I am puzzled. Puzzled that is, by the British attitude towards America’s gun culture. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s (in my view) common sense ruling that the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual, rather than a collective, right to bear arms, British commentators responded by, well, by throwing their hands up in the air and, yup, wondering at them there crazy Yanks. Thus Bryan Appleyard:
I no longer try to understand the American acceptance of well over 30,000 gun-related deaths a year. No other country comes close – though it should be noted that over half are suicides, in other countries people may just kill themselves in different ways so the total gun death figure may be misleading. Either way, the weird complacency remains…Gun culture remains one of America’s greatest aberrations. It baffles other nations. But there you go.
Thus, too, the BBC’s Man in Washington, Justin Webb, who quotes the 2nd Amendment and asks:
Errr, what does that mean?… You can disagree with the majority view, but you cannot escape from it if you live in the United States.
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