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

It sickened me to hear an American pro-gun commentator on Radio 4 maintaining that the reason they allow everyone to have guns in the first place is because of the tyranny they suffered under the British. Well, sunshine, it's TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY YEARS after the War of Independence, and the world has changed a lot since then.

One important common lesson we learned from the US is that we now also tend to believe in the sanctity of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as well. One lesson they could learn from us, however, is that we are also able to PRIORITISE.

If you are a Swiss citizen you are not merely permitted, but obliged, to have a gun in your house. Once a year you have to go off and do your target practice.

*thinks of Harry Lime's observations on Switzerland*

Another land of the free. A Swiss friend described it as a huge jail where the inhabitants are both the jailers and inmates at once.

Never been there. Never wanted to, really. It makes me think of those dreary visions of heaven that George Orwell wrote about.

I've been to the German-speaking part and found it pleasant, indistinguishable from Germany . . . with mountains.

There must be a reason why the prospect of heaven is boring. You couldn't get away with cheeky behaviour, without which life is unimaginable. But heaven is not life anyway, it's afterlife.

So what's to be done about guns in the USA? The problem as I see it is that the US government is unwilling to confront the gun lobby, plain and simple. The first and most important job of any government is to protect its citizens. It's plainly failing to do that, but there's not much point in relying upon government for protection if you are going to allow a free-for-all shooting match with everyone carrying their own weapon.

This is obviously the kind of scenario the NRA would prefer. It's about time that the US government asserted its moral right to govern on behalf of the two-third of Americans who detest guns anyway. but then it would have to be elected on such a platform, which means it would have to make it a campaign issue, and before that happens we will have to see even more bloody and frequent massacres that would polarise this sickeningly complacent country to the extent that its spineless politicians would have to act.

Yes, it is easy to talk of "this sickeningly complacent country" but don't you know as well as I do that there is more variety in the US than anywhere else and that every extreme is found there. There is nobody more sensible than a sensible American; there is nobody more flexible than a flexible American; there is nobody more correct than a correct American; and so on.

The fact that it gets shi te government is the shortcoming of democracy, which has turned into a marketing contest. Wait, here comes an aphorism:

Democracy without education is as useful as a train without a track.

Well, within the compass of this issue, the response to such incidents has been uniform and dismayingly predictable: let's all get around looking sad with candles but no controls on guns, period. If the US is, as you say, so diverse, why isn't the whole spectrum of issues on gun control being represented and voiced right now? Why doesn't somebody face down the NRA, for a change? It'll gain that person twice as many votes as they stand to lose.

This is my take on the the specious 'guns don't kill people' argument: why don't we let Iran have nuclear weapons? After all, nukes don't wipe out countries, only other countries wipe out countries. This is a pretty elementary argument, albeit one that cuts to the core, and you don't need to be anywhere as near as well educated as the likes of you and me to grasp this. So, why aren't we hearing more of it?

Nice one.

Just when I think that Americans can't get any more stupid, they not only get more stupid but even more narrow-minded:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2007/04/16/how-could-loving-god

The feeling of a loving God to whom we are unworthy rebellious children is just so oppressive. No doubt it's meant to be, that's how it works.

The bible's a choice compilation
Of tales for our edification;
Our lessons begin
With original sin
And progress to eternal damnation

It amazes me that rather than blame the attitude to violence in the society, people like that blogger start casting around for other scapegoats. In this particular case it's science and science teaching, particularly evolution. This is supposed to have inculcated a set of materialistic and atheistic values that led to Cho Seung-hui massacring his classmates.

I, on the other hand, would like to know if all these young zealots in Iraq would be blowing themselves and others to bits if they thought that death was the end of the line and that there was no heaven waiting for them and certainly no seventy-seven houris. I think they'd probably have a markedly less casual attitude to life, both theirs and their potential victims'.

This is the most compelling account I have read about why the Right seems to dominate this debate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2164427/

That's it: "enormous disparity in zeal".

Plato said it all; the question that starts off The Republic is "What is justice?" and the simple answer "Rendering each person their due" is shown to be insufficient by the example:

"Should you return a borrowed weapon to a raging lunatic?"

You can always reason that each person's due depends upon the person themselves, and that a raging lunatic might be due less, or more, of some things than a sane person. Would you inject a sane person with chloral, for example? But even within that frame of reckoning current US gun law is totally inadequate.

Which is just what he did; and though he used the character of Socrates as his mouthpiece, he didn't suddenly change it in mid-Republic to 'Disgusting of Athens'

There now: is that better?

Oh, and while we're at it...wasn't the Beslan massacre committed in the name of God? Atheist and materialist views might have prevented that.

I'm having a rethink about the conflicting merits of "group moralities". Dawkins suggests that a religious outlook is just a sorry mistake, but religion's supporters can easily point to atheist massacres too (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot).

My rethink is prompted by the book "The View from the Centre of the Universe". The authors contend, very credibly, that such things as morality can only occur in beings the size of a person: we can wait in vain for the emergence of a moral corporation, government, church, or anything that consists of a group. Any smaller than a mammal and there can't be enough complexity to support the necessary intelligence, any bigger than an individual and the problems of communication slow down fatally the processes that are needed for moral judgment.

This is in stark contrast to Plato's model, echoed by Hobbes, that a state is an individual writ large. It just isn't.