I saw this Saudi news article on the shooting, and thought it very interesting. I dont support, or condone, or have any position on the article, but would like to post it, as it is interesting.
Arab News, Saudi Arabia -- Heavy Price
The massacre of 32 students at Virginia Tech University has left Americans dumbstruck. It is the latest and so far the most bloody in a series of murderous attacks at US educational institutions. At each of the appalling crime scenes, youngsters have settled grudges or played out video game fantasies with powerful automatic weapons. And those weapons are sold over the counter in virtually each of America's 50 states. However at this hour of America's horrified grief, in which all decent people worldwide share, it is worth pointing out that there is a lesson here which, on past evidence, no US administration will choose even to hear, let alone learn.
That lesson is this: if a suicide bomber walks into a crowded market in Iraq and blows himself up along with 32 innocent bystanders, it is terrorism. If the same thing happens in America, it is not. Americans -- and by extension anyone in the country -- enjoy a constitutional right to bear arms. However anachronistic this may seem to outsiders given that the days of frontiersmen and citizens' militias are long past, there still remains a powerful lobby, funded by the weaponry manufacturers themselves, that defends what it claims is a fundamental right.
Yet at the same time, the Americans lose no time in insisting that others around the world surrender their weaponry -- whether the weaponry belongs to Afghan tribesmen, Iraqi neighborhood patrols or, on a larger scale, the nuclear arms of North Korea and the suspected Iranian atomic program. The scale of the weapon is irrelevant. There is an inherent moral contradiction in the rights that Americans seek to maintain for their own citizens and the demands they make on the citizens of other countries.
Let's let others decide what to make of this...
