Life Imitates Art

Back in 1994 (has it really been 15 years?), there was this great film "Barcelona" that featured two young American men in the city of Barcelona, Spain, talking to a few local women about current affairs. One of those issues was violence in America.

Woman: You can't say Americans are not more violent than other people.

Fred: No.

Woman: All those people killed in shootings in America?

Fred: Oh, shootings, yes. But that doesn't mean Americans are more violent than other people. We're just better shots.

It was an amusing film, where a sly comment speaks to our very strange culture here in the States. This week, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) decided to reiterate that point.

ENSIGN: When you take into account cultural factors — the fact that we drive cars a lot more than any other country; we are much more mobile.

If you take out accidental deaths due to car accidents, and you take out gun deaths — because we like our guns in the United States and there are a lot more gun deaths in the United States — you take out those two things, you adjust those, and we actually better in terms of survival rates.

Yes, not that the Repubs and their NRA overlords "cling to guns" or anything, they just really, really like them, to the point that it's okay to ignore the number of deaths and injuries caused by guns in America. The fact that hospitals have to treat more than 200,000 people per year for gun injuries is not important...

I'm sure that if you ignore all the category 1 major defense acquisition programs in the Department of Defense, it really looks like our defense budget is quite reasonable, too.

Comments

[Ann Gaothin]

What's hysterical is that Ensign had no clue what an absurd statement he was making. But that is truly the American way of thinking: We will create massive panic over a flu that kills virtually no one, yet we won't do a damned thing about the tools people use to kill each other more than 30,000 times per year in our country. We are truly one of the stupidest societies on the planet.