Law & Justice: April 2008 Archives
BBC North American editor Justin Webb reports from Missouri on the tranquility and safety of gun-toting America:
Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.
They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.
It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquility and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.
What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.
Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.
One reason - perhaps the overriding reason - is that there is no public drunkenness in polite America, simply none.
I have never seen a group of drunk young people in the entire six years I have lived here. I travel a lot and not always to the better parts of town.
It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.
That's the difference between American citizens and British subjects. A free and armed population can police itself.
(HT: Instapundit.)
The FBI sure seem to have a loose definition of "terrorism":
The car was reported stolen last week. After the theft, the car’s owner was fueling his motorcycle when he spotted his stolen car.“While he was refueling his motorcycle, low and behold, the vehicle that he had reported stolen that belongs to him happened to pull into the gas station area also,” said Los Lunas Police Captain Charles Nuanes.
The car’s owner pulled the keys out of the ignition of his stolen car and the people in the car fled.
When police arrived, they found the explosive device and less than $1,000 worth of Iraqi cash.
“We don’t know what their intentions were,” said Nuanes. “We don’t know what they were planning on doing with any of this.” ...
FBI agents say that they have ruled out terrorism.
Uh... I can't imagine how the FBI managed to rule out terrorism. Explosives... Iraqi money... stolen vehicle... there's nowhere to go from there except terrorism. Maybe the FBI and/or the reporter meant that there's no indication of terrorism, or that there's no indication of a connection to al Qaeda, but a claim to have ruled terrorism completely out begs credulity.
Furthermore, does anyone want to hazard a guess about how the Iraqi cash and explosives got to Los Lunas, New Mexico? Maybe over our porous southern border?
(HT: GatewayPundit.)
I like this mom's determination to punish her son for sabotaging the vacuum to get out of doing chores, but I'm not sure her method was optimal.
For your consideration: a 13-year-old boy in Virginia decided that it was a good idea to break the family vacuum cleaner in order to get out of his chores around the house and play video games. Not so fast whippersnapper. It looks like your mom won this round.She has decided to sell her kid's Xbox 360 on eBay. But the story continues. It turns out that while his mom was going through his computer, she checked out the cookies and found that her innocent little boy was frequently checking out porn sites. So she decided to hack into his My Space page. The mom talks about the incident and states:
"My 13 year old managed to break the vacuum....thinking it would release him from that duty. He also has a list of other chores that were TYPED up for him to do Friday afternoon....one thing on the list was done...mind you these are simple things...empty the trash, clean your room, etc."Then I go thru the cookies on his computer and find out he has been checking out porn sites. Now there is a password so he can't even get on and his my-space page has a picture of snoopy on it now. Apparently I'm the meanest mom in the world, were his words.
"I'm a single mom. I can't let them walk over me or I might never get up ."
The mom could really maximize her own economic interests here by taking the Xbox and games and forcing the kid to buy them back from her at retail price... she'd get more than via an eBay auction, unless she really needs the cash immediately for a vacuum.
Still, that's all nitpicky (my specialty!). Good for mom! Video games are obviously corrupting our youth.
