My wife and I recently saw "Bowling for Columbine" again and it's sad how not a damn thing has changed in a decade (except that Heston died in 2008), or maybe got worse (gun and ammo sales have spiked since Obama took office http://www.businessweek.com/
If anyone watches "The Newsroom" on HBO, interesting fact that gun paranoia over Obama is totally unfounded: gun control watchdogs have given Obama an F rating, yet some people are convinced that he is coming for their weapons (http://thehill.com/homenews/
It's the middle-class whites and Asians who perpetrate the mass killings in the US, but the public is still most scared of and hostile to poor urban blacks and Latinos.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
Yeah I forgot about Obama's 2008 comment about blue-collar whites "clinging to their guns." I wonder how much those 4 words really affected his future policy.
America is the only industrialized, non-wartorn nation with the following combination of conditions:
- A ton of legally and easily available guns (many with the capacity to inflict mass murder)
- A well-funded and entrenched pro-gun lobby
- A heritage of violence and individualism
- A media-consumer-social culture of paranoia, combativeness, and hostility towards each other
- Apathetic and/or reelection-obsessed politicians
Some nations have one or a few of those conditions, but no nation but us has them all. Maybe that would explain why we have the highest gun violence rates in the G20?
PS - in the slideshow at the bottom about the pivotal moments of the gun debate, for the image of the Reagan-Hinckley shooting, the Secret Service are carrying Uzis! To me that weapon doesn't seem appropriate for politician protection.
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