Thu 23 May 2013 | 
Aurora. The right to bear arms versus the right to live.
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Enlarge textThis is the Twitter account of 24-year-old Jessica Ghawi, an aspiring sports journalist. She used the professional name Jessica Redfield, her grandmother’s maiden name, as a kind of tribute to a woman who apparently wanted to be a journalist but for whatever reasons wasn’t.
Jessica Ghawi was an aspiring sports journalist. (AAP)
- 11 Comments | Join the discussion
If you read Jessica’s Twitter account, she banters with a work colleague on Thursday night about him not attending a screening of a movie and then tweets that the film will begin in 20 minutes. That was her last ever Tweet. An hour later she was dead, one of 12 people shot by a rampaging gunman at a cinema in Colorado.
You now know about Aurora, a suburb of Denver, after Friday morning’s shooting. That incident can be added to others in Tuscaloosa, Chicago, Delaware, Seattle, Houston, Oakland, Miami, Pittsburgh, Tennessee, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Boston, Ohio, Michigan, New York, and Arizona in the past 18 months where a lone shooter has killed multiple victims.
Add to that list, the 2009 Fort Hood shooting (13 dead), the 2009 Binghamton civic center shooting (13 dead) in upstate New York, the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings (32 dead), and you may feel you are detecting a theme.
(For more, here’s a list of mass shootings in the U.S since the infamous 1999 Columbine attack.)
The Aurora shooter walked into the cinema with two pistols, a shotgun, and an AR-15 assault rifle, a type that was outlawed in 1994 but legitimised in 2004 when Congress, perhaps feeling the pinch of the powerful National Rifle Association, did not renew an assault weapons ban.
The US has an odd attitude to weapons. A few lines in the Constitution that suggests citizens have the right to bear arms if they are members of “an organized militia” seems to green light the belief that all and sundry are entitled to carry assault weapons. The Supreme Court even updated this position in 2008 ruling you don’t even have to be a militia member, whatever that is.
These weapons that are legal are ones designed to be used (if at all) by highly trained professionals in the military or law enforcement agencies. Not hunters. Not sporting shooters. Not “regular” people looking for a handgun to protect themselves from bad guys. And definitely not people in desperate need of mental health assistance.
Aurora has sparked a slight debate on gun control across the country. Nothing will come of it. The NRA is one of the most powerful lobby groups in the U.S. and will make sure of it. Gun rights advocates cutely spin what seems obvious to some – that assault weapons kill people en masse.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people; if more people were armed in the cinema then the shooter would not have claimed so many victims; it’s my constitutional right, damn it; if you ban guns why not ban sports cars that kill people in car crashes?
And so it goes and we will be sad for the victims and shake our heads at the shooter and mental health services will continue to be ignored or have their budgets cut and gun users will retain their rights and it will still be cool to buy weapons and ammunition as if you were going on a do-or-die solo military assault of some far off place that can’t be found on a map and has an unpronounceable name. Just like in the movies.
But because of some right written in a document in 1791, it remains a right to buy a weapon that the writers of said document could never have imagined would ever exist. Those guys, the revered founding fathers, were thinking of popguns and muskets.
Rights are “rights” and are not always right. But I wonder this: had they been asked before they walked into the cinema for the screening of The Dark Knight Returns, how many of the now-dead would have been prepared to die in support of the right to bear arms?
Which is more important? Those lives? Or that right? Jessica Ghawi’s now untended Twitter account has the unstated answer.
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Comments (11)
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05 Aug 2012 18:07 AEST
From: Auckland
No right to arms
There is no absolute right to bear arms, and there never was. There is a right to form a volunteer militia - contained in the second amendment to the constitution. It wasn't in the original document. Other parts of the constitution have been amended, so that amendment can be easily removed.
