h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

and the school systems becomes one more factory, with the 'teachers' being the ones to spanner nut #43 onto bolt #8 over and over and over again...

My Mum and Grandad were both teachers, and the stories they tell of how they really made a difference to people's lives in small ways, and engendered interest in their subject, always enthrall me.
Like the time my grandad buried a dead robin because it had upset one of his pupils, or the time it was stiflingly hot and he took the whole class out under a tree to read 'The Lotus Eaters' to them.

None of that is possible in the current merry-go-round of tests and exams. The typical uni student attitude of "If it's not in the finals, I'm not interested" has spread to compulsory education.

I was just as much prone as anyone else, but at least I had interests outside school that helped. If I was in school today I would spend less time reading and writing an more time playing on the computer.

Reading and writing is how I play on the computer.
I think if some of the current generation of home-schooled children grow up to be teachers, that will make a difference.
I do think that universities may have outlived their current usefulness.
The origin of universities began with the hiring of lecturers by groups of interested students.
The teachers should not rule the schools. The students should and they should by most standards be exemplary and voted into the school by the upper classes. There must be a true competition otherwise it is just a diploma mill.

I think the university situation may be different over here; although there has been a rise in the number of degrees in things like 'disaster management' and other subjects considered 'soft' the mainstay of universities is still academic. It does seem that some lecturers don't view students with the same respect as others and the quality of lecturing varies greatly even within a university. It's only when I started my PhD that I found out how much goes on in universities that is not related to lecturing. Only half the academic staff lecture, and a great deal of time is spent conducting research or acting as consultants. In our department we have someone involved with the WHO. Most good lecturers treat students as equals.

I do have something of a teacher-bias, given my family, but I can't see schools run by students being viable. The only way to ensure that the students elected were exemplary would be to have some higher authority, which may defeat the object of the system. In the UK, schools are generally run on a day to day basis by the headmaster and the support staff, who deal with the budget, the grounds etc. Students couldn't find time to do athese full-time jobs in addition to studying, or am I misunderstanding your point? Top-level policy decisions are generally taken by the headmaster, but have to be agreement with the board of governors. Unfortunately, although the governors are often retired teachers or teachers with children at the school, with the best will in the world a lot of governors don't know a great deal about teaching and won't listen to advice from those that do. If the headmaster says that the school is the only one in the area without a uniform and to introduce one will eliminate choice and lead to a reduction in intake, and in any case no power on Earth will make the upper school adopt the uniform, the governors will say 'No, we want a uniform so all the students look nice and neat'. If the headmaster says that this pupil should be excluded because he's had dozens of chances and is seriously disrupting the education of others, not to mention casuing thousands of pounds worth of damage to school property, the governors will say 'No, he should be given one last chance'.

Besides, students are like everyone in that they will only vote in the most unsuitable candidates given half the chance.

How else could you explain 18 years of Conservative rule in the UK ?

See, there is a difference between a scholar and an academic.

Basic education has taken the place of life experience.

Academics are just another form of politics.

A student under the current system is just a child or the proper age whose parents are compliant. A student used to be someone who was interested in learning and pursued it at any cost. Some of these grew into scholars. They had sponsors and mentors and patrons and they knew what they wanted and who they wanted to associate with. These are the Charlies that got together to offer money and lodging to lecturers so they could lure them from other schools in Germany, France, and Spain...
These were the boys who created universities in the first place, long before the church and the government started messing around.
Monarchs used to gather advisors and jesters around them and some of each got to found Royal Colleges of this or that.

The students wouldn't run the school, they would be the school.
Under a tree somewhere.
School administration is more fallout from the industrial revolution and the Prussian influence on education and the military.
Not truly needed if the students are real students.
School boards are from the devil and always have been. Here, too.
Meddlesome creatures that you have a hard time imagining how they got through school without the other kids sitting on them and spitting in their faces...

Actually, I kind of like the idea of school uniforms, considering some of the garbage I see children wearing today...and yesterday...
and in the photos of my folks...

I've always thought 'pupil' was a better word for those in compulsory education and 'student' better fitted for non-compulory (and further) education.
Part of the problem in the UK is that apprenticeships were phased out, so now the only post-16 education is A-level or equivalent. This means that sixth-form colleges that would have been filled with students taking academic qualifications now have also have people taking vocational qualifications. The latter don't have the same attitude to work. The academic strand want to learn, and want to find out about their subject, whereas the vocational strand only want a piece of paper so they can get the job they want. Not that there is anything wrong with the latter, but they are two different purposes and I cannot help but feel they would be better served in different instituations. Like the mess that ensues when all the UK polytechnics were turned into universities.

