From: Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
To: The citizens of the United States of America:
In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.
The Queen will resume monarchical duties over all [...]



Melt the Guns

Viscount LaCarte at Newcritics has a song he wants to share:
There are too many guns in the USA.
They are too easy to get.
I’m sick of the NRA.
I’m sick of listening to blathering shills telling me over the airwaves that this is the price of freedom, that gun control won’t work, that the Second Amendment means [...]



How much are we allowed to know about those we love?
Joseph’s crippling post-traumatic stress comes from an incident that happened during his time in the army in Ireland. The event itself may not have been traumatic to another soldier. Someone was killed, but only during the normal course of duty. There was no bomb involved, [...]



Not everyone in America, of course, but listening to the interviews of students and others around the tragedy at Virginia Tech, it is quite clear that, for a significant number of people, the obvious and correct way to go is not even on the cards. And the pro-gun lobbyists are out in droves bolstering up their hopeless case, notwithstanding that the massacres will carry on happening until individuals decide to say no to guns.

What follows is only one example of the kind of mindless drivel that is being pumped through the American media at the present time:

In 2000, the rate at which people were robbed or assaulted was higher in England, Scotland, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Sweden than it was in the United States. The assault rate in England was twice that in the United States. In the decade since England banned all private possession of handguns, the BBC reported that the number of gun crimes has gone up sharply.

Some of the worst examples of mass gun violence have also occurred in Europe. In recent years, 17 students and teachers were killed by a shooter in one incident at a German public school; 14 legislators were shot to death in Switzerland, and eight city council members were shot to death near Paris.

The main lesson that should emerge from the Virginia Tech killings is that we need to work harder to identify and cope with dangerously unstable personalities.

It is a problem for Europeans as well as Americans, one for which there are no easy solutions — such as passing more gun control laws.

One can only hope that American citizens with open eyes, those who can see clearly, along with the rest of the world, that tight gun control laws are the only answer, will provide cogent and convincing arguments sufficient to draw their fellow countrymen back into the stream of reasonable opinion.

Table of contents for Gun control

  1. America in denial over gun control
  2. America still in denial over gun control
  3. Melt the Guns

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About Writing:

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. Franz Kafka letter to Oskar Pollak January 27, 1904

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