Guns n’ Weather - Appetite for Refrigeration (and Destruction)
by Jamie Snashall on March 27, 2008 in Befuddled Foreigner
Lord Tennyson famously said in his poem ‘Locksley Hall’ that:
In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love
It’s almost the end of March, spring has officially sprung and, while today it’s double figures (in Celsius) outside, a cold change with snow is forecast for Friday …
People talk of a beautiful winter wonderland when the snow falls and silence descends on the outside world. That’s true – up to a point, that point being when the snow blower operates at midnight as it clears paths and the reversing noise of the plow truck adds its chorus to the cacophony.
Winter brings different fashion here, especially for women. Ugg boots are worn in public, while colored and patterned wellington boots (gumboots in Australia) are common. I referred in an earlier posting to the Aussie tendency to abbreviate everything, so gumboots become ‘gummies’, not on any account to be confused with the gummy shark (otherwise known as ‘flake’ and a very popular ingredient in fish and chips).
What possessed the Pilgrims to leave behind their cold, dark home in England and come to a location that’s even colder? People in Australia laugh at me because I’m not a fan of hot weather – why else would I enjoy the temperate maritime climate in Tasmania (like England, but drier) and Canberra, with its cold winters (by Aussie standards) and hot dry summers? I now take it all back – you know you’re in serious trouble when the weather becomes too cold for snow to form. And Boston is on the same latitude north at 42 degrees as Hobart, the Tasmanian capital, is south.
It’s enough to make a young man’s fancy turn to thoughts of … firearms! The ease of availability of weapons here is simply astonishing. This is another instance where the US is the outlier compared to other advanced democracies. There’s not much on which I’d agree with Australia’s recently departed Liberal (conservative) prime minister, John Howard, but on this issue, we’d have common cause.
There’s an old joke about Australia’s history as a penal colony in which modern-day travelers arrive and are asked by immigration officers if they have a criminal record, to which they reply “I wasn’t aware you still needed one!” I saw the Australian comedian Glynn Nicholas perform in December 1994 (just after I’d returned from backpacking in Canada and the US) and he described arriving by air in New York and being asked “Are you carrying a gun?” to which he replied, somewhat shocked, “No!” and the immigration officer said “Do you want one?”
I was in Minneapolis visiting friends last October and saw a performance at the Guthrie, the city’s famous theater. A sign on the outer doors read ‘The Guthrie bans guns on these premises’. Why? Would a dissatisfied patron really be likely to open fire on the actors?
Shooting rampages in American shopping centers and schools seem so common and yet nothing really changes. Last week I read the ‘State of the News Media 2008’, a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center and it described how the agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden. A pertinent quote from the executive summary:
A related trait is a tendency to move on from stories quickly. On breaking news events – the Virginia Tech massacre or the Minneapolis bridge collapse were among the biggest – the media flooded the zone but then quickly dropped underlying story lines about school safety and aging infrastructure.
Cheers (I think).
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