For God's Sake!!!
For some reason, Americans are "more important" than everyone else in the world.
To put it in the words of my 1st yr Politics lecturer "9/11 killed a few thousand people and there was huge outcry. A million people died in Rwanda and the world effectively gave them a band-aid."
Similar thing still happens. Hundreds of people die in Iraq. every. day. They end up a statistic.
32 people die in a university mass shooting, and it's a national, if not a world wide, tragedy. There are memorial services and so so much media coverage on it.
And what's amusing is, the Americans are absolutely dumbfounded as to how something like this could possibly happen. Well, maybe, just maybe, it's because you can buy guns and ammo as if you were buying a microwave and popcorn.
Hmm!!!!
Labels: Stupid people, USA
lol, this is exactly what I was saying - "But don't 150 people die in Iraq every day? Why aren't they front page news for 2 days in a row?" The media is so US-centric...
actually it isn't the fact that you can buy guns easily. The Canadians have more guns per capita than the states by around 3:1. It's a nation of hunters yet they've still got european levels of guncrime. Clearly the bloody yanks are just mentally FUBAR. Gotta love em.
I agree, is combination of guns + fear + all that other stuff that everyone raises as a point all the time!
However! To argue against Karan's point, I think that if 30 people were killed in the UK, or France in a college shooting, it would be front page news. I don't think it's so much the NUMBER of people dying that makes it newsworthy, it's the WHERE they're dying. In a war, you can EXPECT people to die. In a famine, you can EXPECT people to die. Obviously not the same for a college.
To make a different and slightly related point, isn't it cool how American baseball is the "World Series" when there is only 1 team outside the US that competes?
Also, to make a different yet UN-related point, Gun -> Ammo is a slightly stronger connection than Microwave -> Popcorn, unless your microwave doesn't work without popcorn, in which case it's a preeeetty useless microwave.
I'm still chuckling from the calls from several people, including the guy who sold the gun to Cho Seung-Hui, to arm students as a response to this. He clearly wouldn't have killed 32 people if the QB was packing a sawn-off. America to it's citizens: take the law in to your own hands, because we're doing _such a bad job._
Clearly untrained civilians are capable of handling these situations, and moreover, students without the preparation and support offered to armed police should have to deal with the psychological trauma of having taken another person's life.
There are nations of responsible gun owners, but the US isn’t one of them and probably never will be. The only sensible response is to severely limit who may own weapons and the conditions under which they must be kept.