For those of you that won't bother reading further than this, I went to the United States for the first time recently and, basically, have never felt more scared in my life. 'cos of the guns. Yeah, it's going to be that kind of topic.
Moving on, if any of you want a bit more information than that, then I'll start with some quick background about me. I travel. A lot. I live in Australia, but approximately one year in every four of my life thus far has been spent overseas. I've travelled by plane, by car, and as a child my family spent three years circumnavigating the world on a yacht. At present, I have been to every continent bar Antarctica, and a total of 45 countries. Most of these countries have been third world, poor, developing, or war-torn, and as a consequence I am not exactly unfamiliar with situations that could, potentially, be very dangerous. And yet recently, as I said above, I went to the United States for the first time not too long ago and the experience seriously shook me.
The experience in question wasn't exactly anything major. We were stopping over in some town, I forget the name (we were only there for the night before driving on to Seattle), and I, the geek that I am, decided to go check out a local videogame store. While I was there, browsing the shelves, a guy walked in with a gun. Not to rob the store, in fact, I didn't realise he had it until I heard him talking to the guy at the counter, who I figure must've been some friend of his. He must've only bought it recently, or something, because he took it out and showed it off and then put it away again. And that was it. But it seriously, seriously scared me, and I spent a lot of the rest of the trip rather on edge.
Now, I've seen guns before, and they don't necessarily scare me. Yeah, I'm a pretty big pacifist and hope that I never come into a situation where violence is the only answer. Thus far, it hasn't happened yet. I don't like guns, and I rather wish the things didn't exist. At the same time, I can deal with them, given the appropriate time and place. One of my favourite travel stories goes back to eating at a local restaurant in the Sudan during their civil war (this would've been around 2002-3, I think). We were with some American tourists we'd become friends with, eating our meals, when one of the armed militia came into the store. He was a big guy, in a flowing desert robe and with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. Within a few minutes, we'd all introduced ourselves and a few of the American kids were getting their pictures taken with him. Very friendly chap. The point of that story is that in a time and place, I can handle being around guns. A civil war in a third world country where terrorism is rife, that is a time and a place I can see a gun being acceptable to cart around in everyday life.
What shocked me about going to America was that I saw guns being carried as if people were expecting to be caught in a firefight just walking down the streets. Now, I don't live there, but is the reality of the United States really such that people feel the need to behave the same way as someone in the middle of a civil war? It just seems truly bizarre. When I'm not travelling, here in Australia, I never see a gun. Ever. Even farmers I know don't keep guns, and Australian wildlife being what it is, I can kind of see how a gun could help fend off the inevitable attack by the local super spider.
So this, odds are, will likely devolve into a gun control debate. That's not really what I want to talk about, though. I'm more interested into whether people in the United States are really so scared that they feel the need to carry a lethal weapon on their body at all times in order to feel secure. Because to me, knowing that everyone around me could be concealing a gun does not make me feel remotely secure. It makes me feel like I'd prefer to be back in the Sudan, where at least they tended to carry the guns out in the open.
Also, the captcha is "know your rights", which given the subject matter is pretty funny.
Moving on, if any of you want a bit more information than that, then I'll start with some quick background about me. I travel. A lot. I live in Australia, but approximately one year in every four of my life thus far has been spent overseas. I've travelled by plane, by car, and as a child my family spent three years circumnavigating the world on a yacht. At present, I have been to every continent bar Antarctica, and a total of 45 countries. Most of these countries have been third world, poor, developing, or war-torn, and as a consequence I am not exactly unfamiliar with situations that could, potentially, be very dangerous. And yet recently, as I said above, I went to the United States for the first time not too long ago and the experience seriously shook me.
The experience in question wasn't exactly anything major. We were stopping over in some town, I forget the name (we were only there for the night before driving on to Seattle), and I, the geek that I am, decided to go check out a local videogame store. While I was there, browsing the shelves, a guy walked in with a gun. Not to rob the store, in fact, I didn't realise he had it until I heard him talking to the guy at the counter, who I figure must've been some friend of his. He must've only bought it recently, or something, because he took it out and showed it off and then put it away again. And that was it. But it seriously, seriously scared me, and I spent a lot of the rest of the trip rather on edge.
Now, I've seen guns before, and they don't necessarily scare me. Yeah, I'm a pretty big pacifist and hope that I never come into a situation where violence is the only answer. Thus far, it hasn't happened yet. I don't like guns, and I rather wish the things didn't exist. At the same time, I can deal with them, given the appropriate time and place. One of my favourite travel stories goes back to eating at a local restaurant in the Sudan during their civil war (this would've been around 2002-3, I think). We were with some American tourists we'd become friends with, eating our meals, when one of the armed militia came into the store. He was a big guy, in a flowing desert robe and with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. Within a few minutes, we'd all introduced ourselves and a few of the American kids were getting their pictures taken with him. Very friendly chap. The point of that story is that in a time and place, I can handle being around guns. A civil war in a third world country where terrorism is rife, that is a time and a place I can see a gun being acceptable to cart around in everyday life.
What shocked me about going to America was that I saw guns being carried as if people were expecting to be caught in a firefight just walking down the streets. Now, I don't live there, but is the reality of the United States really such that people feel the need to behave the same way as someone in the middle of a civil war? It just seems truly bizarre. When I'm not travelling, here in Australia, I never see a gun. Ever. Even farmers I know don't keep guns, and Australian wildlife being what it is, I can kind of see how a gun could help fend off the inevitable attack by the local super spider.
So this, odds are, will likely devolve into a gun control debate. That's not really what I want to talk about, though. I'm more interested into whether people in the United States are really so scared that they feel the need to carry a lethal weapon on their body at all times in order to feel secure. Because to me, knowing that everyone around me could be concealing a gun does not make me feel remotely secure. It makes me feel like I'd prefer to be back in the Sudan, where at least they tended to carry the guns out in the open.
Also, the captcha is "know your rights", which given the subject matter is pretty funny.
