大象传媒

Good morning. Last weekend I watched comedian, Lee Nelson challenge an American lady about the connection between owning guns and people being killed. He asked her if I gave you a mobile phone for the first time would increase the likelihood of your making a telephone call? A serious point disguised within humour.

On Monday, President Obama has once again lamented "yet another shooting" - this time in the protected navy base in Washington D.C. And, our hearts must go out to the families of all the victims killed, injured and traumatised in this atrocity. But, even with this and the other killings at the Aurora cinema and Sandy Hook School last year, there may still not be any significant change to America's gun laws - despite committed effort from some quarters.

Hindu theology does not favour the US's Second Amendment - the right for all to bear arms. Nature, it says, offers each member of a particular species the same facilities of claws and fangs etc. for attack or defence. But, as humans, we can organise ourselves so that only relatively few persons need carry arms to protect and enable the rest of us to lead a peaceful, non-violent life.

It seems to me that the American belief in the right to own a gun is fuelled by a twenty-billion dollar firearms industry playing on the remnant emotions of the frontier spirit. But, with 31,000 deaths by shooting in 2010 - I'd have expected more progress to legislate gun-control.

The Bhagavad-gita calls this apparent inability to see the obvious detriment in our thinking: sangah -attachment. It warns that when we contemplate desirable objects and issues, we come to believe that they're absolutely crucial to our pleasure or security. This attachment spawns unattainable expectations, frustration and anger, which then confuse our memory and destroy our intelligence...

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