Some people like to pretend everything comes as an amazing shock.

You long timers on this blog will know of my steadfast opposition to civilian ownership of guns. I’ve written about it many times before and got a lot of hate mail as a result from people who, probably, don’t own guns themselves but just like the idea.

Nor have I been the only one opposing guns – and after Cho Seung Hui’s (in my opinion, somewhat over-publicised) rampage earlier this year, you’d have thought some people in this country (the pro-gun group being America-worshippers to a man) would perhaps change their minds and decide that – just  possibly - guns weren’t the best thing ever to have been invented. Apparently, you’d have been wrong.

So, in July one of India’s less bad newspapers (there are hardly any good ones, just a difference in degrees of hopelessness), The Hindustan Times, ran a feature pitying the poor forlorn gun owners who (gasp) could buy only three guns of limited calibre on one licence, even if they got a licence in the first place. The poor things! They have to actually prove they need a gun before getting a licence for one, what an infringement on their freedoms! And then the guns are all junk…oh, what a bore.

I need hardly say the guy who blogged about this article, ridiculing it, came in for a rash of vulgar abuse from the crowd I mentioned.

Now a few days back, something just waiting to happen, something I’d expected would happen long ago, finally did. In Gurgaon, a consumerism driven quasi-suburb of Delhi, two schoolboys brought a gun to school and shot dead a third. The operation was well planned – they brought the gun to school, hid it in the loo somewhere, and shot the victim as he was about to board the school bus at the end of the day. The motive was, allegedly, that the victim was a “bully” and that the two budding psychos (now in a remand home and completely sans remorse) who shot him were seeking revenge.

Apparently, the dad of one of these two young killers (they fired several shots at the victim, passing the gun from one to the other), a rich real estate dealer, had left a loaded gun at home near the television set and gone out of town. His gun licence had been given him for purposes of “personal protection”. I would, automatically (given the facts of the case) assume that then he did not need protection when out alone in the wide world away from his normal haunts, and wonder when, therefore, he did need protection, and from whom. But it gets even more interesting than that. The gun didn’t even belong to him. It belonged to a friend of his…and he had it, loaded, near his TV set. Incidentally, he had also taught his son to shoot. An essential survival skill – I think not.   

From the media reaction, you’d have thought that for the first time ever it suddenly became common knowledge that Indian people owned guns and that gun ownership had become a sort of status symbol among the noveau riche and the upper middle class. The same media which was whining about the plight of the poor gun owners suddenly began breast beating on the appalling lack of gun control in India…apart from (and this is matter for a separate blog entry) the stresses on Indian schoolchildren that made them start bullying or prone to violence (that many other sources deny the victim ever bullied anyone is neither here nor there – they contradict each other on everything about him except his name; they contradict each other on his personality, academic record, sports interests, etc, you name it, they disagree on it). Right now I’m talking about the guns.

I’m sure that as soon as the media furore dies down, and it’s back to business as usual, someone or other is going to argue in favour of all schoolchildren being allowed to carry guns in order to defend themselves from one another. It’s only a matter of time.  

Anyone who thinks guns are necessary or should be handed out to civilians on request, which is what 'liberal licensing policies', so called, amounts to, should have their head examined. And I am not just talking about the Gurgaon school shooting. I have myself picked shards of bone and pellets out of the exploded face of a kid who had been shotgunned at close range. I used to see at least one gunshot wound a week in my intern days. Most of them were allegedly “accidental” shootings from licensed, legal, weapons.  

All over the papers these days is the increasing comment about vigilantism. There was, a couple of weeks ago, a very major clash in Guwahati between Adivasi protestors and Assamese locals (remember my post about that?). I can just imagine the situation if one or both sides had had free access to firearms. The Wild West would have had nothing on it.

It's a specious argument to say that firearm possession will either act as a deterrent or reduce crime. People in India who cite gun laws in the US and claim gun ownership reduces crime never actually, one can’t help noticing, provide figures. And of course if they ever quote anyone they quote the National Rifle Association, which is hardly a neutral body.

Incidentally, I am sure you'll have noticed that the number of incidents of shootings in the US is on a steady upswing in the last few weeks.

There are a few of standard arguments by the Indian pro-gun group about gun laws:

1. Liberal Gun laws will prevent crime

 Sure they will. The robber will be so terrified of your locked-down, unloaded gun he won't ever think of entering your house. Give me a break. And if you load it and keep it out in the open, then, well, see what I just wrote.