This means that now when students start at university they don't have wuite the right attitude. Nowadays the students would never be able to raise enough money to lure lecturers over; not when there are lucrative consulting jobs available.
I really like the modern university. The students get to mix with the lecturers, who are also performing research, and what better environment to learn about the subject than at the sharp end? There's also bleed-through between the research and the studies, which is an excellent thing.

I still can't believe how much freedom I'm given here to work under my own initiative and take responsibility for my own work. And if it's a nice day, I can take the day off.

(I seen photos of my Mum in loon pants... a terrifying sight)

I now understand that we are talking at cross-purposes here.
The universities are obviously run very much differently there from here.

Uncle Sammy has almost nothing to say about how Colleges and Universities are run. He has his own little schools, but those are mainly diplomatic and military.

With the exception of State Universities and colleges, most of the universities are run by their own little satrapys of boards and alumni and regents. They do receive state and federal monies in varying amounts, according to their compliance with titles and acts and such, but even law schools and medical schools have each their own little way of doing things. With the exception of the civil service, there are no country-wide exams (yet!) or licensing. Anarchy in the US!

At the lower school level, the high schools and lower, from district to district, they do not even have the same grading scales. Some use letters and some use numbers. The curriculums are scattered from coherent to permissive and the teachers have varying levels of education. Most of the one's with graduate degrees or doctorates are in administration or in the colleges. Below college level, the teachers have BAs or BS and a few Masters...
And since most of them are 'book-bound', when some states choose to have competency tests, there are people who have been 'teaching' subjects for years who fall below the national average for students on the tests!
Get some butts in the seats, get some bodies on the staff rolls....
I know high school students who work at the town library who think England is on the continent.

Maybe we are. After all, is possible to walk from here to France with wading through any water...

It does sound like a mess in the US. Over here, university degrees follow one of two patterns: First, Upper second, lower second, third, pass, fail; or Distinction, Merit, pass, fail.

There isn't any national standardisation of marks in the UK at university level, and some places have a better reputation in some subjects, but on the whole it's fairly even. Universities do set adn mark their own exams but professional bodies often consider degrees equivalent to entry level professional exams.

I've never really got to the bottom of how the education systems in the UK and US compare. We have:

ages 11-14: Secondary school
ages 14-16: GCSE exams at secondary school
ages 16-18: A-levels or equivalent
ages 18-21: First degree
ages 21-22: final year of 4-year degree or one year post-grad degree

My history A-level teacher once said that our history course was considered equivalent to a US degree.

Kindergarten through 6th grade (1,2,3,4and 5) ages 5-12: Grade School
(though in some cases it is 1st through fifth grade, the sixth being in middle school)

7th and 8th grades 12-14: Middle School or Junior High

9th through 12th grades normally known as Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior (the same noises used in a four year college or university)ages 14-18: High School

Now this is where it gets muddy. There are prep schools that take the place of the last two years of High School and the first two years of college.
There are Junior Colleges for High School graduates that offer only a two year program for an Associate's Degree.
There are tech schools that offer only a certificate in the skill mastered.
And there are programs that allow you to take college undergraduate courses for credit while you are in High School earning enough credits to graduate.

The colleges and universities (the terms are almost interchangeable) offer four year, six year and eight year programs, depending upon your degree goal. And some doctorates make take ten years to achieve.
This is not even beginning to take into account the fellowships, degree candidate teaching assistanceships and other weird underbelly activities foisted on the untenured by the tenured. Or the medical and law schools. Did you know that it takes almost as much study and time to become a degreed Librarian as it does a brain surgeon?
Or that a Psychiatrist has to become a Doctor of Medicine first, before he embarks on the schooling to become a shrink? There's a good twelve years right there, when a bartender's course is only six months...

