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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Guns are not a part of the culture of my homeland, except perhaps for the occasional Bollywood movie in which the bad guy meets his demise staring down the wrong end of a barrel.
My childhood in India was steeped in ahimsa, the tenet of nonviolence toward all living things.
The Indians may have succeeded in ousting the British, but we won with Gandhian-style civil disobedience, not a revolutionary war.
I grew up not knowing a single gun owner, and even today India has one of the strictest gun laws on the planet. Few Indians buy and keep firearms at home, and gun violence is nowhere near the problem it is in the United States. An American is 12 times more likely than an Indian to be killed by a firearm, according to a recent study.
It's no wonder then that every time I visit India, my friends and family want to know more about America's "love affair" with guns.
I get the same questions when I visit my brother in Canada or on my business travels to other countries, where many people remain perplexed, maybe even downright mystified, by Americans' defense of gun rights.
I admit I do not fully understand it myself, despite having become an American citizen nearly a decade ago. So when I learn the National Rifle Association is holding its annual convention here in Atlanta, right next to the CNN Center, I decide to go and find out more.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/world/indian-immigrant-nra-convention/index.html
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:04PM (3 children)
I'm sorry, but humans need governments to exist peaceably in dense populations. Actually, even to exist peaceably in sparse populations, but in sparse populations encounters are less frequent, so government is less important. But do note that the murder rate among the Kalahari bushmen was found to be higher than the rate in the Detroit slums. (I'm not the one who picked out Detroit, it was in the original article I read.)
OTOH, the above cited figure isn't quite correct, as the "civilized" murder rate doesn't include those killed in war or by other governmental actions. There may be other problems with it.
People change their nature quite slowly, but the environment within which that nature manifests itself changes rapidly. So I don't expect people to become inherently peaceful, but hope that environmental changes will cause them to react peacefully. Of course, peace can come at too high a price, but as various technologies become more powerful we will eventually find the alternatives of peacefullness or extinction. We're actually already at that point, but currently it's only the large groups (powerful nations) that can unleash extinction. This is in the process of changing. It's is actually probable at this point in time that a medium sized country or a major corporation could unleash extinction on humanity if it really worked at it for a decade. Most of them, though, find other goals more enticing. But as the technologies become more powerful, smaller groups will have the ability to use them.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @07:24PM (1 child)
WRONG
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:44PM
Well, you convinced me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:13AM
government is the biggest killer of humanity yet you claim it would be worse without them. you're a slave.