Re: Armed to the Teeth, and Free by Stephen P. Halbrook

Michael S Lorrey (mike@lorrey.com)
Mon, 07 Jun 1999 19:17:48 -0400

Cynthia wrote:

> > Do the Swiss allow their convicted violent criminals and certified
> > mentally incompetent to possess arms?
>
> Of course not. First of all, the Swiss have effectively stopped defective people
> from breeding over a period of hundreds of years, so that the incidence of
> defective people is lower than ours (but not as low as it is for the Jews and
> Japanese).

Actually there are some serious inbred heritable diseases in both populations.

> And the few defective people they do have, are either in their families care, or
> in some kind of institution (mental hospital or prison).

Tay-Sachs Syndrome is rather widespread, too much for institutionalization. As for the sort of rebelliousness that normally winds you up in prison, I'm sure that hundreds of years of repression will tend to breed that out, though it seems like the rest, if they weren't killed in the Ghetto rebellion, are now doing quite fine in Isreal. As John Stewart, the jewish comedian recently said,"the Jews in Isreal are different from Jews here. The Jews here are your pacifist liberal democrat Jews, while the Jews in Isreal are the paranoid militant assault rifle toting Jews."

>
>
> But here we have the myth that there is no such thing as a defective person, just
> under funded schools. And instead of putting violent people into prison, we
> have social reformers who want to make the whole country a prison.

I often wonder which came first: cathode ray tubes used for entertainment, or the trend of increasing numbers of short sighted, astygmatic, near blind people.... (me being one of those astygmatics...)

Mike Lorrey