"Palme D'Or" for Mike Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11&

[Chaerophon]

People in the US have been calling for more law and order for decades, and in response we have more people incarcerated that any nation on the planet. We also have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to defend ourselves with guns if we like. But, you entirely side-stepped my argument that the problem was drug use, and not firearm use.

The problem is not drug use, Kandrathe. The murder rate in Washington is 46.2 per 100,000. Methamphetamine use is still classified as relatively low in that city, at 0.2% (http://www.kci.org/meth_info/june98_trends.htm). In Vancouver, where I live, meth use is very prevalent and we have one of the highest per capita injection drug use rates in all of North America. Yet our murder rate is a mere 2.1 per 100,000. Don't tell me that it is due to racial makeup, either, because our city has an extraordinarily diverse racial makeup. This is about the culture of violence and social issues.

Guns pervade a culture of violence. Not provable by specific statistics, perhaps, but undoubtedly provable by that old tool, common sense.

Interestingly enough, I'm not in any kind of opposition to the acquisition of guns through a process of stringent registration. However, if you can buy a Tech-9 at the local sporting goods store, there's a problem. Gun crime is not even a part of the mainstream Canadian consciousness; however, in the States, gun use, and the potential threat of gun use, is a constant. Furthermore, Canada boasts a FAR more extensive welfare and unemployment insurance sector and has consequently avoided the rampant ghettoism that pervades American cities.

Rather than solving the problem at its root, mainstream American libertarian response is to "protect one's self" rather than source the problem. Consequently, everyone buys a gun, the state incarcerates 10s of thousands more people, and yet no one is willing to address the human security issue by attacking the problem at its source, which is the pervasive social inequality and ghettoism of the cities. Frankly, this is the same reason that the American response to their domestic "human security" issues post-9/11 was to spend more money on the military and "close up ranks" rather than say, for example, relieve third world debt or adapt their foreign policy in a more positive way. To my view, the positive human security externalities to be derived from a redistributionist state far outweigh any inconvenience imposed by higher taxation. In addition, it's probably worth adding that corporate tax fraud costs the average taxpayer far more than does welfare fraud.

Regardless, violence and murder rates are cultural issues in the United States. One must go back a couple of hundred years to find their roots. The American ethos of militant individualism and unilateralism isn't going to adapt any time soon, so I guess you're right, Kandrathe, buy as many guns as you can, and pray, because common sense flew out the window a long time ago.