American gun laws

need to change. I don't think there is any doubt about that. I wouldn't normally dare to comment on such a sensitive issue in the politics of another country but last night I saw a news clip that has made me want to speak up.
You see there was an eleven year old with wild hair who stood there and faced a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people and spoke up for her generation. 
There was also a news clip of the National Rifle Association suggesting that the eleven year old was nothing more than some sort of stooge for adults with an agenda.
Sorry, that won't wash with me. I know more than one eleven year old. I know that some of them can be passionate and articulate  - and that they do care. I know they can be just as empathetic as any adult, indeed a good deal more empathetic than many. 
I wonder how the NRA can look and listen to the girl who managed, somehow, to say that she would never have to listen to her friend complain about piano practice again. Is the NRA really blind and deaf to all that?
I know. Guns aren't dangerous - but people with guns are another story.  
There isn't any need for the vast majority of people to own a gun. In Downunder there is a need for a farmer who has livestock to own one - for the sole purpose of putting a badly injured animal down as rapidly and humanely as possible. The same is almost certainly true of farmers anywhere else. 
I don't see "target shooting" as a "sport". I know someone who has won multiple gold medals at the Paralympics for shooting and I admire her but I still don't see shooting anything as a "sport". It's an area where we would, if I was socially friendly with her, have to agree to disagree. 
I don't see "hunting" anything as a sport either. I know there are arguments about "keeping wildlife under control" but nature once balanced things out reasonably well - until we interfered.  As for going out and killing something for the "fun" of it?  That sickens me.
I have never held a gun. I don't want to. I have once in my life faced the wrong end of a gun. No, I was probably not in any real danger. The two men intent on robbing the post office in the small shopping precinct in London were more interested in getting away than in shooting me or the other student with me. But it was weeks before I slept soundly again at night. It would have been far worse if I had been inside the post office and held hostage at the time. 
And what if I was one of the students at that high school? What if I was any other student in America who had been through that? Would I ever really recover?
Don't they have the right to speak out? Don't they have the right to demand something be done?