[thechat] Bowling for Columbine

[Erik Mattheis]

On Sunday, January 26, 2003, at 04:02 PM, isaac wrote:
> For those who haven't seen it, Moore makes a brief, but pretty glaring
> allegation that the NRA is the KKK legalised. In 1871, the Force Bill
> was
> authorised by Congress allowing the President to use military force
> against
> the KKK. Soon after they "all but disappeared". In 1871, the NRA was
> founded, etc.

Is this the animated sequence by the South Park people you're referring
to? That was great. It made a whole lot of sense to me, and I felt
vindicated as I was watching it with a friend who I frequently have gun
debates with and it made a lot of the same points I like to make.

In my opinion, perhaps the biggest reason for the high number of gun
murders in the US is that everywhere in the world except N America, gun
ownership was an upper-class thing. But here, it's always been
something the "common man" did, ie, a peasant in a European country had
little reason to own a gun, but here, you pretty much _had_ to own a
gun if you wanted meat in your diet and you didn't live in the
urbanized part of the east coast and were too dumb to learn how the
Native Americans went about gathering their protein ... like what is
now Western Connecticut was once the frontier. Hell, Plymouth and
Boston were frontiers.

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Erik Mattheis
(612) 377 2272
<http://goZz.com/>
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