Well, well, well. The American Dream has delivered another special delivery: six cold bodies in Iowa, a domestic violence spree that’s as predictable as a hangover after a Tory party conference. The shooter, a man with the emotional regulation of a toddler and the constitutional right to an armoury, has done what he does best: ended lives for reasons that would bore a goldfish. Meanwhile, across the pond, the UK government has convened an emergency session to ‘review firearms export controls’. Because nothing says ‘we care’ like shuffling paperwork while the bodies are still warm.
Let us pause for a moment to appreciate the sheer, breathtaking absurdity of this. In Iowa, the Second Amendment is a holy text, and the gun lobby is its priesthood. They worship at the altar of ‘freedom’, a freedom that apparently includes the right to turn your partner into a statistic. The police will do their dance, the media will wring their hands, and the NRA will say ‘thoughts and prayers’ – a phrase so hollow it echoes. And the UK? We’re a nation of well-meaning bureaucrats who think a stern letter to the arms trade will fix everything. ‘Dear Sirs, we regret to inform you that you may not sell your machines of death to the colonies until they have a proper cry about it. Yours, His Majesty’s Government.’
This is the British way: we tut-tut, we review, we form committees. We are the world’s experts at looking concerned while doing absolutely nothing. The blood of Iowa is fresh on the carpet, and our politicians are already drafting paragraphs about ‘export licensing regimes’. It’s like sending a get-well card to a volcano eruption.
And let’s not pretend the UK is innocent. We sell arms to Saudi Arabia, a country where the domestic violence sprees are state-sanctioned. We have our own gun laws, yes, but we also have a class system that throttles equality and a housing crisis that drives people mad. Iowa is just a mirror, a distorted one, but a mirror nonetheless. The real horror is not the guns, but the fact that we have normalised this chaos. It’s theatre, dear reader. The shooter is a puppet, the politicians are puppets, and we are the audience, munching popcorn and tweeting #prayersforiowa.
So here’s my proposal: instead of reviewing gun exports, let’s review the whole bloody circus. Abolish the NRA, burn the Second Amendment, and replace it with a constitutional right to a decent pint and a functioning healthcare system. But that won’t happen, will it? Because the money is too good, and the outrage is too brief. We’ll all forget Iowa by lunchtime. The next mass shooting is already being planned. And the UK will review another document. It’s the carousel of stupidity and we are all, every one of us, riding it to the grave.
