paulsol wrote:
One failed attempt at blowing up a 'plane with liquid explosives 10 years ago and now the whole world is forbidden to travel with a bottle of shampoo or a drink of water and here some people are seriously having a debate as to whether having even more guns available would be an effective counter to the threat of guns being used against children in schools is just brilliant.
Well duh, it's simple economics. An airliner costs millions of dollars and probably has important business people on it. Kids really don't have any buying power, and half of them are probably welfare babies anyway.
His Excellency Aethien wrote:
I can't find an English article for it at the moment but the news here reported that since Belgium started enforcing a law that means you have to prove that you need a gun to be able to buy any sort of gun or rifle in 2006 deaths from gun shootings (murders and suicides) have halved from 134 in 2005 to 68 in 2010.
Why must you be so sensible? It really makes us look bad.
Smasharoo wrote:
I've been thinking a lot over the past 15 years or so about why the US has more gun violence than other countries, correcting for gun availability. I think we're a gun culture because of our cultural heritage, for lack of a less pompous phrase, of the rugged individualist. Our fascination for solving problems with confrontation, for solving problems as individuals, for walking like a got-damn MAN, for being a cowboy hero instead of a wussy negotiator, all contribute.
I don't know how you heal a culture.
You don't. It's integral to the big lie of the myth of American capitalism. If you remove the "America is magic and her people are fully self realized ubermenches" fantasy you get a brutal thuggish country who committed multiple instances of genocide, and lucked into a near perfect treasure trove of resources through an accident of geography. That's a much tougher sell as an explanation of why the US is the wealthiest nation on Earth than "American Exceptionalism".
I don't know how you heal a culture.
You don't. It's integral to the big lie of the myth of American capitalism. If you remove the "America is magic and her people are fully self realized ubermenches" fantasy you get a brutal thuggish country who committed multiple instances of genocide, and lucked into a near perfect treasure trove of resources through an accident of geography. That's a much tougher sell as an explanation of why the US is the wealthiest nation on Earth than "American Exceptionalism".
Well, to be fair those European types had their chance with it. Thankfully they bought into the stereotype that the Americas were a resource-poor land with smaller/inferior animals and weak people. Not worth fighting for.
More for us.
Edited, Dec 18th 2012 8:03am by someproteinguy
Besides Smash is probably busy wiping **** from butts. 