Jenna’s Model Life

Your people own too many firearms, too many of which are handguns and/or automatics and semi-automatics. This is why you have so many shootings, and why they are so deadly. If at any time you would like to cease experiencing shootings approximately as frequently as Charlton Heston takes his acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, you could let those members of your people who pass background checks and sign a national registry own plain old one-shot-at-a-time, bolt-action hunting rifles. You will find these prove astonishingly difficult to use in mass murders.

Sincerely,

The Rest of the Developed World

• • •

After hearing the latest depressing, frightening, (and close-to-home!) news in this country, I decided to turn my attention to news from a farther-away home. Believe it or not, this is how an account about arresting the leadership of a major gang reads in New Zealand:

Dawn raids see 28 arrested

It’s safe to say we’re fond of dawn raids in the antipodes. These particular raids involved 36 properties located all around the North Island, and linked to a gang named the Mongrel Mob. New Zealand gangs tend to have colourful monikers, and full members still wear leather jackets with official “patches” on the back, but they do the usual illegal stuff — mostly produce and supply marijuana, as well as Kiwi drug du jour methamphetamine. The prostitution racket has cooled somewhat since we legalised it in 2003.

Officer in charge of the operation Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Whitehead said over 700 pieces of evidence were collected.

“The laborious task of collating is now under way. This necessitates quite an involved process of cataloguing vast amounts of material to be used as evidence in court,” he said.

What did they find, you ask? $20,000 in cash, for starters. Computers, radio scanners, fancy television sets and something the article mysteriously refers to as “animal health products.”

The 100 officers involved also found one gun. This merits an entire paragraph:

The discovery of one military style semi-automatic assault rifle reinforced earlier police warnings of the correlation between the drug trade and the illegal trade in firearms, he said.

Oh, if only the gangs in my neighbourhood had one gun apiece. I’m gonna shoot you, man, just as soon as I get back to my leader’s house, ask him nicely to give me his piece, find the ammo carton, and get back here! Gang-related disagreements in NZ are fought with baseball bats and knives — dangerous enough for the gang members, comparatively un-dangerous for innocent bystanders. Americans need to understand what the rest of the first world knows: that private gun ownership is nothing more than a ridiculous Hobbesian race-to-the-bottom. In purchasing a gun, you may marginally improve your own security, but having one more gun at large significantly decreases the security enjoyed by your neighbours, which pushes them in turn to arm up, until the unsafety snowballs and the neighbourhood starts to look like Richmond. That and Americans need to learn to read, because most of you seem to think the Second Amendment protects private gun ownership, when it does nothing of the sort.

If only the electorate here were willing to act to prevent U.S. gangs from amassing their typical small armouries. Then there might be less reason for me to fear my local Safeway.