Evidence

I keep on saying to people that a hundred years ago it was excusable to advocate communism and many other things but that the last century was the greatest experimental laboratory the world has ever known and at the end of it there's absolutely no excuse for much of the nonsense which is still advocated.

It occurs to me that another instance of this is the argument about `gun control'.
Here's a quote from the article by Richard Munday:

" Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain)."

Here's some more:

" In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones."

Do I really need to say any more? Do the liberal, intellectual types with whom I spend my days have a leg to stand on? No, but it won't stop them telling me how stupid and violent and fat Americans are.