Atypical Guy

Reuters reports the details in U. S. most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people.  The intro helps put this into perspective:

The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

I find some of the numbers surprising, but certainly believable. We didn’t have to wait for the attack on Iraq to see the violence that is prevalent in American culture.  The daily news (especially from local news outlets) is filled with descriptions of murders, rapes, and other forms of violence.  Even if one person in some remote area of the U.S. is assaulted, we’ve got to see the pictures.  And, we need to see them every evening. 

For more on the topic, see Michael Moore’s film, Bowling for Columbine.  The title refers to the the Columbine High School Massacre.  The subtitle for the movie raises an important question: “Are we a nation of gun nuts or are we just nuts?“.  As with the Virginia Tech Massacre, people were glued to their TVs, watching pictures of blood-soaked sheets and people crying for lost loved ones.  It’s all typical American entertainment.  With ridiculous claims like “people kill people”, it’s easy to see how things got this way.  Clearly, no citizen should have the ability to kill dozens of people in just minutes.  Still assault rifles and other massacre-class weapons are readily available.  I don’t see this changing any time soon - people will be increasingly fearful, and they’ll look to violence to ease their fears.