A world exploding with violence

Two very different and totally unrelated incidents, from very different countries, cultures, societies, left the world shocked once again last week.

The first was, in yet another bizarre incident in the US, a 3-year-old boy shot his father and pregnant mother in a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Saturday.

The child removed a loaded handgun from his mother's handbag and fired one shot which struck his father in the lower back. In this freak incident, the bullet apparently exited through the father's hip and hit the mother, eight months pregnant, in the right shoulder.

Fortunately, unlike an earlier incident again in the US, where a toddler removed a loaded gun from his mother’s handbag in a supermarket and shot his mother fatally, both the parents have survived this shooting.

In another corner of the world, the barbaric ISIS is touching new depths in savagery and brutal violence. The Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, who was taken hostage by the ISIS was apparently beheaded.

A video has surfaced on many terrorist websites, showing a terrorist with a British accent beheading Goto while giving a “message to the Government of Japan.”

The ISIS has also taken hostage another Japanese and a Jordanian pilot and has threatened to execute both.

Though the authenticity of the video has yet to be confirmed, the worst is feared. Goto is seen kneeling next to the masked terrorist with a British accent, who blames the Japanese government for his slaughter.

AS expected the Japanese have been devastated, and vowing that “Japan will never yield to terrorism, and is firmly resolved to fulfil its responsibility in the international community's fight against terrorism,” Japanese Prime Minister Abe said, “I am at a loss for words thinking about the pain that (Goto’s) family must feel.”

Japan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yasuhide Nakayama has said negotiations with the terrorist group were “deadlocked”.

More and more journalists, particularly western journalists, are being abducted and killed by terror groups. In April, Anja Niedringhaus, a German photographer of the Associated Press was shot dead by a police officer in Afghanistan while covering that country’s elections.

In August 2014, the ISIS had beheaded, again in the same gruesome manner and videographing the event, an American freelance journalist James Foley, who had been kidnapped in Syria in November 2012. His whereabouts were unknown till the Isis claimed he was in their custody and finally murdered him.

Two weeks had not passed by and the ISIS released another video showing the beheading of a US-Israeli freelance journalist Steven Sotloff, who had been abducted in August 2013.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 60 journalists were killed across the world in 2014 because they were journalists, compared to 70 killed in 2013. The CPJ is investigating the deaths in 2014 of at least 18 more journalists to determine whether they were work-related.

West Asia, Eucraine and Afghanistan were the most dangerous places for journalists to work in, and Syria was declared as the “world’s deadliest country for journalists” three years in a row, by the CPJ.

Journalists without Borders reported that in 2013, 71 journalists were killed and 826 arrested, while 2,160 were either threatened or physically attacked. While 87 journalists were kidnapped, 77 had to flee their homes thanks to repressive regimes. Even bloggers and netizens have not been spared with 127 of them being arrested. In India we are only too familiar with what happens to those who post comments on Facebook against politicians.

Once again, the execution of the Japanese journalist Kenji Goto by the ISIS highlights the dangers freelance journalists face while reporting from highly dangerous regions and conflict zones. They don’t have the institutional backup enjoyed by full-time reporters working in mainstream media organisations.

Goto, 47, who was kidnapped along with another Japanese, a security contractor, was a part of the freelance fraternity and was taken hostage in Syria with another Japanese security contractor. In tributes to him Japan’s journalists have hailed him for his extensive experience, particularly in conflict zones where he told the stories of ordinary people trapped in war zones.

Returning to the shots fired by the two American toddlers, they were of course innocent children who had no clue of the consequences of what they were doing.

But imagine the trauma of these toddlers when they grow up and have to come to terms with what they did when they were children. The one who killed his mother… will he ever be able to go through normal childhood and adolescence, is the moot question.

The even bigger question comes back to the unending debate in the US for the need to have so many guns, with a huge and powerful lobby favouring the American’s rights to self defence.

But the easy availability of firearms results in so many school shootings, apart from freak accidents such as toddlers getting hold of guns. What is frightening is that in both the recent cases of toddlers shooting their parents, the loaded gun was in the handbag of the mother.

Try and research on the net why so many Americans women are carrying guns, and you’ll find starting media features such as one in Mailonline which has photographs of Texan women proudly showing off their guns, with some of the pictures shot with the loaded handguns lying inches away from children and pets.

Or websites such as americangunfacts.com, telling you about a recent study published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy , concluding that “there is a negative correlation between gun ownership and violent crime in countries internationally (more guns = less crime). Nations with strict gun control laws have substantially higher murder rates than those who do not in general.”

Then of course the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”, as stated in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, 1791.”

Whether it is the brutality of the abhorred ISIS, shootouts in American schools or freak accidents of toddlers shooting their parents, or the increasing sexual assault and violence against women across the world, we are living in an increasingly scary world, where violence seems to be the norm.