Originally posted by beet1e
Funked - just going back to that freedom thing - you like the "freedom" to own guns. I like the freedom not to. By which I mean that because of our relatively low homicide rate, people are able to relax at home and sleep well at nights, without the need for a loaded .44 Mag under the pillow - like that crazy Nicholls guy in BFC.
Another example of the double sided freedom concept is the issue of smoking in restaurants. What was it - 1995 (?) when all restaurants in NYC became non-smoking by law. Some might see this as an infringement upon the freedom of smokers, when in fact it extends the freedom of non smokers to breathe clean air. Smokers are a minority in Britain - same things is probably true in the US. (hehe, I read your "only in Kalifornia" thread 
)
In the U.S., a large # of crimes are prevented by the potential victims every year thru the use of those guns kept under the pillow, clipped beneath the bed, etc. Just because a single idiot, targeted by the film maker because he is an idiot, happens to follow the practice of hundreds of thousands of rational individuals does not make that practice an unwise one. Also, you'd think that in a documentary such a statistic (crimes prevented by legal gun ownership - before there is a victim, as opposed to after which is usually the case with police intervention no matter how dedicated the police may be) would be mentioned at least once.
The smoking equivalent exists for guns as well. You cannot decide to plink with your .22 pistol 'anywhere you feel like plinking'.
The problem with Moore and others like him is that they follow a classic pattern - they aren't arguing a point with facts. They are flooding the airwaves, soundwaves, etc. with false accusations and lies presented as facts to win popular (uneducated by personal experience) opinion over to their point of view. They know that once the laws are signed it's 100x harder to get the injustices imposed 'fixed'. The bottom line is that firearms are treated with great respect and great responsibility by the vast majority of those who own them legally in the U.S. And if lazs, or funkedup, or myself were to commit even a minor infraction when it comes to storage, use, or transportation of a firearm the firearm would be taken by the police and there would be serious fines and jail sentences involved.
And lazs would feel perfectly safe walking unarmed in a number of cities in the U.S. I'll bet, and in certain parts of certain cities and in certain parts of London if he knew the town like a local he wouldn't feel safe walking there no matter how he was armed.
America is not a wild west Nation held at the mercy of irresponsible gun toting psychos. Moore doesn't care to own firearms or shoot them, and he can score 'fight the establishment' points with his ilk by slandering a group of people that they know don't give a rat's bellybutton about their fame or the pseudo-power they wield due to that fame. Moore doens't give a damn about the kids killed at Columbine. He doesn't give a damn about the people killed in drive by shootings every week. He cares about them about as much as Jane Fonda cared about the people of Vietnam. Both used the suffering of people they didn't give a damn about to attack a hated enemy (the NRA, gun owners, the U.S. government) with false accusations of responsibility for the suffering of the victims.
I've been shown some training material that came from the Columbine shootings. The main cause of the majority of the deaths was that the 2 deputies who arrived on the scene had been so hamstrung - so mentally cowed - by the constant focus on 'liability' as opposed to finding the bad guys and shutting them down - that they sat and waiting for the proper support and authorization while people died...which is exactly what they had been trained/conditioned to do. Contrast that to the hostage situation in a German school a little over a year ago, where one of the first police officers on the scene basically 'made a gut check' and went into the situation without support as soon as he got there - and wound up saving a large # of lives.
Moore uses the alleged 'culture of violence' in the U.S. to explain the deaths at Columbine. It's the actual 'culture of don't make a call lest the 2d guessing people with no personal experience sue us into oblivion' that kept the very forces that could have ended the situation almost immediately from ever being used. But that doesn't sell movies or get you into swank parties in certain parts of hollywoodland.
"It is an occupational habit for actors on the political stage to distort the truth, for reasons and in way that vary with the nature of the power they hold. Autocrats, in direct control of all means of communication and expression, disguise the present and rewrite the past. Democrats, whose influence depends, happily, on their persuasiveness, expend so much energy trying to show their undertakings in the best possible light that they eventually lose the habit of thinking about the issues' substance. Their skill in presenting their case almost entirely replaces their interest in the facts. So that in free societies the past is sometimes misrepresented, not, as in slave societies, by crude censorship and lies, but suavely, through legitimate persuasion and the free propogation of an adulterated or entirely bogus version of an event. With repetition, this version joins the body of accepted ideas, those the masses believe; it acquires the status of truth, so firmly that hardly anyone thinks of checking the original facts for confirmation."
- Jean-Francois Revel, from 'How Democracies Perish' (1983)
Mike/wulfie
p.s. lazs - have you checked your healey email lately?
