Postscript: America's shame in one photo

After suggesting that the world shun America over guns and their lack of control I see that The Daily Show has a better idea: Mockery.

They sent John Oliver Down Under to investigate Australia's 1990s conservative-led tightening of gun control laws. Americans are even aware of Australia's example probably because former Prime Minister John Howard published a New York Times Op-Ed post-Sandy Hook, titled 'I Went After Guns. Obama Can, Too'.

Oliver speaks with him, drops the "Whoopty-f—ing do" bomb on him even (word is Howard approved), as well as opponents from then who have changed their mind now and an obligatory deranged American. Oh, and there's a man in a kangaroo suit. Oh, and ...

(Song plays throughout: Land Down Under – Men At Work)

JOHN OLIVER: Mr Prime Minister, let's begin in the formal Australian way. G'day.

JOHN HOWARD, FORMER AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: How do you do?

JOHN OLIVER: Obviously gun control doesn't work, it can't work, it will never work. So how was your scheme a failure?

JOHN HOWARD: Well my scheme was not a failure. We had a massacre at a place called Port Arthur 17 years ago and there have been none since.

JOHN OLIVER (Voiceover): Zero gun massacres? Hold on... did gun control actually work?

PHIILIP VAN CLEAVE, AMERICAN GUN LOBBYIST: It stopped one thing, that could also be a statistical anomaly.

JOHN OLIVER: Yeah. It was just their mass shootings disappeared.

PHIILIP VAN CLEAVE: But there were so few of them. Woopty-doo.

JOHN OLIVER: Woopty-doo?

PHIILIP VAN CLEAVE: Yeah.

JOHN OLIVER: Woopty-doo?

PHIILIP VAN CLEAVE: Yes. Mass shootings were rare anyhow.

JOHN OLIVER (Voiceover): Exactly.

JOHN HOWARD: There were about 13 in the previous 18 years.

JOHN OLIVER (Voiceover): But perhaps there were other non-woopty-doo side effects.

JOHN HOWARD: The homicide rate involving the use of guns has declined significantly by factors of up to 50 and 60 per cent.

JOHN OLIVER: Woopty-f*****g-doo.

Pleased to see Comedy Central has loosened the strings on geoblocks and, even better, Youtube clip uploads so enjoy, in three parts, after the jump:

America's shame in one photo

This photo is of some of the families of the Newtown shooting victims yesterday at the White House. This is their reaction on learning that the US Senate had rejected expanding background checks for gun purchases.

It should shame America.

Last month the BBC's Panorama showed how easily anyone could buy a gun when a British reporter got one. It's called straw purchasing and it feeds guns to criminals and that's what the vote was about.

America is so far gone that checks to stop terrorists buying guns are rejected by the gun industry lobby and thus politicians*. Anything that resembles gun control is rejected because the country is caught up in an insane culture of worship to an ancient text and a belief that a cycle of violence, guns begetting guns, is a good thing.

Yesterday I saw the former Conservative MP Louise Mensch expressing exasperation at the country. Last year the conservative former Australian Prime Minister John Howard wrote in the New York Times of how Australia united for gun control after a massacre. He did this following Newtown, to show how the rest of the world has managed to control guns and gun violence.

America's friends want to help. But how to stage an intervention with a 1000lb gorilla?

This photo shows that America wants to be different from the rest of us. It refuses to join civilisation. It will pompously talk of its culture and history so if the rest of us can show cultural relativism elsewhere, to say, 'well, actually, our way of doing things is better than yours' to other people's backwards and antidiluvian cultural practices, then we should do it to Americans as well.

This photo is not the result solely of 'gun nuts' or the 'gun industry lobby'. It's because America won't make it stop, enough won't get angry enough to make sure this never happens again. Most of America doesn't see this picture as shameful.

The liberal Ana Marie Cox writing today in The Guardian tries to explain the vote. It is because the 'NRA culture' is dominant, then she relates that culture to her own experience.

It is a bizarre read. She talks -- I am not kidding -- of a zombie apocalypse and how best to prepare for it and who she would want to be with should a 'tyrannical government' take over, like that's something which even crosses the minds of citizens of normal countries.

Cox cites her Texan upbringing and I am well aware of how this psychosis is well rooted in the US, and not just in 'flyover country'. It's all excuses. Cox and her fellow liberals needs to grow out of it. Other countries (Serbia, Germany) have done far worse and changed.

I floated shunning as something friends might do on a liberal blog I read and most thought Americans were so far gone it wouldn't work, though I do recall a time last decade when American tourists would pretend to be Canadian, so the idea does have form. But one person wrote this:

Please shun us. Try our politicians for war crimes. Issue ongoing travel advisories to our major cities. Advise tourists to our states to take out special medical insurance for acts of violence.  Caution against eating our genetically modified food.  Refuse to work alongside our election observers until we get our own in order. Really, make us feel like a pariah among Western democracies.  Nothing else has worked.

Worth a try?

Watch video from the Rose Garden yesterday after the jump: