The right to kill in America

Everybody is talking gun control after the Aurora shooting, and that is a good thing.

No private citizen should be legally allowed to buy the numbers and kinds of weapons that were taken into the Dark Knight screening Friday night, and that means the issues of registration and more comprehensive surveillance are being raised.

In the weirdness that is the United States of America, the right to bear arms is written into the constitution. A person has the right to defend themselves with guns and protect their private property. Nothing, but nothing, will be done about that unless politicians change the constitution and that is never going to happen, so let's end that debate right now.

But the simple knowledge of how many weapons a person possesses is not against the U.S. constitution; it just makes common sense especially in a land that prides itself on intelligence gathering. If authorities knew James Holmes possessed the arsenal that he did, they might have sent a friendly police officer by to ask him to explain things. Maybe they might have been able to prevent the Colorado tragedy.

Unfortunately, there is no way that firearms registration will happen in the Great U.S. of A. The NRA has deep pockets and many politicians in them. Besides, if we look at the Canadian experiment with gun control, we see that, even in our civilized society, guns win. Every time.

The entire gun registration experience was a fiasco from the get-go. The registration system that the Liberals brought in was nothing but a costly bungle. And once the Conservatives came to power, they were delighted to put it out of its misery.

Fact of the matter is that most of the guns that kill are stolen from God-fearing ratepayers and are not wielded by crazy-assed gopher killing farmers.

There is a butt and I do have one.

James Holmes had legal firearms with which he killed and hurt all those people. And to my mind, if one incident like that can be prevented, that's reason enough for registration and surveillance.

It will be interesting, in this election year, to see what the politicians come up with. Clearly, they've got some 'splaining to do to the American public and those poor families who lost loved ones.