Aurelius
Registered user
Greetings from (currently unbearably hot) Florida, Mike. I've been following with great interest your adventures out West, and felt the need to comment briefly on something you wrote in one of your most recent postings:
To be honest, I’m shocked – personally I was armed with a plastic comb and an extensive vocabulary. Over the course of the next few hours, I think long and hard about this. I’ve been reminded very forcibly that I’m a foreigner here and that some parts of American culture and its mores are totally alien to me. I don’t sleep well that night – I’m not saying that ‘carrying’ is wrong, I’d just let myself forget that I’m visiting a country where the carriage of firearms is a legitimate and, seen by many as an essential, option.
While the "Right to Bear Arms" is enshrined in our Bill of Rights, excercising that right is one area in which we Americans differ sharply. If you've ever followed one of the ubiquitous pro/anti gun threads on the ADVrider forum, you'll see little support for the practice of carrying concealed weapons, even among those like myself who have been involved in various shooting sports for most of our adult lives. The few who feel the need to carry concealed firearms are generally viewed as kooks, and quite propperly so, in my opinion. As proof of this, some of them have even been known to wear pro-IRA t-shirts.
I mention all this only because what you've expressed above is bound to give a false impression of the US to your British readers, many of whom seem determined to believe the worst about us already.
To be honest, I’m shocked – personally I was armed with a plastic comb and an extensive vocabulary. Over the course of the next few hours, I think long and hard about this. I’ve been reminded very forcibly that I’m a foreigner here and that some parts of American culture and its mores are totally alien to me. I don’t sleep well that night – I’m not saying that ‘carrying’ is wrong, I’d just let myself forget that I’m visiting a country where the carriage of firearms is a legitimate and, seen by many as an essential, option.
While the "Right to Bear Arms" is enshrined in our Bill of Rights, excercising that right is one area in which we Americans differ sharply. If you've ever followed one of the ubiquitous pro/anti gun threads on the ADVrider forum, you'll see little support for the practice of carrying concealed weapons, even among those like myself who have been involved in various shooting sports for most of our adult lives. The few who feel the need to carry concealed firearms are generally viewed as kooks, and quite propperly so, in my opinion. As proof of this, some of them have even been known to wear pro-IRA t-shirts.
I mention all this only because what you've expressed above is bound to give a false impression of the US to your British readers, many of whom seem determined to believe the worst about us already.