Thursday, November 16, 2006

Odds and Ends

I have a news aggregator on my computer called "Findory" so I often get bizarre, but interesting stories. On the top of my "suggested" list this morning was the following story.

From USA Today: An Idaho town is mandating that all of its residents keep guns in their homes to protect against, wait for it.... Hurricane Katrina refugees. Ok, so that aside, the debate is centering around the relationship between bearing arms and citizenship in the US. Considering that I am currently reading Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America, it was interesting to see the parallel debates tying good and responsible citizenship to soldiery and armament. By the way, the book starts slow, but picks up about 50 pages in, after the interminable introductory chapter.

Anyway, I'm not going to get into a second-amendment debate here (although having grown up somewhere without guns for 5 years, clearly NOT Virginia, I am on the Brady side of the line), but I'd like to point something out: they Idahoans are demonizing the Katrina refugees as bringers of crime and danger. The predominantly minority/low income refugees. This is bad enough, but did no one tell them that Greenleaf is a suburb of BOISE? Nowhere near the gulf coast. Not even a little. I'd be more worried about a submarine-launched attack by the Japanese (which happened in Oregon during WWII) than Katrina refugees. But that is just me.

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