Originally Posted by Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday
Ask yourself this. Even if you had a house full of guns and ammunition, would you then murder a close relative, shoot your way into a nearby primary school and massacre as many children as you could? Of course you wouldn’t.
You would have to be mad to do such a thing, and mad in a rather special way. And if you were mad in that way, and had no gun, you might use other weapons. There are recent instances in various parts of the world of what appear to be attempted mass murder by car, or by knife.
Take what happened just over a week ago in Chenpeng village school, Henan province, in China. Min Yongjun stabbed an elderly woman before hurting 22 children (many very badly) with a kitchen knife.
So shall we ban kitchen knives? Or cars? Actually, most mass attacks in China – which like almost all despotisms has very tight gun laws – are done with either knives or explosives.
The important thing is that these attacks still happen even with gun laws. What I am asking you to do here is to think. Don’t be herded into the standard liberal opinion, that the Sandy Hook School tragedy is the fault of America’s allegedly crazy gun laws.
Actually, Connecticut’s gun laws are a good deal tighter than Britain’s were before 1920. British gun law before then was so relaxed it made Texas look effeminate. Did the streets of Edwardian London echo to gunfire? Were school massacres common? No.
Were guns restricted here because of crime? No, they were restricted because the panicky British government thought there might be a revolution.
In Switzerland, to this day, most homes contain powerful military weapons and ammunition.
But gun crime is extremely rare there (unless you count suicide). Yet these massacres are a feature of modern life. They happen in countries such as Britain and Germany that already have severe gun laws.
Guns have been around for centuries, and high-capacity magazines have been around for decades. Guns in general are more controlled than ever. So a thinking person must look somewhere else for an explanation.
While the BBC and the papers have raged about guns, nobody has looked at the people who did the murders. There has been no great pressure to find out about Adam Lanza. Most reports make it plain that he was in some way mentally abnormal. Some suggest he may have been on one of the many powerful and poorly tested ‘medications’ that modern medicine casually inflicts on bored children who fidget in class, or on people who are just unhappy in various ways. There is, as yet, no clear answer. There may never be, as the authorities and the media just aren’t interested enough.
One of the Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris, was on such medication (as we know thanks to a Freedom of Information inquiry), and the other, Dylan Klebold, may have been taking mind-altering pills at some point before he acted, though his medical records are sealed – inexplicably, given the importance of the information. In many other similar massacres, pills are involved – Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’.
So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Then there are the illegal drugs that have been effectively decriminalised in much of the USA and Britain, especially supposedly ‘peaceful’ cannabis, now increasingly correlated with severe mental illness. ‘Medical Marijuana’, in effect the lawful sale of dope on medical pretexts, became legal in Connecticut earlier this year. Funny that, as we panic about guns we get laxer about mind-altering drugs.
Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered six people in Tucson, Arizona, had at one time been a heavy cannabis user. And then of course there’s our old friend ‘care in the community’, under which people with quite severe problems are pushed out on to the streets so that mental hospitals can be closed and sold, and their staff made redundant.
There you have it. You, and MPs, and the media, can choose to think seriously about this subject. Or we can run with the flock bleating for tougher gun laws – and then wonder why it is that the massacres keep happening anyway.
