The ripples of the largest school massacre in US history had not yet settled when the US Congress, House and Senate, yesterday passed an emergency motion to ban all guns and rifles in private hands.

Last month’s multiple gun spree at Montana’s top high school left exactly 1000 students and teachers dead, and was planned by a group of twenty students to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. It had been meticulously planned, using Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ as inspiration, to decimate the school’s top students and academic staff and destroy the school’s historic central buildings.

Even the extremely vocal gun lobby has been silenced by the unimaginable proportions of this massacre and their tacit support left the Congress with no choice. The sheer human cost has dwarfed all economic factors that had previously been used to limit gun usage in the USA.

Over the past ten years an average of 30,000 people have been killed by gunshot wounds every year, estimated to represent an annual economic cost of more than US$ 100 billion.

Congress has concluded that it can no longer support the Second Amendment – the right to keep and bear arms. A one-year amnesty will allow all private individuals to turn in their guns in return for a symbolic refund. After that, severe sentences will follow anyone found in possession of a firearm.

For years, gun opponents have asked: “What will it take for us to change?”

Now that question has finally been answered – and the answer is 1000 innocents.