Nightshade wrote:
I am glad you had a great experience here, it's an awesome country as long as you're not in certain parts of major cities. I think, and this goes directly to the vast cultural gulf between our nations, that if you had owned/fired weapons like an AR-15, you'd not feel the way you do for long. I think it's a fine line between respect for the weapon due to exposure and "familiarity breeds contempt", but if you're not a psychopath then you don't cross that line.
The problem is finding just ways to keep said psychopaths from obtaining weapons in the first place. I agree that truly civilized people don't need guns, but we don't live in a civilized society. Until we fix all the underlying economic and societal issues that drive people to the point where they're willing to shoot each other, we'll not be close to civilized. This will be the case even if every gun on the planet instantly vanished.
I was staying in Pasadena, but drove down into East LA and parked up for a few hours to walk around Compton and Watts, then up to Inglewood, and came back through South Central. About 5 hours walking in total, and even there, in what you'd think was the worst place in the world, I met cool people who just wanted to talk. Yeah it was awesome; just a continual reeducation in what it means to have real manners. You don't get that over here.
I don't deny I wouldn't become familiar, or whatever, but that's really my main issue. The fact that you, or any other American is so cool with owning such a destructive force just boggles my mind. There's literally no difference between owning that and a cache of rocket launchers and mortar bombs. You may not live in a civilised society, but you're a civilised person, and to me, that means you should find the concept of owning a gun quite abhorrent.
The way it is over here is that anyone who has a gun is a policeman or a gangster. If you stay out of the way of both, the chances of you encountering one are infinitely small. That's not the case where you are. In America, there are hundreds of stories yearly of otherwise law-abiding people getting their Dirty Harry on over a stupid argument or crossed word. It seems that a gun, much like religion, can make otherwise completely decent people do terrible, terrible things.
And where you say about "until we fix all the underlying issues etc..", I'd say it was better to end that with "we should ban all guns, because we haven't shown that we're collectively responsible enough to own them, yet."