2. Licences should be handed out after gun safety courses, PROVIDED the safety course isn't made an excuse for denying licences

Excuse me? Did you notice that in this country you can get a driving licence without ever having sat behind a steering wheel in your life? What about the proud gun owner who lent his friend the gun the friend then left loaded on his TV set so his gun-trained psycho son could go shoot someone with? Does a gun safety course ensure future compliance?

3. Gun control won’t prevent suicides or murders – would be suicides and murderers would find some other way.

I’ve attempted suicide thrice, as I’ve said before, and it was only my incompetence at poisoning and hanging myself that kept me alive. If I’d had a gun I would not have been alive to write this today. And as for murders – if you have a lethal weapon ready to hand, it seems to me, it makes murder more likely than if all you have to go at your target is a nail file or a bread knife.  

There is no point in comparing, as gun lovers love to do, gun-owning countries like Finland or Switzerland with India - and even in Finland there was a major shooting recently. With liberal social and sexual mores, far lower social and political tensions, and minimal environmental pressures such as catastrophic overcrowding, the people there are much less violent (anthropologists have long noted that sexually repressed societies, and overcrowded societies, are more violent. Here in India we have a society that is both sexually repressed and overcrowded). India, unless you're deaf and blind you can't help noticing, is an extremely violent society, one which is getting more violent by the day.

I said it before and I’ll say it again – no civilian has any legitimate reason, in today’s world, for owning a firearm, anywhere. But then the Indian gun lovers don’t mean that anyone should have ready access to guns. What they mean is that upper middle class people like them should have ready access to guns. But you can’t make laws for only one set of people based on economical criteria, so the hoi polloi will have guns too.

Can’t have your cake and eat it, baby.    

    

Those of you who are long timers on my blog will be familiar with my extreme anti-gun views. One of the few things I agree with where Indian laws are concerned is the licensing procedure.

This procedure, as you can see, and as I said before, makes it almost impossible for an ordinary citizen to buy a weapon.

So it might be a bit odd that I decided to apply for a weapons licence. After all I have never even killed so much as a sparrow (even though I own an air rifle) and I have never been threatened or anything that I should need to pack heat.

But still - I'm applying for a licence for a .32 handgun (official reason: self-protection) and a double-barrelled 12 bore shotgun (official reason: sport). Alternatively I may apply for a .22 rifle and give the official reason as "target practice" if they make noises about the "sport".

Bizarre? It isn't really.    

You see, I have no intention of buying any of these weapons. What I want to do is prove a point.

I have no criminal record. I have never even got a parking ticket. I am, as such things go, a so-called "upstanding" member of society. I pay my taxes on time, my identity papers are all up to date and so on, everything's in order.

So I want to see what reason they give for denying me a licence, as they are almost certain to do. I'll keep you posted.

Many years ago, I recall reading an issue (by then already old) of that impeccable propaganda sheet of the American right wing, The Digested Reader (oh, OK, Reader's Digest). One of the articles was about a mysterious shooting of a young woman in her car on the highway. She was driving along one morning on a highway by the sea, her window rolled down, when she slumped over, shot in the head, and her car rolled off the highway until it came to a stop.

No motive could be found for anyone to shoot her; and if it were a maniac sniper, he didn't even shoot at anyone else, nor were any traces of a shooter found.

Here's what the investigation threw up: a man had been practising with his rifle on the other side of the bay, using a heavy rifle, firing at flotsam in the water. One of his bullets missed its intended target, hit the water at high velocity and at a shallow angle, bounced off, and, by now tumbling end over end, came over the highway and hit the girl in the head. If she had had the window closed, she might actually have survived, but who ever keeps a car window closed in hot bright morning sunshine?

Lessons to be drawn: keep your car window closed,  and - if you're a rifle owner - either shoot yourself or leave your gun at home.

I still wonder why the NRA didn't pay to have that article quashed.      

(This is another post that would likely be incomprehensible to non-Indians and not a few Indians, those of us who don't know anything about the country they inhabit. So I apologise in advance.)

The North East Indian state of Manipur is seldom in the national consciousness, just as the North East of the country is itself seldom in the national consciousness. It's a beautiful state of forested hills and cultivated plains, with a lake that is almost unique in the world because of islands of floating vegetation where people have built homes and lives.

It is also a place where insurgencies of various descriptions have been going on for the last fifty years.

