King, if you prefer your gun laws, so be it. I can sit right here in Iowa, order any legal firearm I wish (including handguns), have it shipped to a local licensed dealer, and not only is there no registration, but there's not even a requirement that any phone call be made to approve my purchase--because my CC permit essentially makes me pre-approved by the state. Sorry you were misled, or overreacted on how hard it is to buy guns in this country vs elsewhere--especially from "across the sea" (which requires either obtaining an import license or paying a fairly significant fee to someone who already has one).
And I suggest you look at Salopian's first post, relative to how WE (assuming he meant the US is the greatest nation on earth, not the Brits) rolled over on a lead shot ban, how we pollute, etc etc. I was only responding in kind. If you expect Americans to sit around and take BS like that, regardless of whether we've now elected a kinder and gentler president (which remains to be seen, unless you think politicians always follow through on all their promises), then think again--at least as far as this American is concerned. And if you prefer British gun laws to ours, please stand up and be counted. Likely all by yourself.
As for who does or doesn't pull one's weight, a small number of Canadians being killed can look large because of your small population. Canada, like the US (and Great Britain) is a part of NATO. Has Canada ever, since WWII, spent anything approaching the same % of your GDP on defense that we spend on ours? And remember, those were OUR guys, sitting in Germany in disproportionate numbers from the end of WWII to the fall of the Soviet Union, while the rest of NATO made disproportionately smaller contributions. And, for the most part, hid behind our nuclear umbrella.
Great Britain has been one of our few stalwart allies in Iraq, although just about all the British troops are now gone.
As for our Patriot Act, I suggest the both of you might want to look at what the Brits did to German spies (more or less the equivalent of the scum we swept up off the battlefields of Afghanistan and shipped to Gitmo) in WWII. They were given a choice: cooperate or die. Most of them chose to cooperate, which is one reason--along with breaking the Enigma codes--why British intelligence played such an important role in the war. But then maybe using sleep deprivation, making someone sleep in a cold or hot cell, and even waterboarding them (which we do to some of our own troops, in training) is harsher than the Brits summarily executing German spies in WWII (as we did in this country as well). Somehow we forget that stalwart leaders like FDR and Churchill helped us win that war. Weak leaders, like Chamberlain, might have taken action to stop Hitler years earlier rather than promising "peace in our time". Whether our "kinder and gentler" policy towards terrorists pays off in the long run remains to be seen, but I would remind you that virtually the entire American counterterrorist community promised that we would be attacked again following 9/11. Whatever else President Bush did or did not do, we were not attacked again. Nor did we round up Arabs and put them in camps, as we did Japanese-Americans back in WWII. So how "harsh" we've been, or how much we've violated international law, needs to be put into historical perspective--doesn't it? And we did win WWII, lest anyone forget the results of those even harsher tactics.
And I'm still waiting for the Europeans (and toss in the Canadians, if you like) to handle any sort of significant military crisis all on their own. Darfur . . . part of a former British colony. Nothing's happened. Rwanda . . . former Belgian colony. Nothing happened. Somalia . . . formerly British and Italian colony. Americans went in and died. Bosnia and Kosovo . . .UN troops sat back and watched Bosnians being slaughtered, and the other European nations did nothing until the US got involved.
Sorry to distract from the lead shot discussion, to which I believe I've made a more meaningful contribution than most others here, citing from a report from another state that's contemplating additional lead restrictions. And I can promise you that I do not intend to roll over to the no science/bad science nonsense of banning lead shot for upland hunting. Seeing that I write for American hunting magazines, I intend to do my very best--providing the editors cooperate, and I think at least some of them will--to make sure that American upland hunters know we're being sold a bill of goods on the "dangers" posed by lead used in upland hunting.
