforts to limit gun ownership are fiercely resisted.

America is the home of the brave: gun owning, god fearing and proud of their democratic rights which were hard won. The American Dream, although not as bright and shiny as it once was, is still the foundation on which the country builds its hopes and aspirations.

Newtown, Connecticut was described on the news this morning as the sort of community where the American Dream was more likely to be realised, and 'a decent place to raise a family'. I'll be honest, we often joke that an American would be hard pressed to point out the UK on a map of the world, likewise, many non US citizens would be hard pressed to point to Connecticut on a map of the US let alone Newtown, population 27,560 (2010).

Since that census was taken the population has obviously increased but today we are all too well aware that due to the actions of one man, the population of Newtown has been suddenly and savagely depleted. The latest figures seem to be 27 dead including 20 children aged between 5 and 10 years of age.

As I watched President Obama make his emotional statement to a shocked nation and to the wider world, I couldn't help but think that the American Dream is now an American Nightmare.

Since 1982 there have been around 60 mass shootings in America and the vast majority of the perpetrators used weapons that they had acquired legally - the right to bear arms gave them the freedom to kill.

Those who so ardently defend the Second Amendment have already begun to offer their worn out platitudes repeating and repeating ad nauseam that it is not guns that kill people, it's people that kill people. Former Arkansas  Governor, Mike Huckerbee, was interviewed on Fox News after the tragedy and plainly stated that restricting gun ownership would not have prevented this killing, the killer would have found another way of carrying out his murderous spree. He went on to say that a lack of school prayer was, in his opinion, a root cause of violence in schools. The man is a fool.

Surely any sane person who examines the facts can see that restricting the ownership of guns must reduce the opportunity of such events like the one we have seen in Newtown.

A spur of the moment decision following a mental breakdown might well have led to this incident and having access to guns made it so simple to walk into that school and kill innocent people. On the spur of the moment where do you find another way of causing such havoc? Where do you get the bomb that  Mike Huckerbee spoke of in his interview?

We all remember Dunblane, 1996 and 17 deaths (16 being children). We changed our gun laws and I can't prove that these changes have stopped further such events but luckily we have not seen anything on that scale on our doorstep since.

Here in the UK we have seen so called rampage killings, some perpetrated by those who owned their weapons legally, others by criminals. There is an ongoing battle to get as many illegal weapons from our streets as possible and in Nottingham we saw the need for those ongoing efforts reported on our news just last night. (Two men imprisoned for 15 and 11 years respectively for a revenge shooting attack.)


As our own local news proves (and here I can agree with Mike Huckerbee)  it is people that kill people. But people kill people with greater ease and in greater numbers when they have access to guns and they can do much more damage more quickly with a gun than with, for example, a kitchen knife.

I bet that if a man walked into that school yesterday armed with a knife there would not have been so many lives lost.


Looking from the outside, it's hard to understand why a country like America clings on to tenets and rights that were written for a totally different era, an era where the populace really did have to think like a militia.

If American citizens feels so insecure in the modern world why not address those insecurities rather than board up the windows and stock up on ammo?

The more you read the Second Amendment the more it appears flawed in that the right to bear arms should insure freedom and security for the people - how free and secure do those who survived this attack feel? How free and secure are those grieving families?

If America truly believes that it leads the world perhaps the time has come to show that world how Americans love their children more than they love their guns?