Those in glass houses should be careful.
>I think that a lot of folk in the USA are bred and raised on fear.
Yep. The Democrats count on it. Unfortunately we have too many Republicans in Washington today who've left the principles of Goldwater behind and joined in the fear mongering power grabbing the Democrats had raised to a high art form.
Along with utopian claptrap like no guns, would you care to explain how you will win the war on drugs (you know, something else involving today considerable manufacturing processes and cross-national smuggling). It won't happen.
In particular, let's turn attention to Gower's questioning if someone would've really been raped or killed -- after they had just described a gang of four battering down the door to his childhood residence. Ignore the truth and spin it to your own ends -- yep, that's a rational view point.
Oh well, us Americans will continue to be the laughing stocks of the Europeans, put down for how violent a society we are and how awful it is we allow individual citizens to protect themselves with force. By the way, what was the homicide rate for Europe in the last century compared to North America? And don't forget to count those pesky time frames like 1914-1918, 1936-1939, 1939-1945, and the majority of 1991-2001. I wonder if German homicide statistics included those shot by East German border guards?
Oh wait, I must be imagining all that violence in Europe, after all, there seems to be a lot of people here who believe personal ownership of firearms and carrying weapons for self-defense causes violence.
Hey, no guns = no gun crime is a nice feel good poster slogan, completely ignoring whether it's practical or would indeed reduce the long term trends quantity or lethality of violence. It takes no thought about the deeper differences between societies and a broad range of conditions that affect violence and crime and it's manisfestations. But what do I know, I'm just a un-thinking right winger.