Thursday, January 27, 2011

WHY NOT THE OFFICIAL BOWLING BALL?


The Americans are mad, quite mad.

They love their guns. They believe in their guns. They worship their guns.

It matters not what mayhem contorts the streets, what horrors are brought to neighbourhoods, how many suicides and murders are added to the rolls, Americans believe in their right to bear arms...at the shopping mall, at the cinema, at the bar, at the school and playground and the beach.

And if your nutty next door neighbour or your corner dope dealer is packing, I guess it's only right that you pack too.

And nobody, nobody from President Obama on down, dare speak of this elephant in the room, because this belief system is so deeply entrenched that one risks not only one's political career, but one's very life to say otherwise.

Well, now it's official.

The sovereign great state of Utah has its state flower and it has its state bird.

Not enough, kids.

Now it is poised to adopt its official state gun.

That would be your Browning M1911 semi-automatic pistol.

It doesn't matter to the legislators in Utah that the sick bastard who shot up Tuscon, Arizona a few weeks ago was using a similar weapon - the Glock version of the semi-automatic pistol.

It doesn't matter to theses august souls that anyone can walk into a store in Georgia and buy 23 pistols and walk out the door, or that you or I can Google "AK-47" and in seconds be put in touch with hundreds of shops in America that will sell us a repeating automatic weapon of destruction for a very reasonable price and even ship it to us.

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." is the mantra of the NRA.

Yes.

Yet, it's odd how often those people who kill people happen to have smoking guns in their hands when the killing happens.

Canada is not immune to this disease. But to date we are so far less a gun nation than the USA that one can only give thanks.

1 comment:

Diverdaren said...

David,

Of course you know guns are among the rights that Americans have enshrined in their Constitution. The founders of the nation felt the right to protect oneself is on par with the right to speak freely, and worship as you see fit.

Are you saying it's the right to bare arms that causes the carnage in American society, and that the carnage would disappear if they moved to the Canadian approach to gun control?

Our Canadian gun controls are perverse. Don't let law abiding citizens have the guns, and that will keep us safe. Well we're not particularity immune to gun violence as a result of keeping guns out of the hands of good people.

If you want to keep guns out of the hands of bad people, you wont find a bigger booster than me, but don't march out the tired Canadian idea that our society is safer because good people can't have guns to protect themselves from bad people who do have guns, it just doesn't hold true.

(just as an aside, that's a Colt M1911 designed by John Browning. Browning is a separate manufacturer)