Wednesday, March 20, 2019

How It Should End

There was a very funny YouTube bit that suggested an expedited version of Lord of the Rings. Instead of wandering through forests and mountains and encountering all manner of treachery and danger, it was suggested that one of those great big eagles could have been used to carry Frodo over Mount Doom where the Ring could have been dropped in a thrice. Evil thwarted and all those books and movies could have been skipped.
This is what I thought of when I heard that New Zealand's Prime Minister was calling for changes in her country's gun laws. This came within hours of the massacre of fifty people at two different mosques in Christchurch. Not that thoughts and prayers were ignored, but what came directly in the wake of the murder of innocents was action. It could be that a breaking point was reached, but it should also be noted that the last mass shooting in New Zealand was nearly thirty years ago when thirteen people were shot "indiscriminately" by a neighbor with a grudge and a rifle. That shooting resulted in a change to New Zealand's firearms policy.
And now this.
Rather than making social media posts and wringing their collective hands, the government of New Zealand is taking steps to see that "this" never happens again. Never again. Already comparatively low on the scale of gun violence, with one gun death per 100,000 people per year compared to twelve per 100,000 in the United States, there was still room to move. How about zero?
The change will not come easy, as there are a great many guns there. More than a million in a country of four and a half million citizens. Which sounds a little like every third person has a gun, but like the United States, there is a smaller group owning multiple weapons. And they aren't keen to give them up without an argument.
I hesitate to say a fight, since that would be a gun fight, and I don't imagine that would be in anyone's interest.
Or maybe they could get Landroval to gather up all the pistols and rifles and semi-automatics and drop them into a volcano. The end.

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