Farewell to arms no easy task

Just a few hours after the tragic shooting last Friday in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six adults, my colleague suggested that we should discuss gun control in our weekly Across America Talk video programme.
But the question we immediately asked ourselves was what we could discuss about gun control. We had extensively discussed the subject in July right after the theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which took 12 lives.
In between, there was a shooting in August at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in which seven people died, and then the shooting just days before the Newtown rampage in a shopping mall in Oregon, which killed three.
The US cable networks have been covering the Newtown massacre 24/7 over the past week. The conflict in Syria, the satellite launch by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the protests in Egypt which had dominated the news before the shooting suddenly no longer made the headlines.
Even the so-called "Fiscal Cliff" has been given little coverage despite the fact that US President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have not struck a deal so far to save Americans and the world from a possible panic only 11 days away.
When the Aurora theatre shooting took place, Obama was reluctant to talk about gun control for fear of offending pro-gun voters in a close presidential election. This time, after securing his re-election, he has made many pledges and vowed tough action to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. On Wednesday, he said Vice-President Joseph Biden would lead the effort.
But if Obama is truly to use all the power he has, he probably should lead the mission himself to accomplish a mission impossible.
I would like to be wrong, but I think that after two more weeks, no one in the US is going to talk about the Newtown shooting or gun control, except for the families who lost their loved ones.
The United States has become a society addicted to gun culture. With around 270 million guns held by private citizens, it has the most armed civilian population in the world.
The gun culture is so deeply rooted that any major effort in gun control will be met with strong resistance from those defending the Second Amendment, which gives US citizens the right to bear arms.
In the name of defending the constitution, few have seriously considered whether such an outdated amendment is still fit for the 21st century.
Reports show that gun sales have increased in Connecticut since the Newtown shooting. The FBI has also reported more background checks for firearms purchases this year than ever before.
A Pew Centre survey, which was conducted right after the Aurora theatre shooting, found that 47% said it was more important to control gun ownership, while 46% said it was more important to protect the right of US citizens to own guns. The attitude was largely unchanged despite the shooting.
I am not trying to sound cynical, but Obama and Americans simply need to take drastic action to "unarm" US civilians before another mass shooting occurs.
People in the US marvel at the low gun-related homicide rate in Japan, less than 10 in 2008, but they do not realise that it is almost impossible for Japanese people to buy guns, let alone high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic rifles, which were used in all of the recent shooting rampages.
On the same day the Newtown tragedy took place, a crazy man in Central China's Henan province entered a rural primary school and injured 23 children. But if buying a gun in China was as easy as in the US, that tragedy could have been worse than Newtown.

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