It's the fact that the free-for-all fuck-you ethics of US society means that you can never rely on friends or strangers or the police or the government or pretty much anyone to treat you with sanity, respect and consideration.

US society?

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

Guns are a function of paranoia that has built up over many years.  If you ask most people, you'll get little to no acknowledgement of the fact that you're probably more likely to get stabbed on the streets on Des Moines than you are on the streets of New York -- or that you're just flat-out a helluva lot likely to be the victim of violent crime today than you were 30 years ago.  That's at best.  At worst you'll get Paulist babbling about the FBI -- or more likely some vague bitching about "the feds" -- lying about the statistics.

The interesting thing to me about these events -- Columbine, Aurora, all of them -- is how they've sprung up after violent crime peaked in the late-'80s/early-'90s.  Maybe that's a function of when I grew up.  I was 15 when Columbine happened.  But nothing really jumps to mind from the era before the crime peak, unless you want to count Kent State or something.

I've never owned a gun.  Grew up in the South, with kinfolk in rural Georgia, so obviously it's not an alien thing to me.  (I even learned to shoot when I was a boy scout.  Just about destroyed my shoulder the first time I shot a 12-gauge.)  But I've walked New York in the middle of the night.  I've worked in Southeast DC -- one of the worst areas in the country -- in a building surrounded by an iron fence and barbed wire.  And I've played shows in some neighborhoods in West Palm that would keep an average suburbanite awake well into his 50s.

Yet I never felt any need to have a gun.  There's only ever been one or two occasions when I've even felt mildly intimidated by an area -- and one was just a couple blocks from Mig's place in London! -- and in both cases I put my head down and went on my way.

The fact is that, although violent crime is much higher here than it is in Europe, your chances of being a victim in an American city are pretty damned low.  And once you adjust for the fact that the vast majority of murders are committed by and against people who know each other and have criminal reasons to be looking for each other (gangbangers fighting over turf, etc), it becomes pretty obvious that the risk for most people is just about zilch.

But the paranoia remains.  And for that I blame the press, which has continued jacking up coverage of violent crimes despite the plummeting rates, and the public for a culture that continuously pushes things to be afraid of and faux-heroism.  At base, most people know it's all bullshit, but the "Better to be safe..." mentality mixes with the "I'M JOHN MCCLAIN, BIATCH!!" mentality, and the results speak for themselves.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

So Tallahasseeans have a general understanding that the South Side of town is the "dangerous" side.  And it's true, in the sense that there's almost no violent crime on the North Side.

People speak of it as though you should never venture down there, lest you get shot.

So take a guess at how many murders -- in a city of 182,000 -- there typically are per year in Tallahassee.
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Five.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

I fully buy into the idea of people traditionally owning rifles for hunting, it's still true that in some parts of the US a rifle can be the difference between meat or no meat on the table. But aside from that, gun ownership was falling in the first half of C20, remember guns may have won the west, but psychologically after OK Corral, civilisation required that guns vanish from the street. America, as a civilised country was growing up. Even the police were unarmed until the very worst excesses of Capone.

no, it was  the civil rights era, when the racist right re-armed to "protect" themselves and their women from the rampaging other. Equally, black people armed themselves to protect themselves from the very real threat from the KKK.

that was when the arms race started. 50 years ago, not 400.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Rupert Murdoch steps down from NI boards - Telegraph

Companies House filings show that Mr Murdoch stepped down from the boards of the NI Group, Times Newspaper Holdings and News Corp Investments in the UK last week. He also quit a number of News Corp's US boards, the details of which have yet to be disclosed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

News Corporation played down the significance of the resignations as "nothing more than a corporate housecleaning exercise prior to the company split".

For Viacom chief Sumner Redstone, airing shows with offensive content isn't a problem. Redstone grew up in the entertainment business. After earning a law degree and acquainting himself with the intricacies of tax law, he joined his father's movie theater chain. Redstone's crucial insight was to recognize that, while new means of distribution might evolve, content was the vital commodity. He built his father's business accordingly, eventually acquiring Viacom in a hostile takeover. The corporation now owns 170 media networks and thousands of programs, including Jersey Shore, which celebrates binge drinking, brawling, and the vigorous pursuit of venereal disease and melanoma.

In the corporate mindset, the specifics of "content" are irrelevant. Either you generate the necessary margin, or you cease to exist. "Content is king," as Redstone is famously fond of pointing out. And profit is God.