Admission to a university is rarely determined by grades or ability to pay. There is a whole list of criteria that varys from school to school, depending upon whom they are attempting to attract for the student body or the faculty staff. Ethnicity seems to play more and more a part and people are getting sued over it. Economic background plays a big part because the old boys don't want any new boys they wouldn't have put up with, regardless how things have changed.
And then there's this new round of Politically Correct crap and Tenured Faculty underground noise about the war...
A lot of these people have no connection to the society at large. They went to school once upon a time and they intend to stay there...
huddled, muttering about the great unwashed...and the students who pass through their dusty lecture halls will never be the same...or, will be more of the same...
I know people who've been to school for six years and still haven't figured out what their major will be...

I've seen things about 'positive discrimination' on US Tv programmes, and boggled at it. It seems to be walking a very dangerous line. On the other hand, race seems to play a much more important part in the American psyche than here in the UK (at least from my indirect experience).

It does sound an unpleasant mess. Medical qualifications take a very long time here, too, which is perhaps why medical students have such a reputation for practical jokes and drunkenness.

There's a unified applications system for undergraduate degrees in the UK called UCAS (there's a guide entry on it, I think), but post-graduate applications are still handled on a case by case basis. I may have a somewhat skewed view of universities in the UK as all three I've been at have been very modern. I'm told that there are still some reconstructed attitudes at Oxford and Cambridge, but the prospect of going to either of those has never appealed to me.

Universities have always been a bastion of the political left, which is no bad thing. What worries me more is the sometimes rabid response of the political right to those opinions. It starts to smell like the McCarthy witch-hunts, which are one of the darkest elements of modern US history. Michael Moore's TV Nation programme once painted a truck with the USSR flag and filled it full of communist-era memorabilia, as an historical exhibit, and sent it on a tour of the US. It was fire-bombed several times.

What's this business with majors and minors? We have have around nine distinct subjects at GCSE, usually four different A-levels and a typical undegraduate course has thirty linked modules.

You have to declare a Major subject or field in which you hope to gain a degree. The Minor is either an unassociated field in which you do not hope to gain a degree or an associated field in which you hope to get a lesser degree, which leads to such fascinating things as Math Majors with Minors in Physical Education, or Pre-Med Majors with Minors in Archeology(sp?)....

The truly sad thing about McCarthyism is that it was a visceral response to something that you couldn't really do anything about.
You can't 'police' thought. But, the real issue was security within government agencies and the sympathy of foreign service officials who'd 'gone native' with the ideologies of other nations. This has been obscured by time and legend. The 'Red Scare' was stupid and unsubtle in the extreme. And one of it's sillier aspects is that it made martyrs and saints out of otherwise mediocre writers like Dalton Trumble. Have you ever been able to sit through 'Spartacus'? It's worse than 'Ben Hur'!

The really stupid part of this is that the political traditions of the left in the US, the true left, not the Anarchist charlies who popped up in the 1890s and 1930s, or the pot-smoking, scotch-swilling ur-hippies of the 50s, the true left have a tradition in the US that is so buried in time and familiarity that few have the ability to look for it. The LaFollette family of Wisconsin...for one example.
No, while those clowns were goofing off with their three-ring hearings in Washington, the real work was going on in the interior of the country. And it continues.

You can only put so much in a popular history. There are, after all, fifty states, most of which are bigger than half the countries in the EU. Each state busy as a hive for over a hundred years. In many cases, doing what they please and the heck with Washington or the parties.

And, it must be said, the Soviets did have some designs on infiltrating the government and they succeeded in both the US and the UK, mostly with damp intellectuals, the same kind of dilletantes that filled the 'intelligence' or 'diplomatic' departments in those days.

And, it must also be said, that fascism in the battle against communism proved that, in the end, many of the effects were the same, just arrived at in different ways.

It might fall under the Defense of the Realm Official Secrets Act, but a cursory examination of the British government's activities during the late forties, early fifties might give up some events that will suprise you in their mirroring of the McCarthy craze.
Particularly in their overwhelming concern that 'poofs' would be great security risks. Witness Alan Turing.

Micheal Moore is a fascinating little gadfly. He is very aware of the axiom: If you're going to play 'pied piper', don't be surprised if the rats come out to follow.

I managed to foul up and lose my lengthy, erudite post before it got posted. So here are the edited highlights:

UK... love/hate relationship with homosexuality... coming out polarises already held views about a celebrity...

McCathy... Didn't celebrities finger one another... Don't think that happened here... Glad those days are past... hopefully they won't return even given current world events...

Michael Moore.. Louis Theroux... catch his programme if you can... extracting Michael...

