Keeping the Tigers away.

     A number of years ago I heard a story about a man who walked around his hometown in a city in Texas snapping his fingers all of the time. He was a regular fixture and everyone seemed to see him at one time or another. Someone finally asked him why he was always snapping his fingers. He said: "To keep the tigers away."  The man looked him and said, skeptically: "But there are no tigers in Texas." And the man replied: "Yes, see!"

     During the "Cold War" days championed by Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the US foreign policy was one of "brinkmanship," and a central facet of that policy was keeping the communists at bey through the threat of the use of atomic weapons, promising "mutually assured destruction" for those engaging in a nuclear war.

     There are many people in our country now who seem to be applying the same ideas to the notion that the "good guys" should be armed so they can prevent the "bad guys" from getting an advantage. The belief seems to be that the more "good" people who are armed, the less gun violence there will be because only "bad" people use guns to harm people and they will be too afraid to use their guns. That is, of course, a stupid idea believed only by idiots with no sense of history or psychology.

     Brinksmanship lead to an arms race that nearly bankrupted the Soviet Union financially and led to the US having the largest military budget in the world and encouraging some of our political leaders to believe that the US can and should use its military might to try to force other governments to adopt US style democracy. We spend more money on our military than the next 5 largest nations combined. We still can't get countries in the Middle East and Afghanistan to do our bidding.

     There are now more gun shops in the US than all grocery stores and hospitals combined. The money being expended on guns and ammunition annually exceeds all of the money we are expending on mental health services. We still lead the world in annual gun deaths with over 30,000/year. No matter how many are killed, there are always more to be killed because guns are so readily available in the US. The killing will not stop just because more people have guns. As long as guns are readily available they will be the weapon of choice to kill friends, family members, neighbors, policemen, school teachers, kids, estranged spouses, and those who commit suicide.

    As Americans we have a habit of "declaring war" on things; perhaps we should start "declaring peace" on ourselves by bringing guns under more control so that, like in Japan, a gun death is something that is so rare that people can remember the exact time when one occurred rather than learning each night on the news in the US that there have been several more that day--so common that they mean nothing..