DT, you can absolutely believe one thing about me:
I do not for a single second believe that Americans are more, or, less, primitive, than absolutely anybody else on this planet.
I have lived in many different parts of this planet of ours, and if I have ever learned one thing, that is that people really are the same at the end of the day, with the same fears and desires that everybody else has too.
Not only are we the same, but we are in the same boat too.
People can and do distinguish between the perpetrators of the current mess, your religious right wing loonies and the NeoCons and their Spokesman-In-Chief, Mr. Bush, and the rest of the American people that have absolutely nothing to do with the situation at hand.
RE guns, as I said earlier, gunpowder has very little to do with results, quite to the contrary, the physical law of
action = reaction applies in all other areas of RealPolitik and life as well.
Your
corrupt Military-Industrial-Complex that your wise President Eisenhower very rightly warned you guys about has raped US society left and right, no other nation hemorrhages more of it's tax payers money into an army that cannot even win a battle in Third World sand boxes like Iraq or Afghanistan, while 45 million of your people do not have health care.
That is a real crime. It's not that you guys could not afford it, it's that you have been conned into believing that the money is more wisely wasted on the army.
In real life however, more bucks have never bought less bang have they.
Never minding that the wars were totally wrong from the outset, but on top of that there is nothing but total failure in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That is actually nothing to do with the US army though, it's only logical: occupying a country is easy and you don't need anything even remotely resembling the outfit you guys have to achieve that. Staying in an occupied country against the wishes of the citizens is impossible though. Not even the Soviets could achieve that in medieval Afghanistan, even though they pretty much had every atrocity at their disposal to make it work.
Still did not work, did it.
The only army any democratic country needs is one that serves as a sufficient deterrent to monkey business.
And we don't even need much of that.
The US, the EU, China, and some more places on this globe have total immunity from monkey business.
Who would hope to invade us after all ?
Let alone stay ?
The mere idea is a joke.
Nationally, in the US itself, where guns are rampant, you pay the price of personal security at the cost of the highest crime rate of Western societies, at the cost of never knowing if you are the next one to be car jacked or shot.
Actually though it is not the guns, the Swiss have as many guns as you guys do without the commensurate crime rate.
I think the aggression in your society is a result of decades of policies where people have been sold a policy that benefitted the very rich mostly, that left the middle class behind whose incomes have pretty much stayed the same since decades in the face of rising costs, while the very poor in your country have no safety net.
That can and does make aggressive, I believe.
Again, that is not anything specifically American, all people all over the world would react in the same way when faced with certain inequalities.
What is sad though is that the enablers of Bush are the ones on the receiving end of the inequalities, it's the people with lower education, with less life income, the people that go and serve in the army to get an education, that vote Republican. You never saw the Cheneys or Bushes serving in Vietnam, did you.
I think the aggression in US society will stay until your social inequalities are fairly addressed.
Do not get me wrong, I am not in favour of an all out welfare state where there is no incentive any more to do a days work.
A lot of our European countries way overdid that in the past, it's just as easy to get the pendulum swinging too far in either direction.
It is, as always, a question of finding and maintaining the right balance, welfare should exist in every society, but only for those who cannot help themselves, and taxes should be fairest to the "mostest", not the fewest, the state should be as small as it can, but as large as it needs to be to get the job done.
What simply is not true though is the US Republicans arguments running the country in a way that benefits maybe 20% of it's citizens that that is the only way to run a country.
You will not see a wealthier country anywhere in the world than Finland, a country where everybody has free health care, free education, where poverty just simply does not exist, where even the lowest of the low live in very very decent housing, and where still many people managed to get rich as entrepreneurs.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is not a we are cleverer / better / more beautiful than you guys argument, stuff like that is beyond imbecilic.
You are a great nation with a great economy as we are, I just think that the
distribution of wealth is currently too lopsided in your part of the world, and that leads to some of the problems we are currently seeing, this is not the main reason behind oil driven Iraq, but still, wars are always a good distraction from national problems after all, aren't they.
:cheesy:. 