I don't intend - in this blog post - to discuss the genesis of those insurgencies. If I began, I would never stop. But suffice it to say that there are anything up to twenty or thirty insurgent groups active in Manipur, most of them ethnic-based and mutually antagonistic, whose primary purpose is not the "fight for freedom" but monetary gain from drug smuggling (narcoterrorism), kidnapping for ransom, and extortion. One can't even buy a car or build a house in Manipur without paying "taxes" to the insurgent group controlling the locality, and I am not exaggerating. Where more than one group is involved, each will have to be paid off separately.

Also, of course, there are the common criminals. Perhaps more of them than there would otherwise be, because legitimate existence in Manipur is increasingly difficult and perilous and crime is often the only way for young people to survive.

Against all these are the state police, which is to all intents and purposes useless. There are the central paramilitary forces and armed police, which are more riot control organisations than anti-terror squads and whose primary purpose is to keep public anger at the state of affairs from boiling over. 

Also there is the Army, which has been given the right to kill on suspicion, and which cannot legally be called to account for its crimes. Despite decades of being given the right to kill at will, the Army has not managed to reduce, let alone eliminate, insurgency in the state.

So, what does the state government do?

In his latest brilliant statement, Chief Minister Ibobi Singh, who has been proved to have paid money from government funds to insurgent groups in the past, has decided to hand out gun licences to anyone who asks. Yes.

This is truly, spell-blindingly brilliant.

I can, you know, just imagine a terrorist group armed with M16s and AK series rifles turning up at someone's home to extort money from him for buying a new motorcycle, and the man himself sending them packing with his trusty 12 bore single barreled breech loading shotgun. Oh yes I can.

Meanwhile, of course, what this will do is ensure that whenever there is any domestic quarrel or riot, each side is going to be even better prepared than ever to deal out violence and death. Given the Indian penchant for violence and schoolchildren battering each other to death, perhaps we will have a Virginia Tech a week. That's quite all right with Ibobi Singh and the Indian gun-worshipping lobby.

One of the very few things that has kept the lid on casual violence in India is the difficulty of buying firearms. This is so self-evident the police generally order all owners of guns to deposit their weapons with police stations whenever there is any danger of rioting or communal strife.

Ibobi Singh is fine with doing away with that.

Once - if - he is allowed to get away with it, let's see what will happen:

1. Other states will do the same.  It's so easy to abrogate responsibility and say, "Here are guns. Now you look after yourself."

2. Criminals will have a nice time robbing people of their guns. A gang of robbers with machetes descend on your house at midnight, and I can just see you fumbling for your gun cabinet keys while they stand and wait for you to shoot them dead.

3. The next time anyone gets angry with his wife or teacher, he will just take the family pistol and shoot that person dead. A Virginia Tech a week, as I said, especially given the  tensions of life in this country, which would make pretty much anyone snap.

4. A tremendous increase in poaching and the rapid destruction of what little remains of our wildlife. Any number of spoiled rich kids are held back from that only because they can't get hold of high powered guns too easily. 

5. There was this nice little episode recounted in the paper a few days ago. A businessman from a gun owning family (every male member owned a gun) was in the excellent habit of getting drunk, putting his unloaded revolver to his temple, telling his wife "I'm now going to shoot myself" and then pulling the trigger. Good joke. Well, one day he did not unload all six chambers of the revolver...you can guess what happened.

(Did I hear someone mention firearms training? This is the country where you can get a driving licence without ever having sat behind a steering wheel, for heaven's sake.)

Back when I was an intern, I saw any number of kids who had shot themselves playing with their parents' guns. One one memorable occasion I had the highly pleasant job of picking shotgun pellets, loose teeth, shards of bone and dead tissue out of one thirteen year old who had blown his lower face apart like the petals of a flower. I do not want to see that repeated on a daily basis, thank you very much. But if this easing of gun ownership laws goes through, I will.

(OK, you say, so the parents should lock the guns up. Fine. And then what the hell are you going to do when you need the guns in a hurry? As I said, fumble for your keys while the robbers are busy chopping your family to pieces...)

Common sense  would suggest Ibobi Singh do his duty and improve policing. But that involves real work, something Indian politicians would never, ever, do if they can help it.

They would rather get everyone genuine weapons of mass destruction instead. 

I wonder what the National Rifle Association, et cetera, have to say about this? A sane society would have banned gun ownership long ago.

But I forgot. It's the Land of Freedom.

I wonder why I, sitting on the other side of the world and an opponent of most things American, am the one who is angry.     

Some things just can’t be avoided.

I admit that this is the third time I’m returning to the subject of the Virginia Tech shootings – previous posts, for those who missed them, are here and here. But the mess of ill-informed debate, racism and misdirected anger is getting so bizarre that it deserves another look.

