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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: 1) by khallow on Friday May 05 2017, @01:04AM
Still, i only gained my appreciation of them as a useful tool. I fail to see what the point of owning so many is, or making such a big deal out of it. I only need 1 power drill, 1 tablesaw, etc. We dont get coverage of power tool conventions in the news. Why would you need more than 1-2 rifles and maybe 2 pistols? Why an automatic?
People collect things. And if you're asking about "need", then you're barking up the wrong tree. People don't collect dozens of firearms (or any of the many other things that are traditionally collected) because they need to, they do it because they want to. And in a democracy, that's good enough.