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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 krishnoid on Thursday May 04 2017, @07:18PM (2 children)
The Indians may have succeeded in ousting the British, but we won with Gandhian-style civil disobedience, not a revolutionary war.
Both were colonies, but the American colonialists were transplants, and the British significantly outnumbered (?) them. My American history's kind of sketchy on this, but it seems like the British could have completely suppressed them by force of arms.
India, on the other hand, had a large, entrenched culture and population and outnumbered the British in such a way that 'Nah, brah' was a feasible option. And tapping my sketchy grasp on *world* history, the British were a civilized oppressor -- complete resource exploitation and genocide doesn't seem to be in their DNA, and wouldn't have been considered an option.
Note the attempted abolition of the caste system, and the introduction of schools, hospitals, rail lines, and other infrastructure I'm forgetting about [youtube.com] -- all things that a dirty socialist colonizer would do to improve the lives of an existing population through providing their filthy socialist services. Under a different colonizer, things could have gone *very* differently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @01:00AM
To add to that, but not specific to India, the age/period is also different. The POMs were pulling out of a lot of their colonies in Asia in the mid 1900s without going through the bloodbath like when the Yanks did it. Malaysia was another colony that got independence through lobbying, no need to even have a big fast fest like Gandhi and the population was significantly smaller than India, though probably still outnumbered the POMs.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday May 05 2017, @03:03AM
You drank the coolaid brah. British atrocities are unparalleled but they were on the winning side of WW2 so they got the chance to rewrite history.
In order to find answers to these questions we must first of all get clearly in mind the fact that India is a subject land. She is a dependency of Great Britain, not a colony.
Read this thoroughly [theatlantic.com]. British engineered deaths of millions of 'savage' 'un-humans'.