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Well, see, there is a strangeness about the British attitude toward entertainers. They are rarely picked up at a drugstore and thrust into the limelight (though that may have happened with Diana Dors ). They are usually trained at school. Entertainers are expected to be 'entertaining'. While many of them become involved in politics and popular causes and devote time and energy in wartime, they are not held to the same standard as a non-entertainer because entertainers of the old sort are held to be a sort of secondary aristocracy, with a hint of nobility (until they get Knighted).

In the US, there was a big chasm between vaudevillians and movie actors, college-trained actors and drugstore pick-ups, threatrical dramaticians and movie muggers, so when the Red Channels scare was puffed up by an ignorant little supermarket manager, the media and the congress ran with it. The middle class had always suspected that actors were engaged in illegal, immoral and fattening activities and this was the time to weigh in..

(It wouldn't hurt to remember that early television had a big part to play in this little morality play. McCarthy was broadcast and he learned about soundbites early. Hollywood was in trouble and they knew it. Most of the TV networks had their facilities in New York and the two coasts had a rivalry for actors and writers going on. The studios still had their slave system going strong and the networks would pay someone more for one project than the studios would for an entire contract. That was why some of the better-paid actors and writers narked on each other. To save their careers. Witness Ronald Reagan.)

It didn't really have anything to do with communism or the stupidity that HUAC was going through. The Hollywood witch hunts were truly just more of the same old thing. Ever since the movie industry had its first dim beginnings there had been churches and civic groups and politicians dragging it into the headlines every little chance they got. And the industry loved it. There was always some sort of scandal going on, from Fatty Arbuckle to the Hays Act, from Lucille Ball to Ingrid Bergman. That's part of the game.

Now a little-known fact is that much of the problem was that the residue of the Great Depression was being erased from public consciousness by the Witch hunts. Just as the Germans and some others blamed the Jews for the circumstances and results of the Great War, many Americans could not get over the belief that the businessman was not to blame for the stock market crash. They wanted to believe that it was the work of subversives undermining this great country. And some of them believed, just like there are some today who believe that the WTC incident was stage-managed by the CIA and the Mossad to give the US and Israel an excuse to go to war, that FDR had minions who helped manufacture a situation that would allow him to become president for four terms. The Republicans needed a show and they got one. Mom, apple pie and Chevrolet. We won the war that the Democrats got us into. It's a whole new world and we helped make it.

Truman thought McCarthy was a drunken idiot. Eisenhower thought that the congress was wasting taxpayer money investigating something they wouldn't have understood even if they had the answers.

Beware of history that fits on a matchbook cover. It usually leaves something out.

The old process of entertainers inthe UK seems to be dissolving. Witness the success of manufactured pop bands and now, disgracefully, the Popstars/Pop Idol phenomenon. The tragedy here is not so much that the winners aren't anything special (though I don't begrudge them their personal success; go for it say I), but that it may mean that budding entertainers no longer try to build up their craft on the small scale before trying to make it big. It can only make entertainment the poorer. What with the lottery, popstars and the inflated fees for footballers some people seem to spend their time waiting for their 'big break' to happen without looking for ways of making it happen. Gig culture has been very ill over here for some time, and I can't see it surviving for much longer.

Re soundbites: Cynical manipulation of the public is part of the politician's stock-in-trade. It is dispiriting to see how few people notice when it's happening to them.

I've always thought that conspiracy 'theories' tell more about their creators than those implicated by them. In the way you described, some discontented citizens see things going wrong in their country and can't accept that it's just natural and for the moment in this field their country isn't the best. So they invent increasingly absurd hypotheses to explain what's going wrong. And they imbue the conspirators with amazing powers of secrecy and astonsihing levels of competence, given that some of them choke on pretzels when they're drunk. To be honest, I always find flag-waving displays of nationalism distasteful. There is a fine line between rejoicing in your own country and heritage and denigrating others. I can't beleive that in the US school kids are still expected to pledge allegiance and raise the flag. That sort of thing only happens in loopy banana republics. If someone tried that over here, they'd be laughed out of the classroom and rightly so. Perhaps what lies at the heart of all of this is a certain insecurity in the US psyche about identity and heritage.

