I don't think non-Americans will ever understand the USA's love of deadly weapons. After all Australians live in a country with much stricter gun laws & yet we are hardly cowering in our houses afraid of random attacks. Its not as if people are not allowed to have guns at all - one of my coworkers was complaining that his wife made him get rid of his guns & gunsafe - its just that people don't see the nead to have them. Even when guns laws were much more liberal ( my dad remembers when you could buy guns at K-mart) gun culture never became the norm.
But how do we defend ourselves? Pro-gun yanks screach - aren't you a bunch of socialist pussies? Well people do manage to defend themselves with fists & knives & broken botttles & cricket batts & one woman even fended off an attacker with her high heal. So the American's insistance that they NEED guns to defend themselves seems rather strange, after all we manage to live in a civilised society without having easy access to guns.
However the level of poverty in Australia is much less than America & there is not as much population density or racial problems. There are less homeless people too. One of the things people always say when returning from America is " You won't believe how many homeless people there are!" But each to their own. If Americans want to go around shooting eachother then thats up to them, its their country so i don't really care.
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