Believe it or not, there is a whole other world outside of Cambodia, be it people or politics, frustrations or football, this is the place to talk about it.
kinglear#1 wrote:Will admit to simplistic thinking last night. It just bothers me that:
"US campus shootings
February 2010: A professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Amy Bishop, opens fire at a faculty meeting, killing three colleagues and wounding three others
February 2008: Former graduate student Steven Kazmierczak kills five students, wounds 16 at Northern Illinois University and kills himself
April 2007: Seung-Hui Cho kills more than 30 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech, before turning the gun on himself
April 1999: Two students kill 12 others and a teacher and wound more than 20 before killing themselves at Columbine High School"
are followed up by the recent shootings. Yet gun debates in the US always get dominated by bleats about the right to be able to have one. It's true that in most (if not all) cases, the perpetrators were disturbed in some way. But still, these tragedies could have been averted if gun laws were much tougher.
KL, you're asking an American to see a pattern in something that gives enormous amounts of money to private companies who finance elections. Are you naive?
People who steal from banks get jail. Banks who steal from people get bonuses. You gotta love capitalism!
Bloody hell,dont start me about gun ownership. Pretty hard to kill seven people with a knife or any other implement. As for koreans,I think they have always been on the outer. Most guards in japanese POW camps were koreans and they were very nasty,this is obviously pre korean war. As for post korean war,many atrocities in vietnam by ROK soldiers. Many more than by other allied forces,even americans! There is something about koreans. But US gun ownership that causes 50,000 deaths a year-give me strength.Those right wing nutters have a lot to answer for. Come in conny....
Re weapons, intent is the thing that kills. Any weapon itself is inert without a user - it has no intent of its own. Guns kill, but with the exception of obscure accidents, they can't do that without someone to pull the trigger.
Which leads to... be more careful about who you give guns to.
What's the view like from America these days. I'd been thinking recently that over the last few years whilst I've been living in Cambodia and have therefore been picking up international news from over here, every time there's a gun massacre in the U.S. the reporting and discussion of the incident in the news seems to get shorter and shorter, as if the U.S. becomes more desensitised every time another one happens.
Then today I came across this perception of American gun culture by a British journalist. He seems to be suggesting that people are barely having the debate over there any more.
Any thoughts? I'm in agreement with one comment below - earlier I posted an article by Naomi Woolf under my heading, 'Descent into totalitarianism' about the way America is going. It seems particularly scary to me that people are obsessed with their freedom to bear arms as defence against government abusing its power whilst doing nothing to protest new laws that do exactly that.
