The BBC Have You Say about the Virginia Tech shootings has (predictably) turned into a debate about the right to bear arms. There are, of course, many Americans who still believe that a society with free access to guns is safer than one without. And it doesn’t matter how much you try to persuade them otherwise, they are incapable of seeing sense.
A couple of particularly stupid comments that I’ve seen:
If more people had guns, the shooter wouldn’t have gone so far before ending the rampage at his own convenience. It sickens me that there was no armed resistance. Even with gun control, the criminals will get guns when they want them. The law abiding citizens are left ducking for cover.
Drew D, Philadelphia, United States
So the problem is that there weren’t enough guns on the scene. Does that make any sense at all?
to all you Europeans using this moment for more schadenfreude, you’ll never understand Americans belief in the right to bear arms. That’s why you had Hitler and the unelected EUcrats now.
Jason Harris, Dallas
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on 1930s Germany. I don’t even know what their laws on private gun ownership were back then. But I strongly suspect that the reparations that Germany had to make after WWI were a far more important factor in the rise of the Nazis than the amount of gun ownership.
Remember people, guns don’t kill people – bullets kill people. Well, I suppose you could kill someone by hitting them over the head really hard with a gun.
Oh, and if you enjoy picking the best nonsense out of the stream of ill-informed bollocks that usually passes for debate on Have Your Say then you’ll love Speak You’re Branes.
A group of friends of mine and me used to play an online game called the Have Your Say Challenge, the rules were pretty simple and went something along the lines of – You are allowed one post on the bbc have your say forums per day, it may not be a direct reply to another post nor mention another poster by name. The day’s winner will be the poster with the most recommendations.Of course, there were a lot more rules added as the game evolved extra marks for being quoted on the front page, avoiding the newly added ‘moderation’ system and so on. We did get pretty good at judging the ‘mood of the nation’ and frequenty all got in the top 10 highest recommended posters on any given topic (the subject was more or less irrelevant but it did behoove you to chose something that would obviously be popular or controversial)I suppose the point of mentioning this is that, for all we know, everyone could be playing this game (or versions of it) and the views on the BBC Have Your Say forums represent nothing so much as the conniving whimsies of a bunch of cynical post-internet gamesters, maybe…