AgentDoubleS wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 12:20 am
Thanks for sharing your experiences Timmy including your stories from New Jersey. I wonder if you ever dug into why the place is called ‘New’ Jersey.
Europe/UK has a pretty similar attitude to firearms too. Even the targets are being ‘dehumanised’. I can no longer call a shot a ‘head shot’ or zero my pistol with a ‘neck hold’.
A real shame considering the continent’s extraordinary contribution to firearms design and development.
Yes, it is a real shame. I feel as if the remaining gun companies, like Henry and Savage, should move to Western states, where their products are appreciated and the tax base would be also. However, it's not likely to happen: Savage, especially, has walked a financial tightrope for years. This is sad and just wrong, considering it is one of the most accurate production rifles, especially considering the reasonable price tag they bear.
A lot of the Eastern Seaboard states have names derived from the English: New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia come to mind. The Western states, by contrast, have many Spanish names (as does Florida!), and there are many Native American names for states, too. Spanish and Native American names are often dismissed in the USA when the facts are brought up, but I felt it was always instructive to point out that Spanish New Mexico was founded before Plymouth Rock or Jamestown. Or, that Acoma Pueblo is the oldest continually inhabited dwelling in North America).It wasn't a way to win friends or influence people when I pointed these things out, but at least people avoided their arrogant insistence that only one culture mattered after I pointed these and other facts out. (I also had a lot of fun showing jackalope pictures and other Western jokes to them -- for all of their sophistication and culture, such as it was, many did not know they were being "had")
I envy India, which has its own place names, and not those derived from colonial masters, along with the wonderful National Anthem. The USA's national anthem, in case you did not know, is a song about a battle in an obscure war that ended in a draw, written by a slave owner, and sung to the tune from an English drinking society. This is shameful, I think! You've got a plethora of cultures which have much to teach and appreciate there!
Yes, the UK's gun laws are pretty bad. They are also old, especially when one considers Scottish history. But then, there's no shortage of people who support gun laws with the rationale that we must only allow the "right people" to have access to them, is there?
Regarding the rest of Europe, Finland stands out as a reasonable place, but it's a fairly new nation with a history that proves the usefulness of an armed population in the face of tyranny and dictatorship. Isn't it hypocritical that nations which blubber on about democracy and the power of the people don't even trust their own citizens to own arms?
From a personal perspective on this curious situation, I look at Polish history as instructive: Marshall Piłsudski, the founder of Modern Poland (Think of Gandhi, Washington, William Tell, etc.) started sportsman's rifle clubs in Galicia, the province of Austria Hungary that ruled "their" part of Partitioned Poland. (The Austrians were quite happy to have access to Polish cannon fodder when fighting the Tsarists, just like the British were at Monte Cassino and the Falaise Gap in WW2) These clubs were the foundation of the Modern Polish army -- which, in a few years, whipped the Bolsheviks at the Battle of the Wisła. This is but one example of many that can be supposed to have instructed nations running empires to look down on personal gun ownership, don't you think?