The right to kill

So ONE of the too many to count reasons why I did what I could last year (and really for many a year prior to that) to fight to stop the election of this lunatic to lead the most powerful country in the world, was because of his shrill rantings on the campaign trail about how 'they' would take away people's guns and he, if elected, would make sure they didn't.

Unfortunately I was up against some slightly more powerful people, not least those that make money from selling guns in the US. The US gun lobby (the NRA) that boasts 5 million (mostly male) members, including this lunatic leader who it describes as a 'true friend and champion', spent over $30 million last year on getting him elected, more than they spent on any previous candidate.

One of the first things the NRA's political puppet did once in office was to undo the regulation introduced under the Obama Administration to make it harder for mentally ill people to buy guns.

One of the first sentences out of the mouth of the lunatic leader after the latest mass shooting in a Baptist church in Texas that killed 26, mostly women and children, was 'we're dealing with a mental health situation here.'

Then he went on to say that if it wasn't for the man who shot the killer while he was leaving the church after having killed or wounded everyone in it - that one man with a rifle against the guy with the machine gun - 'we would not only (my emphasis) be looking at 26 dead we'd be looking at hundreds.'

What a load of man shit.

There's a connection here that shouldn’t be ignored: The most common thread between America’s mass shootings is a history of domestic violence. (Rolling Stone Magazine, Nov 7)

The main reason this idiot was elected to lead the most violent nation on earth, rather than the anti-violence, pro-gun-control female candidate he was up against, is also the main reason why so many mass shootings occur in the US every year, other than the increasing availability of high-powered guns to anyone no matter their mental health or history of violence against anyone, least of all women, and that is men's hatred and resentment of women, the principal cause of domestic violence, the most common form of violence in the world.

I, who have studied the causes and consequences of domestic violence, have long known this, as have other feminists, it is something new and reassuring that a popular magazine like Rolling Stone with a significant male readership, which probably won't be accused of 'man-hating' and thereby dismissed, is acknowledging it and making it public.

Hopefully the deaths of the only 26 and the only 58 in Vegas just a few weeks earlier, both by men with a history of violence against women, and both whose victims were predominantly female, will not be totally in vain, unlike the deaths and injuries of their millions of sisters worldwide who are the victims of violent attacks by the men they know every year, whether by guns or fists or acid or anything any man with a 'mental health' problem can get his hateful hands on.

Thanks too to Chelsea Handler for listing at the end of her most recent Netflix show all the Republican members of congress and senate who have accepted donations from the NRA.