USA and Guns

It's been a strange, and terribly sad, week overhearing the voices of the religious right in the American south voicing their opinions on Orlando over the social media. Bible Belt - '...where there are more prisons than Starbucks.' (Kevin Spacey's David Gale in The Life of David Gale)

These people hate the very idea of Islam. It almost seems as if some of them welcome fundamentalist terrorism happening so they can up the vehemence in their rhetoric.

These people hate 'gays'. You will not find the expression 'LGBT' in their tweets. They often gather outside LGBT events holding random verses from Leviticus.

So when an ethnic middle-eastern, USA-born, bi-polar afflicted, proclaimed gay-hater who turns out to be gay goes mad with an assault rifle in the name of Islamic fundamentalism in a club full of members of the LGBT community - well they find it hard to get their anger pitched exactly right.

Know this friends. The shares in the company who made the weapon used by the murderer apparently went up by 50% over the weekend.

Number of people killed by guns in the UK per 100,000 last recorded full year - 0.04
Number of people killed by guns in the USA per 100,000 last recorded full year - 3.6

Ninety times more likely.

One Twitter user went through every condolence tweet from every senator and congressman and added the amount of money they had received from the gun lobby in the previous year. Eye-opening. It was a lot.

All this information is gleaned from newspapers and I have no first-hand knowledge. Apologies if any of it proves to be incorrect. It surely can't all be.