Farrukh Dhondy | ‘Altered mindset’: Will Trump, if he’s elected, pass tough new US gun laws?

“…And then descended a silence --

No, not the one called death --

The birds abandoned the trees

The clouds above held their breath

The hungry foxes of the night

Clambered over the wall

This silence was a darkened light

As leaves began to fall!”

From Laments of Hasino Casino, by Bachchoo

The Bible tells us the truth, nothing but the truth, but on occasion not the whole truth! Take the story of David and Goliath. I now have it on the archaeological authority of the Roman Prophylacticwallus that the sling David used was made in the Philistine (“Filasteen” -- Palestinian?) factory owned by the friends of Goliath.

Again, records tell us that Big G resisted every move in the Philistine parliament to control or ban deadly slings. Goliath proclaimed that it was not the slings that were lethal, it was the “bad guys” who held them. He even went on to say that all good guys should arm themselves with one.

And, yes, good-guy David did get hold of one.

We humans repeatedly chant the mantra of learning lessons from history.

We never do. Take the current situation in America, where the Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald “Wigwarm” Trump, was shot at by a twenty-year-old Republican lying on a roof 300 yards from where Wiggy was addressing a rally.

The bullet from the assailant’s gun, which came closest to killing hush-money-convict Trumpet, grazed his ear and made it bleed.

Wiggy went on to proclaim to the nation that God had directed the bullet away from his head. The BBC even showed a social media picture of himself with a figure, presumably in the vestments and long hair of Christ himself, holding him protectively by the shoulders.

Wiggy’s claim about God saving him is, if not sacrilege, disrespectful to the Almighty as it implies that he controlled the path of the bullets which killed an ex-fireman and grievously wounded two others -- spectators at the rally.

Accusing God of complicity in murder and mayhem is, to say the least, devilish.

Now after the assassination attempt, Trumpet says he is going to announce his altered mindset and work towards the unity of the nation.

Wonderful. He could start by promising, if elected, to pass gun laws to curtail the murder that gun ownership in the US allows. The statistics which are most reliable say that 49,000 people died from gun-related homicide (and suicide) in 2021.

The statistics for 2023 demonstrate that there were nearly 700 maniacal assaults with a firearm in which more than four people died. There are 400 million firearms in private ownership in the United States.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that the number of guns in private ownership, sanctioned and fiercely promoted by the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby, both with Mr Trump’s vociferous support, causes (enables?) the US to have 80 per cent of deaths by gunshot compared to just four per cent in Britain.

As a teenager in India, I owned an airgun, classified as a .177 lead-slug shooter. A friend owned a more lethal airgun known as a .22 -- which meant larger lead slugs which he used to shoot pigeons, which we then roasted on improvised wood fires and ate.

The only other lethal gun use I came across then was witnessing stray, even rabid street dogs, being shot by the municipality’s official dog shooter who went around the streets followed by urchins and others who wanted to observe the pitiful shooting of curs who would circle and whine if the first shot wasn’t fatal. The official dog shooter carried a sack to take the bodies of his victims away, leaving trails of blood on the streets and pavements.

My friends and I used our airguns for more innocent purposes such as target practice on empty bottles or tin cans. One of these purposes or uses of the .177 could, I suppose, be deemed less innocent: in our predominantly Parsi neighbourhood in Pune, there was, at the end of a branching-out street, a red-brick synagogue with a tower. A very nasty old denizen of our street lived next to my granddad and aunts’ house where I and my sister stayed in school term-time.

This character’s backyard adjoined ours. In it he had a large mango tree whose fruit he sold as it ripened to harvesters, who came each season, climbed the tree, picked the fruit and carried it away in sacks.

This nasty neighbour published an anonymous scandal-sheet called “Synagogue Searchlight”. It was a single freely and clandestinely-circulated sheet full of gossip and insinuations about the neighbours.

In one of these scandal sheets, he had written an attack on my elder sister, saying that she was seen regularly cycling in the company of non-Parsi boys from her college. The piece was not just disapproving, it implied that she was having forbidden liaisons with these friends.

My aunts were furious. Everyone knew who wrote and published the Synagogue Searchlight. My aunts couldn’t retaliate. My friends and I could.

As the mangoes on his tree grew to near-harvesting size, we took turns in the quiet of the morning, before the neighbours were awake, to use them as targets so the slug “bullets” would penetrate their flesh and cause them to rot with lead poisoning. When the harvesters came, they naturally refused to buy the rotten fruit.

There was no mention of this vengeful devastation in the next edition of Synagogue Searchlight. We wondered why.