Don't Take Your Guns to Town, Kid

This week I have read quite a lot of blogs from the US, and obviously the Virginia Tech massacre seems to have brought the gun control issue to a head, as you would expect.

So I want to talk about guns. Not a subject I am hugely knowledgeable about, do not read the following blog for lots of statistical analysis or personal anecdotes. I have never held a gun. I have never, therefore, fired a gun. I have never had a gun fired at me. In fact, my only real experiences of guns are the fact that I have traveled in Gaza where I frequently heard gun battles, but they were usually a long way in the distance (still scary though). The only other time is spending a few minutes in an air gun shop with my brother in law (he made a few Beavis and Butthead noises to himself "cool…uh huh….awesome….") and then we moved on for a cream tea with extra strawberry jam at the nice shop at the end of the road. Hardly life in the ‘hood.

So I guess some people would think that it makes me very under-qualified to talk about the subject. I don’t agree.

I may not be knowledgeable enough to do an in depth analysis of the world gun trade, but I would just like it to be put on the record that, from my perspective, life without guns is fabulous.

I attended a state comprehensive school. It wasn’t the worst in the country but it wasn’t so far off the bottom of the league tables. It was enough having to cope with the hair pulling and verbal abuse I received at the hands of the other students. I am so glad that I was able to partake in my classes without hearing rumours along the grapevine that so and so has a gun in their bag and is waiting for you after school. I am so glad that there whilst there was undeniably a culture of violence at the comp, it never did and never has ended in a fatality.

The school was in a working class town. It wasn’t the safest place to live. People got beaten up for standing out, there were a lot of drugs and gangs. Despite that, I still managed to have a happy childhood where I was allowed to roam most of the streets, my life was not characterised by fear and danger. I feel that without the strict gun control we have in the UK this would not have been the same. I’m not saying I would have got shot. I’m just saying that with all the gun crime on top of everything else, my neurotic mother wouldn’t have let me leave the back garden and a lot of my fun childhood memories would have been stolen from me. I wouldn’t have been the only one. The lives of me and my friends would have been spent in front of computers and TV’s rather than walking through the woods behind the old pit or running through the fields on the common. I may have sometimes walked the long way home to avoid the bigger boys who shouted lewd things after me and my twelve year old girl friends, but imagine the power those bigger boys would have had with their dads stolen gun in their pocket. Guns are not just used to kill, but to cajole, to threaten, to rape. The bigger boys in my home town just had catapults and the real psychos had knives. But I’d rather take my chances with a man and a knife than a man and a gun, although neither, admittedly, is something I’d put on my wish list.

Finally, and this issue feels a lot closer to where I’m standing now: if guns were legal in the UK, I would be dead. I say this sincerely and honestly. Every depressive who has wrestled with the big one has a preferred method. A single, simple gunshot wound has always been mine. Less than a six months ago, I was so fucked up that had guns been legal I can say with certainty that I would have bought one, pulled the trigger and hey presto, exited the planet. 1 in 4 people in this country suffers from a mental illness at some point in their life. I don’t know the exact statistics relating to methods but I do know that studies have shown that in countries with guns, suicide rates tend to be higher as many more attempts are successful. I’m not saying that gunshot wounds are the only way to kill yourself, far from it, but it my own case, the method I was forced to use was much less effective and therefore there was time for me to be rescued by the paramedics and then time for me to be saved in hospital. If I had found easy access to a gun, I simply wouldn’t be here writing this now.

So, people, from where I’m standing, I say: fight to keep Britain as gun free as possible. Those in other countries who own a weapon: know that you are 41% more likely to be murdered if you have a firearm in your house, which to me would be as cold a comfort as the hard metal casing you so foolishly caress under your pillow. Let us not forget that guns are designed for one thing, and it’s not protection. Guns are made to kill. They tear apart communities, wreck lives, mame, wound and torture. I’m pleased to say that today I haven’t been one of the approximately 1000 people who died because of a gun. I hope I never will be.

Look at it this way: today I have been able to walk through my city’s streets unattended, carefree, feeling safe. For billions of people all over the world, because of the threat of the bullet there is so such feeling, no such freedom. I know you’re all going to laugh and call me a sucker idealist but for me there will never be any peace in the world until the firearms trade, both legal and illegal is dismantled. So why stop at Britain? Lets fight for the belief that the only place that people should to see guns in the whole world is stuck behind a glass cabinet, in an armory museum. Sure, it’s not a guarantee against the human violence (both headline grabbing and unreported) that dominates our planet, but it sure would be a step in the right direction.