You'd noticed that too, huh?

David, you're really starting to frustrate me. You clearly don't understand that we're, like, better and different, because we're, like, so good. And stuff.

Get on the program, dude.

Hm, interesting.

I'm not a big 2nd Amendment fan (I think handguns, for example, should be banned). But Gen. Wallace's statement may be a bit misleading. I think it's fairly well-known that not "everybody" has guns or has the right to own guns.

Here's an interesting Washington Post article on the subject.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A26394-2003Feb4¬Found=true

"Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said last month that officials had handed out 'hundreds of thousands of weapons' since the Bush administration began deploying additional forces to the Persian Gulf.

One group largely left out of the gun distribution has been Shiite Muslims, who make up about 55 percent of the population but whose allegiance has been questioned by Hussein and other top leaders, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims."

Did I draw any conclusions? I don’t think I drew any conclusions. :)

Good points, Derek, and even after finding figures (which I didn'’t quote on grounds that they were insufficiently pithy) stating that the number of firearms per capita in Iraq was comparable to that in the US, I certainly wasn’t going to jump to the conclusion that they’re as evenly distributed.

My position on the Second Amendment is that, like the “twenty dollars” clause in the Seventh, it’s part of the price we pay for having the rest of the Bill of Rights. Messing with any of it would open up Pandora’s box.

I do think the level of protection an armed populace provides against tyranny is generally overrated in this country — by the same process of ignoring any historical or, God help us, foreign evidence to the contrary that underlies so much of American political thinking.

That said, I also think it’s interesting — and, I suppose, for a certain type of American paranoid, even reassuring — how much difficulty the US military is having with these lightly-armed irregulars.

(To those of us who would prefer a swift conclusion to the war with minimal loss of life, of course it’s not reassuring at all. So much for high tech.)