Someone's turned off the heat underneath the US melting pot. I was reading Bill Bryson's history of the US recently, and in the early stages of the country it really was a proper melting pot model, with different immigrants bringing pieces of their own culture. But now, it seems anyone has to conform to existing ideas of what an American should be. Or rather, what comfortably-off white Americans should be. No wonder there is such a visible racial divide.

And another word on conspiracy 'theories'. From a scientists point of view, theories are things that have been proven to be true, hypotheses are unproven ideas. Almost by definition, there is no such thing as a conspiracy theory.

From my recent and ongoing perusal of the British media, albeit filtered through the truncating cone of the internet, I find the way the 'mind' works over there, although it is admittedly the media 'mind', is surprisingly similar...
People don't do anything and then they wonder why nothing happens...

There is a kind of Norman Rockwell greeting card sentiment that overlays the realities of US life...it is cheap, plentiful, easy to use, and serves as a kind of joining ritual before the various parties go to whacking at each other's deeply held beliefs...very similar to the opening ceremonies in the House of Commons...

The pledge of allegiance to the flag may seem a bit silly...but it has in the past and it has in the present become not a salute to a silly bit of rag, but a salute to the people who have died for and because of that flag....
I know this is uncharacteristicly maudlin for me, but when foreign nationals burn the flag...it is our country in effigy...when they carry it in demonstrations with ugly slogans scrawled across it, they wish it were the whole country...
The US has, since the beginning of it's still very tenous existence, had a siege mentality, mainly because of the circumstances under which most of it's immigrant population left their home countries.

The "melting pot" thing was a bunch of crap on the day it was first scibbled, back in the 1850s... There was and is no guiding overweening philosophy for the country... The "typical american" was an economic cosmetic dream designed to sell Chevrolets and Cigarettes and get you into bed with white women... He never really existed and where he did, he had to dig a metaphoric foxhole to defend himself because reality kept intruding and demanding that he use his brain instead of his wallet...

On the other hand, I know people who cannot wrap their minds around the idea that the UK is not an all-white enclave full of Hyacinths and Arnslows...and Richards.....

The whole 'racism' thing is overblown because it obscures the fact that sutpid people will do stupid things and then get blamed for it because of their color... Culture is the big problem.... The true culture of the US is once again growing outside of media eye because there is yet no way for Time/Warner to make a buck off it...

RE: the pop music thing... Just for fun, check out what the music scene truly was like in, say, 1961. On the charts, in the government's mind, on the tube and in the clubs...
Let this phrase echo through your mind,"Guitar groups are on their way out...."

It's always dispiriting, isn't it, when the media only respond to a subset of current culture because they can't see an easy way to turn a profit on the rest?
Case in point: popular music and video games. Regardless of what you think of either, TV seems to have an overwhelming bias towards showing music because it is seen as more 'sociable' and is cheap to show. The visuals are good. It makes the programme seem 'happening'. Yet, in popular culture in the UK now video games are at least as significant as pop music, given the sheer number of people who play them, yet there's currently only one programme on all the TV in the UK that involves it. I think that the media have a certain responsibility to represent the full spectrum of current culture, as it is these media that will shape future generations' perceptions of what life was like today. I wonder how many of our deductions about past culture are wrong for exactly that reason?

If the internet persists in a form similar to its current one, future generations may go scouting old IP addresses and domains to find the untouched web-pages of decades ago. It's a prospect I find appealing.

I've been playing a computer game recently called Planescape: Torment, and it is such a mature, thought-provoking and deeply philosophical experience that as a work of art I think it stands up better than, say, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman or anything by George Eliot. Yet, we are asked to coo over Brit-Art's latest self-obsessed, clichéd out-pourings and consider computer games to be kid's stuff.

I must confess I've never responded emotionally or intellectually to flag-burning. I always think 'You bought the flag to burn, the joke's on you, mate'. But then again I don't believe that a country has any inherent merit, only that which it gets from its people. I wouldn't lift a finger to save my country. I'd fight to the death (courage notwithstanding) to save my country's people. Or any country's people, for that matter. I see them as equal. On the other hand, the hatred and violence in the minds of those who go around burning flags is chilling. And they would be just the same if they chose not to burn flags. In a way, it's kind of them to warn us.

I'm sorry, "Brit-Art"?

