Shots were fired at the rescuers in the New Orleans superdome

[fpb]

Well, this, according to the majority of Americans, is what the "right to bear arms" is really about: to be able to point them at government if government gets uppity. Like trying to organize a rescue.

Comments

[gunderpants]

The only thing I can say is an Ed Wood quote:

"You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!"

[fpb]

The truth, of course, is that if the government ever managed to get itself in the position where armed resistance were necessary, there is no way on God's green Earth that any amount of brave civilians, even armed with assault rifles, could do anything against a modern professional army. But these fantasies feed Americans' attachment to their killing tools.

[bufo_viridis]

there is no way on God's green Earth that any amount of brave civilians, even armed with assault rifles, could do anything against a modern professional army.

Depends on how fast civilians are able to learn to change into guerrillas. Last decade proved that although they're unlikely to win, they can make hell of a trouble.

[fpb]

A member of my f-list wrote a very angry comment on people who criticized the American attitude to firearms, which I cannot help feeling is not casual just after I published this remark. And to show just how rational and reasonable and open to debate their fondness for people-killing tools really is, he has locked the comments facility.

I cannot say that this further evidence of openness and rationality makes the thought of American "right to bear arms" any more comfortable to me.

[fpb]

It is my impression. I have heard that excuse over and over - an armed citizenship is supposed to be a bulwark against tyranny. It does not work in the Arab countries, where pretty much every adult male has a gun and pretty much every government is a tyranny, nor in Europe, where every government is democratic and every country has very severe gun ownership restrictions. But Americans have their own logic.

[fpb]

Well, hundreds of thousands of continental Europeans in each country - I know best about Italians, of course - also go hunting. There is a deep town/country divide on the matter, but it is not primarily about the use of guns, but about the scarcity of game: urban Greens feel that there is little left to shoot in places like Italy and that there ought to at least be a moratorium on hunting birds. (Nobody, however, objects to the culls of Italy's rich and never decreasing population of wild boars.) You need a weapons license for hunting guns, although never having had any interest in such things, I do not know what the conditions are; I do know that they are pretty stringent. Britain has by far the most draconian - they have almost killed competitive sport target shooting - passed in something of a panic after two frightful massacres in Hungerford, England (fourteen dead) and Dunblane, Scotland (ten dead children and one teacher) carried out by misfits with assault rifles.