While surfing YouTube – a process that ended with my import of this video, I came across a lot of drivel, abuse, and non sequiturs. I personally got targeted by a none-too-grammatical lady who calls herself redhead6868 – whose theme song seems to be “I’m older than u (sic), therefore I know better, sweetie, and I own guns and my husband hunts FOR DEER (sic)”. OK, so there is no effort involved in blowing redhead6868 out of the water (and, no, I did not go to the effort of finding out how old she is). I’m talking of the others.

In the first place, let me just go over the fact that Cho Seung Hui may have been an ethnic Korean, but he lived in the United States since the age of four. He grew up in an American milieu, watched American movies, presumably learned to drive at the regulation American age of 16, learned to shoot as any “red blooded he man” American (as distinct from namby-pamby liberals) would, ate American food, and imbibed American values. I find it rich, therefore, that he should be racially targeted as an Asian – and there should be fuming rhetoric as to how the “gooks” should have been killed by the “Japs” back in World War II. Going by that sort of “logic”, then, after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P Murrah building in Oklahoma City, killing 168, people of Irish origin should have been targeted (were they? No. Arabs, who had nothing to do with it, were). (As an aside – our ever-toadying Indians are at it again. On the website known as Sepia Mutiny, the hangout of Indians resident in the US, some are going to great pains to say that we are South Asians, as distinct from East Asians, and hence “blameless”. I suppose no one among them has heard of the Reverend Martin Niemoller.)

Now, Asians, whether South or East, are rather different culturally speaking than the West. I mention this simple fact because, somehow, it does not seem to have entered the minds of most people. We Asians (and the Russians too) are much more family oriented. It is not a matter of shame to us to head to the bosom of the family when we have problems. I don’t mean this to be patronising, it’s just a statement of fact. How does this affect the current issue?

Well, all of us have problems and grievances. All of us have times when we want to withdraw from the world, or lash out at it. Some of us (I am one) are loners by temperament, we internalise our problems, but when it gets too much for us where do we head? To the family. No one is ever no longer a part of the family in an Asian society. You may live a continent away, but you are still part of the family, and your actions reflect on the family’s “honour”. This is why Cho’s family is so obviously distressed and apologised to the American people for his actions. An average Western family would have gone “It’s awful, but it was what he did, we are not to blame.” But Cho, brought up in an American milieu, did not go to his family with his grievances. He bottled them up till they exploded in slaughter.

Obviously, now, Asians also have psychopaths like – for example – this guy here. But they are almost invariably serial killers, not what I would call binge murderers like Cho. The serial killer, as any psychologist or criminologist will confirm, is a special breed. More usually than not he is of above average intelligence, whatever his conceived motives, and is very careful to space out his killings and tries not to get caught. He does not operate in a murderous frenzy triggered off by an inability to handle pressure. Unlike the binge murderer, he is not actuated by grievances that tip the balance of his reason beyond all thought of self preservation.

When we read or listen to Cho’s video manifesto, his anger against the “hedonistic” lifestyles of his peers is obvious. Listen to him: “Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you slugs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough, you snobs.” He claims to have been picked on and humiliated, and to have been forced to have done what he did (uh – back in school I was obese, picked on and bullied, disliked for my alleged “intellectualism”, mocked for my ineptness on the sports field and inability to get girls to fall for me. Did I pick up a weapon? No. But if I had had access to a weapon, there are times when I might have. I very seriously doubt it, though). You can’t call his rampage senseless, anyway. He had grievances and he went to great pains to tell the world about those grievances.

Of course, now, it no longer matters at this stage of proceedings whether the grievances are real or imagined. For the person involved, they are real and more than real. They are so important that they are literally a matter of life and death. An Asian, under these circumstances, would likely seek refuge in the bosom of the family, or, failing that, commit suicide – a lonely suicide. But Cho, whatever his ethnic origin, was no longer psychologically an Asian.

And what of his grievances? The average person in the US is under intense pressure to prove himself. Proving himself, more than anything else, means material success. If you don’t have wealth, you are nobody (and we Indians are headed the same way, fast). Cho, the son of supermarket workers, already psychiatrically not quite all there (as his family claims, he was autistic as a kid, and as his fellow students claim, his behaviour was bizarre), looking around him and finding conspicuous consumption and the irresponsible display of wealth. For an inherently unstable person like this, the pressure to perform, to match up, is potentially too much. In Asia one can step back and take a breath, but not so in the US, not unless you don’t mind being labelled a failure.