One of the other researchers was telling me about going to the Isle of Wight on holiday to visit her parents. I went to look at the IOW on the web and found a lot of touristy stuff...in the midst of it was a news report about the dearth of Dental care on the IOW! NHS can't get anyone to go and the dentists that are there have set up an emergency care that was designed to handle 25 people a week...and they are getting 40 a day...the article blamed the dearth of dentists on the closing of schools and the apparently recently prolonged schooling, plus the fact that old dentists are retiring and new dentists don't want to go to the outlyings...

Stupid question: Why aren't any of those tourist monies going into the local situation?
I saw a gay/les site for IOW that said it was partially funded from Lottery monies...
Not that I have anything against...but...
Second stupid question: What does the NHS do for a living? The BBC and other media I have been accessing on the web are not at all kind to the NHS (to put it mildly).

The post office is supposed to spend 3000 pounds per office to put in a virtual sign-language thingy where the employees say chosen phrases in it and the image signs to the customer...while the customer can sign all they want and no one understands them because the post office can't afford employees who can sign... While another postal group is going out of business.... Truly confusing...

Bus drivers in one place are getting shot at with pellet guns and stabbed with stanley knives and the railroad is in trouble... some people want to outlaw crossbows and others want to outlaw samurai swords and some idiot spends eighteen months in jail because his girlfriend was carrying his modified starter pistol in a sock in her purse...A starter pistol that he had paid 1500 pounds for....dimwit..hes says he's glad the police caught him...and now he wants to send a message to kids everywhere...
Pluey!

'Brit-Art' is the fashionable term for the works of 'artists' such as Tracy Emin and, err... That's all I can remember. You can tell how much of an impact they've had on me. The saddening thing is that there is a lot of interesting and unusual art being produced, but all the attention is gathered on the sensationalist and rather poor works by a handful of artists. As I said, they tend towards cliché and self-obsession.

I hand't heard about the fuss on the IOW. The tourist money doesn't help pay for dentists because it all ends up in the pockets on hoteliers and shopkeepers, and both local and central government are too lily-livered to put up any sort of taxes.

The lottery was intended to fund non-core activities like alternative sexuality groups, sport and the arts but sadly even vital services are more strapped for cash. I don't like the commission that awards lottery money is allowed to spend it on local healthcare, although there has been discussion as to whether that should change.
The NHS was, for many years, one of the leading health-care systems in the world; and practically every European country has a similar scheme in place. Free health-care may have meant that it didn't have large sums of private money flooding into it, but a respectable protion of UK GDP went into it and provided basic health-care including free prescriptions for many people and surgery for just about everyone. Now time to get out the soapbox...
The Tory party decided that this sytem was uncompetitive, and offered all sorts of incentives to encourage private health-care providers. It then set about sleshing the NHS budget in real terms for something like 18 years. Wages for NHS staff were seldom increased as they should have been, and the dearth of money led to wards closing and a lack of new equipment and budgets for new and experimental treatments. I'll leave to your imagination what this did to the quality of health-care. The current situation is that the NHS is groaning at the seems with insufficient funds, private health-care is used by just about anyone who can afford it becuase it pays better wages and there is less of a staffing crisis, but for those without the money they're left with twelve month waiting lists to see a consultant, or get an operation, or undergo a test. There has been a recent influx of money, but the chronic underinvestment can't be corrected quickly so NHS money is paying for patients to 'go private' or visit hospitals in other EU countries. Everyone is complaining about the state of the NHS and blaming the current government (which is not entirely fair; as the problem was not of their creation). Nothing is going to get better until someone bites the bullet and puts up taxes, preferably about 2-3p on income tax so the NHS can pay decent wages and invest properly. Even in a best case scenario it will take decades to undo the damage. In an independent survey, the UK came below the US in health-care for practically the first time (I don't know what criteria they use, so I'm reserving judgement on how valid the survey is).

The railways are in an even worse state. Your friends and mine, the Tories, sold it off at a fraction of its true worth then watched as safety and quality of service went down the pan in favour of huge director salaries and shareholder dividends. It needs nationalising. Now.

I don't think outlawing crossbows or swords will serve much purpose. The rationale behind firearms bans is that a gun is easy to cause carnage with, whereas with a sword you have to get up close and personal and a crossbow is nowhere near as pwerful and takes much longer to reload. There is talk of banning those kind of starter pistols, and they can be converted to fire live rounds too easily. I have to say I agree with the sentiment.

£1500? How much would a comparable small calibre pistol cost in the US?