The question is why do we have so many guns on the street and why are military-style weapons so popular? Why is America flooded with guns, why are they so available? You want to change the subject, make it about race and liberals. I guess the next thing you’ll be telling is the reason the ghetto can afford guns is because they get food stamps from the government.

Ever since this debate started you have been trying to distract us from the real question, about the lack of effective gun control and the ubiquity of firearms. You, and your party, have tried to reframe it, to make it about how other weapons are also used, how even in Europe people get shot, about the long history of schoolroom massacres, demographic statistics, always more demographic statistics. Anything to make us look the other way and miss the obvious. You have skillfully and deliberately been trying to change the subject in order to conceal your own ideological complicity in the problem. How’s that for a motive, Bucko? So you bore us and distract us with your meticulously documented irrelevancies in the hope we won’t notice that the real problem, the main problem, is that there are too many guns.

Firearms or not, there will be violence, particularly among young people who are unemployed, living in decaying communities with social institutions breaking down due to poverty. It doesn’t matter whether they are black drug dealers, tatooed Latino gangs, meth-head white trash in rural Florida, or the Russian Mafia in New Jersey. It doesn’t even matter if they are Moroccans in Spain or Turks in Germany. The only thing that matters is now American ghettoes and suburbs are awash in AK-47s, and European ones aren’t.

We have a gun problem because guns are too easy to get and because too many of them are military-style weapons. The reason for this is because a substantial proportion of the “law-abiding”, white population is childishly obsessed with guns and can’t get enough of them. A big and very profitable industry has arisen to exploit that adolescent fantasy for financial gain, and has developed a well-funded and highly organized lobbying and propaganda effort to frustrate any attempt to control it. If a few surplus guns leak off into the underclasses…well, that can’t be helped. It’s the price we have to pay for our “Second Amendment freedom”.

This isn’t about liberal social engineering. It’s about good, old-fashioned, all-American
conservative fear, hate and greed.