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I don’t think Americans fully realize how the #KenoshaShooting (or any shooting) looks like from the other side of the Atlantic. This time I’m not gonna let it go.
A thread.
A thread.
America’s epidemic of gun violence is an epidemic of hypocrisy, too. The outraged people who protest after every shooting are the very same people who go on saying “but not all gun owners are bad”, “but it’s our culture”, “but the Second Amendment”.
Gun owners are not all bad, that’s right, and police officers are not all racist. However, just like police officers should be fired after they show racist behavior, gun owners who show dangerous or extremist tendencies—yes, also online—shouldn’t be allowed to possess arms.
It’s your culture, I hear you say? What kind of sick culture is this where people don’t feel American unless they possess arms? What kind of culture produces teen school shooters and killers? Last time I checked, the American creed wasn’t “liberty, justice, and guns for all”.
But the Second Amendment… NO. It is a relic from a time and place that has nothing to do with contemporary America. There’s no Far West anymore, there’s no British army anymore.
If the government decides to declare war against its citizens do you really think you can defend yourselves with rifles? The original meaning of the Second Amendment is unclear even to scholars, and its interpretation is controversial to say the least.
Now, let’s be clear. No one ever said that guns should be banned altogether. We have guns in Europe. The point is that generally you don’t see guys walking down the street with an AK-47.
You don’t see the police murdering people every other day because (guess what!) if people generally don’t have guns, the police has incredibly strict rules for when and how they can shoot.
More than 36.000 Americans are killed by guns each year—about 100 per day. The US gun homicide rate is about 25 (TWENTY-FIVE!) times higher than in other high-income nations such as the UK, France, and Germany. Gun homicides have increased over 30% since 2014.
I know this whole thing may sound very patronizing coming from a random European 19-year-old but I have American friends who are scared of going to school because someone might show up and shoot them. The European model of gun control is successful, why not try to emulate it?
A wise man once said that if guns made a country safer, America would be the safest country on earth. Well, it’s clearly not. I’ll leave y’all with this clip from The West Wing because Toby Ziegler is way more effective than any Twitter thread.
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