New Zealand's prime minister on gun violence: 'I do not understand the United States'

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is stumped as to why the United States continues to put up with mass gun violence. Join the club, prime minister.

"Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest, I do not understand the United States," she said.

This is a point of confusion, internationally, so as diplomatic service let me explain it in at least rough outline: The difference between the United States and other nations, the ones with sensible gun laws, is not rooted in our Constitution but in a fundamental cultural belief that it is sometimes Good to Murder People—and that it is in fact a right to murder your neighbors, if you believe your neighbors have done something that now justifies their murder. None of the gun fanatics of the United States cite the Second Amendment in arguing that they should be allowed to purchase, collect, and display guns as cultural or historical artifacts. The difficulties all arise when you suggest limits on the ability to load those guns, carry them around in public, point them at others, and pull the trigger if the American on the other end deserves the bullet.

This cultural tradition stems from multiple of our national myths, and is therefore quite ingrained. The Revolution is cited, but without the bits about assembling an army to fight off a ruling despot; in the modern interpretation, it will be Biff, his neighbor Biff from down the street, and three more Biffs that live vaguely near the supermarket who will be single-handedly defending the sovereignty of their neighborhood from the overwhelming military might of the United States or whatever military power was able to thrash the United States thoroughly enough to now be threatening their quiet suburbia.

Stories of the gunslinging American West feature prominently, but not the actual events so much as a small set of television shows that burrowed deep into the national brain. You can hardly call yourself a man if you cannot fight off a "bhaar" with knife and rifle, and on the tumbleweed-strewn parking lots of the local outlet mall you cannot count on a badge-wearing sheriff to arrive to save you from trouble. In the television version of the American West, you pick up the badge and you wear it yourownself; any townsfolk twitching about due process might want to hitch up the wagon and flee to another show on another channel.

But none of this was ever enough to turn this nation truly loopy until the advent of leaded gasoline and a resultant outbreak of mass stupidity, which at its peak transformed the nation's foremost hunting and shooting club into a frothing mass of proto-terrorist lunacy. It was the National Rifle Association that put its massive funding to the notion that guns were now not for sport: Guns were for murdering your neighbors and/or rioting minorities and/or agents of the government, good and hard, and with whatever ammunition was necessary when the fated day came.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2JtjZ9D