Not even the Las Vegas shooting can get the US talking gun reform

Stock image of a rifle and the US flag. Picture: Alamy

I do not understand America or Americans. Whether it is a high school in Colorado, a primary school in Connecticut, or a music festival in Las Vegas, massacres with a gun just keep happening.

A few weeks back eight people were shot and killed in Texas. Maybe because it was “only” eight dead it didn’t rate too much coverage. Maybe Americans are inured to this kind of carnage. Maybe they just turn away and continue to chase their version of the American dream. The only thing that is certain about this awful tragedy is that it won’t be the last.

Why in heaven’s name would a 64-year-old retirement community resident with the deceptively ‘normal’ name of Stephen Paddock, choose to mow down so mercilessly hundreds of his fellow citizens? More to the point: how is it possible that a seemingly ordinary person can be found dead by his own hand in a hotel room with explosives, 18 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition? Among those weapons were automatic and semiautomatic rifles. Apparently in some US states you can buy these guns at Kmart.

How does America get guns so wrong? Who worked out that anyone outside the armed forces or police would ever have need of an automatic weapon? The National Rifle Association of America is the most powerful lobby group in the country. It owns the Republican Party, if you’ll pardon the pun, lock, stock and barrel. How else could there be no real call for change in the gun laws after this slaughter and so many others?

Only in America do people wander around in the woods, dressed in army fatigues, practising drills about defending themselves from imaginary attack. They are not thinking about a war or invasion by the dreaded Russians or pesky Chinese, or even the North Koreans. No, these lunatics are training to resist their own government. There is an illness in the US, through every city, village, hamlet or farmhouse. This Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms, was promulgated when it took two or three minutes to prime a musket. Now one idiot with a sub-machine gun can kill 59 people and wound more than 500 others in not much more time than it took to prime that musket. How could this disparity be overlooked by a nation that has so much success, so many brilliant people? Then again, they did just elect Donald Trump.

Speaking of the President, he gave a solemn message to his citizenry about love keeping them together. There wasn’t much love in Paddock or all the other perpetrators of gun massacres. Trump made no mention of gun law reform. The NRA owns him and he will brook no discussion about changing laws that enable the Paddocks of this world to kill and maim again and again and again.

Sadly I saw a gun law reform advocate bemoaning the fact that, even in this time of the worst peacetime massacre in US history, there will be no hope of reform. To those in America claiming it is too early to talk about reform, the stark reality is that it is too late.

The greatest and most powerful nation in the world is utterly powerless to protect its citizens from themselves.