A heavy price - Texas bikers’ shootout

SOMETIMES it’s difficult to understand your own family, usually it’s even more difficult to work out what really makes your neighbours tick, but the shooting dead of nine people in a biker gang shootout in a Texas car park seems to make America an even more incomprehensible concept.

The gunfight at the Twin Peaks Sports Bar and Grill hardly resonates like the iconic gunfight at the OK Corral, but the same level of fantasy seems to have been involved — except of course the people murdered at the Central Texas Market Place were not actors.

What is even more difficult to understand though is how heavily armed the bikers — and the police — were. Americans may regard the right to bear arms as a fundamental, inalienable reality, but blood fests like this show how very costly that position really is.

Comparatively speaking, we are lucky our legislature has kept such tight controls over private gun ownership. Tragically, it seems too late for Americans to confront this issue — especially as so many of them do not want to.