Scary Thoughts from across the water.

I've been thinking about our American friends a bit. I was watching this peculiar little film on DVD called the CSA - The Confederate States of America, which was a mock documentary imagining what would have happened if the confederacy had won the civil war and slavery was still legal in the States today - it came across as an interesting imaginative exercise full of things like scientific investigations into a disease that makes slaves more ikely to run away and interspersed with adverts for products like "Darky toothpaste", "Niggerhair tobacco" and "Coon chicken". And then there was the scary part - the captions over the closing credits which revealed that research had really taken place, that they were real products marketted under those names, some as recently as the 1980s. Food for thought.

With the tragic events at Virginia Tech still in the news, the response of the gun lobby has really got me incensed. You see it seems that the real problem, wasn't the availability of guns to the killer, but the fact that Virginia Tech was a gun-free zone and therefore other students weren't armed in order to defend themselves. I'm afraid I just don't get this guns make you safer argument - it doesn't make sense to me. I remember having this conversation with a couple of otherwise reasonable American friends, who were adamant that owning guns made you safer. However, during the course of the conversation it emerged that they were the only people in the room who had ever had a loaded gun pointed at them - I'm not quite sure how this made them safer! Of course, those who like guns always fall back on the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution which states "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". All Americans, you see, have the right to bear arms, it says so in their constitution. Except, of course, it doesn't, because the bit they forgot to say, the full text of the 2nd Amendment is "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". To me that reads that they only have the right to bear arms in a well regulated militia, but what do I know, I'm just British.