America Is a Gun

In February 2016, a British man writing under the pseudonym Brian Bilston, the “poet laureate of Twitter,” published this poem:

America is a Gun

England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.

Brazil is a football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona’s hand.
Germany, a oompah band.
America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun.

I heard about the poem at some point after that. It gets reposted or quoted when there's a particularly prominent mass shooting: Uvalde, Annunciation school in Minneapolis last year, last week in Bend. Too many to remember. 

But I've been thinking about the poem's words as more than the tragedy of mass shootings, as if that isn't enough. About how our country has more guns within its borders than people; how way too many young men have guns with them so that when they have the normal disagreements young men often have, someone gets shot instead of punched; and how those shootings then get spun into media panic stories of "gangs" operating. Then, even when violent crime is actually declining as it is now, the message of fear is used to flog the message of retribution and more prisons. 

How police in the U.S. now routinely walk around in bullet-proof vests, and you can't have a community festival without paying for armed police to parade through, watching for possible shooters everywhere. That means there are more guns in front of us, routintely — supposedly making us safer. 

America is a gun, and it makes the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers very, very happy.