[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

You people just don't seem to get that you live in a society that is fearful. You're constantly trying to protect yourselves against something that might happen.

Ali, Ali, you're being a lot less openminded than you should be. It's not fear we're talking about, much as you insist it should be. It is that we are determined to prevail -- regardless of the degree of force arrayed against us, we are determined to nonetheless prevail over it. We're just a bunch of winners, and we're going to stay that way. And apparently, we are determined in a fashion you can't wrap your mind around -- we do not surrender to wrongdoers. Friendly advice: never demand that of us. It will hurt if you try. You won't like to hurt that much.

No wonder George thinks it's ok to make pre-emptive strikes on nations which pose no threat. It seems the whole mindset is to protect yourselves against something which might just happen.

No threat? Every single intelligence service on the entire planet without a single exception assessed the Saddam regime as within a year or two of some kind of overwhelming weaponry with which to discomfit every friend we had in the region. I say we were right to do something about Saddam Hussein before he became favorably comparable with Hitler. The sole reason anyone can claim "pose no threat" is because we hit them soon enough. Lazy thinking, Aliantha. We've done better foreign policy this Administration than the last, as a perusal of Dereliction of Duty by Patterson might show you. Perhaps bloodier, but more purposive and using better strategy.

You can't control everything, and considering the murder rate in your country, I don't think all the gun toting is doing much good.

If on the other hand your country had a low incidence of gun related crime I'd agree that everyone having guns is a good idea, but until that day comes, there's no way anyone will convince me it is.

Switzerland. The place is stiff with assault rifles in most of its closets, together with 200 rounds ready ammo, and a requirement in some cantons that you have to carry your arms to a polling place to vote -- at least, by statute. And what's the Swiss murder rate?

Our overall national murder rate has spent some time below Scotland's. Outside of certain of our large cities that have suffered zones of urban decay, in which the bulk of murders and gun assaults take place, the murder rate, by any instrumentality, looks more like that of England. And England's murder and crime rates are both on the rise since they took the guns out of private hands, starting in that very year and growing annually. Thanks to England's worsening, we're looking better by the month. And month by month, we hope for our English cousins to finally come to their senses before the whole place looks like A Clockwork Orange.

Aliantha, we've given you truth, in quantity, and you reply with blindness, closemindedness, and non-learning. Just what do you gain by testing our patience? You are wrong to think as you do, Aliantha, and your specific kind of wrongness opens the door, has opened the door, to violent crime and its state-scale equivalent, genocide. Believe me when I say you do not want a pro-genocide mentality; it corrodes the soul.