So, Cho was an unstable young man under intense psychological pressure. What could he do about it? Denied the option, by his upbringing, to go take refuge in his family (even if he wanted to, that would be “unmanly” by US standards) he took the way he could.

And about that way – as I said, I too was bullied and abused. I wanted sometimes to get hold of a weapon. But could I? No. I don’t want to have to repeat ad nauseam what I said already about gun laws in the US, but it stands to reason that Cho, had he not had ready access to firearms, would not have run amok with a bread knife. I’ve already talked enough about gun laws in the US. Check my previous two posts (linked above) if you want to refresh your memory.

Somewhere I once read that one in every four people in the US has appeared, at some point, on television. Television is the road to recognition. If you’re nobody, if you’re famous for absolutely nothing but being famous, if you are, say, a Nicole Richie or Paris Hilton, get on TV and your reputation’s made. Cho’s video manifesto was tailor made for TV. He wanted to go out with a bang so loud as to live forever on TV, and get movies made about how he went out in a blaze of glory like Billy the Kid. He’s very likely to get his wish.

And that’s another thing.

Now, of course, while I am on this topic of TV and – by extension – video games and movies, what is the staple? Violence, violence, and yet more violence. Video games are all about violence – can anyone name a non-violent video game in recent memory?; the most loved movies are ultra-violent ones like Blackhawk Down, much appreciated by the dickless weapon worshippers, of whom more anon. Compare and contrast European television and movies to American ones to see how violence is not necessarily the route to high cinematic art. Oh yes, I do realise that films and videos are not to be taken seriously. I realise that, you realise that, but millions of people round the globe don’t necessarily realise that. Fantasy and fact get blurred, all too easily.

Now a guy who keeps shooting men and women on a video screen naturally gets somewhat used to the idea of pointing a weapon at someone and pulling a virtual trigger. But that is not necessarily all he does. For in the US, hunting is something anyone who is not a pinko liberal commie faggot Islamofascist traitor terrorist lover is brought up into; getting a gun is not just easy, but is a rite of childhood’s end, as is learning to use it. In other parts of the world, a teenager who shoots animals would be regarded at least as a potential danger and certainly as an oddball; in the US he is taught to shoot animals, usually by his own father. Once one begins killing, killing comes easier and easier. Inflicting death becomes a pleasure in its own right. A way to get your rocks off. And also a way to feel empowered. You’re ground down at work? So what? You can blow away a bull moose! Nimrod the Hunter had nothing on you!

I have always held the theory that people who love guns are monumentally sexually insecure – guns are the weapon worshipper’s way of tackling his penis envy, as is driving SUVs, the traffic equivalent of the gun. Now I do agree that until someone points a gun at someone and presses the trigger the gun is unlikely to kill or injure anyone, but the fact that thirty thousand people die yearly from gunshot wounds in the US shows that guns do get pointed and triggers pressed remarkably often. That’s nearly a hundred times a day.

It’s odd also that the same gun worshippers are most likely to support stopping the Iranians, for example, from possibly, at some remote distant future time, getting their hands on a nuclear device, even if they show no signs of wanting one, because of the alleged potential danger; but show no compunction about keeping actual and real dangerous weaponry right by their side.

In what other country of the world would an aspiring presidential candidate (Mitt Romney) lie about owning guns when he does not, and about going hunting when he has never applied for a hunting licence? Anywhere else in the world, whether a politician owns a gun or goes hunting is either irrelevant or else actually counterproductive. And as the governor of Montana (I think) – a Democrat to boot – said, “I probably own more guns than I need, but not as many as I want.”

In what other country would the right to own deadly weapons become a factor on which elections are won and lost?

The most potent irony in this is the simple fact that Cho – a mirror, as he is, held up to society – will become a product furthering that society. I can already see the books being written on him, and by next year there will certainly be one or more movies in the pipeline.

What will not happen is either a ban on guns or even reasonable control. That’s so, uh, anti-freedom. To quote Donald Rumsfeld, “Free people are free to do bad things…” I guess shooting holes in people is – by that standard – expressing one’s freedom. Rather like freedom of speech.

"Police struggle to find Virginia Tech motive"? It's...plain as the nose on your face, unless you deliberately choose to ignore it.

Even sarcasm fails as a tool sometimes.

Virginia Tech yesterday, a hostage "drama" in NASA now. And in the Johnson Space Center (sic), too. Two dead.

Oh well, there's no need to control guns. It's the people's right to bear arms.

Tell that to the family of the dead hostage.