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Its gun control – but not as we know it

August 15th, 2006 · Posted by Skuds in Life · 3 Comments · Life

Over in Dallas, Texas there is a crime problem. Apparently it is the most dangerous city in the US with murders at a level four times as high as the average for the US. But the council has a cunning plan: as the article says “alarmed by rising gun crime in Dallas… …councillors have advanced a plan to ban replica firearms”

Real guns are still fine, obviously, but those nasty toy guns have got to go. I imagine there will be an amnesty where children can hand in their cap guns, spud guns and water pistols and get given a real gun to replace them. No figures are given to compare how many people were killed by real guns and how many were killed by replicas, but I’m sure the council know what they are doing.

Actually, the scariest bit of the whole article is this quote from the manager of a toy shop in Dallas:

“And westerns taught us lessons. The good guys always won, the bad guys always lost and it was easy to tell who was who.”

It explains a lot if that how the average Texan thinks and if they do indeed get taught about life by westerns. These days it is not so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, but you have to wonder if GW Bush got taught by westerns and can only handle foreign policy by imagining the ‘bad guys’ as an ‘axis of evil’ or a vast inter-connected Al Qaeda/muslim conspiracy.

I watched a lot of westerns as part of an O/A Level film studies course. We learnt about archetypes in the westerns, and how the genre could be used as an allegory for certain aspects of life but we were never told that they were real. Admittedly our teacher didn’t actually tell us never to base foreign policy on Shane: it seemed so obvious it didn’t need saying, but then this was Essex and not Texas.

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3 Comments so far ↓

  • JamesZ

    So the state that executes the most people and has done for years has the highest gun death rate, I think that says all that needs to be said about the traditional arguement of the pro-death penatly supporter, ‘it’s a deterrent’ – well clearly not.

    It doesn’t surprise me too much that they think banning replica guns might have an answer, the motto of the politician there must be ‘anything but take on the NRA’. That reminds me of Eddie Izzard’s parody of the NRA’s arguement that it is not guns that kill people it is people that kill people – ‘well I think bullets have something to do with it!’.

  • Amy

    I went to Dallas last summer with some friends and I swear that every man we saw aged over 40 was wearing cowboy boots and a stetson, drove a pickup truck which were all fitted with somewhere handy to store the gun. Very scary.

  • Skuds

    To be fair, the article was about Dallas being the most dangerous city. It didn’t say anything about Texas as a state – but I think your pont still holds.