04 Aug 2012 19:30 AEST
From: Australia
Aurora, Port Arthur, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Auschwitz
I'm a hunter who supported our government's buyback of high-capacity firearms. Assault rifles are out of context for us and we've learned they can't be kept them from unstable individuals. The US rose from the people overthrowing a military dictatorship and their descendants jealously guard their constitutional right to protect their freedom. Mass shootings in America are appalling, but where are the voices decrying the current slaughter of Syrians by their own army? Sadly, freedom is costly.
02 Aug 2012 11:06 AEST
From: Marrickville
Silly arguments
Let's imagine the scenario. You are out in a shopping mall or a football game when it happens. A madman opens fire with an assault rifle - high velocity and long range. What do you do? You have no cover either from sight or fire. You pull out your trusty .38, take careful aim at the limits of its effecftive range (about 50 yards) and bring down the baddie with one disabling shot. At which point the police come storming in and there you are with a gun in your hand surrounded by dead bodies. Oops.
02 Aug 2012 11:00 AEST
From: Marrickville
Who kills who?
The rate of gun deaths in the US is 10.19 per 100,000 of population. To put that in perspective, the UK death rate from road accidents is somewhere around 6.6 per 100,000. So, a lot of murders in the US? Well yes, but not as many as you'd think. Around 6 of those 10 are suicides - a clear majority. Small consolation but the most likely person to be killed by an American gun is the owner.
31 Jul 2012 13:46 AEST
From: Woodstock NY USA
I'm Apologizing For America
I have to say I do wonder how the world views us. They must think we're all a bunch of nut cases. And for the comment if others had guns in the theater, he set off tear gas and had full body armor on head to toe. Yeah some more guns would have helped. The death toll might have got to 50 then. And I served in Vietnam BTW
31 Jul 2012 9:07 AEST
From: Woodstock NY USA
Assault Rifles Should Be Banned
First off the NRA are abunch of weekend military wannabees who hide behind the constitution like a behind in his rent tenant hides from his landlord. I agree the founding fathers couldn't imagine what weapons have become and I'm not ant-gun either. The fact is what is an assault rifle made to do? Its to kill in a field of war, not go deer hunting with. So why aren't they banned? Gun advocates now come up with catchphrases like if they ban them only criminals will have them. And he had an AR-15.
30 Jul 2012 14:01 AEST
From: Australia
Each to their own
Apparently words, freedom of speech, can kill as certain as machine gun bullets riddle a body, expecially in St Louis. It sems the American way, domestic blood lust. They patriotically send their young men to battle unwinnable wars of vengeance & fear & call their dead, heroes, now being replace by drone missiles.Having a weapon at home to kill another human being is just more terror on their streets. American culture can be so unpalatable to outsiders especially those who value human life.
29 Jul 2012 10:34 AEST
From: Guadalajara
On another level
If people think they have the right to bear arms to protect themselves; how about giving the same right to every country: the right to have nuclear weapons to defend themselves.
29 Jul 2012 8:03 AEST
From: brunswick, melbourne
Is the person of the individual inviolate ?
Had anyone or more of the theatre patrons been in possession of a pistol, this would have been known as a no go area for any would be gunman. The 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution is not about hunting, as that was what people then had to do anyway to survive, it was solely to do with deterring illegal entry into one's home by either a common criminal or by a tyrannical state. If simple possession of a firearm did not deter then it was to be used with deadly intent.
25 Jul 2012 21:10 AEST
From: Melbourne
wow....tell us what you really think
FYI a militia is an irregular army, a military force composed of ordinary citizens. At the time the American Constitution was written, the right for ordinary citizens to rise up against an oppressive government was particularly relevant. You only need look at Syria today, there's a perfect example of why the people should have the right to form militia's and defend themselves. The document is old but still relevant. The Aurora shooter was armed with a shotgun and two pistols, not assault weapons
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Matthew Hall presents a first-hand look at world events from a different angle. Follow @Matthew_Hall
Matthew Hall New York-based writer Matthew Hall has chased fugitives across Texas, been shot in outback Australia and has lunched with Liza Minnelli.
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