>Arms training, by contrast, instills people with a sense of
>responsibility and respect for other people. If the politicians were not
>so distant from the real effects of weapons, they would be less blase
>about using them.
I responded with the statement which GN quoted:
============ K. Mickey:
Both Hitler and Mussolini were extensively trained in arms during the Great War. This training did not, as far as I can tell, deter them from the use of arms for even one minute. Nor was Winston Churchill, who trained at Sandhurst and experienced war as a soldier and a journalist, ever particularly noted as a politician who shied away from the use of arms.
==========
To which you replied:
>GN: Yet the Swiss and the Israelis are armed to the
>teeth and I don't think we have many instances of the
>Swiss going beserk.
My comment was about the conduct of Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill as office-holders, not as private individuals. I certainly did not accuse them of going berserk.
But as long as you have brought it up, it is interesting that the Swiss and Israeli examples are often mentioned as showing that societies can be well armed without producing widespread mayhem.
But while Swiss and Israeli military reservists are required to keep their weapons at home they do so as part of the state's armed forces, presumably subject to regular training, inspection, etc. I don't know if in Switzerland they are either required or allowed to keep ammo, though, or if that would only be given to them on mobilization. (Just as GIs in barracks might well have access to their weapons but not to ammo without a superior's OK.) It would make a difference on the ability to be an effective berserker. Actually, it would be interesting to consider the rural French, who are much attached to the right to shoot game but who seem on the whole not to shoot each other as often as Americans do.
>GNThere was I think a beserker Israeli who took out a bunch of Arabs a few
years
>ago but generally such activity is organized by the state.
Yeah, you mean Baruch Goldstein, I think his name was, whose tomb is a shrine for some folks. But there have been a number of lesser incidents involving armed settlers and Palestinians (and of course attacks by armed Palestinians on Israelis). The Israeli situation is of course complicated by the different regimes in Israel proper and in the territories and by the fact that Arab citizens of Israel usually don't serve in the IDF and are thus not armed and the non-Israeli-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories are not supposed to be armed (except for the PA Police). State and non-state action get hard to sort out sometimes when the policy of the state encourages vigilante behavior even if it doesn't explicitly authorize it.
You then mention and disagree with a press article which argues that the
threat of return fire deters shooters:
>GN: If the "threat of return fire" were the main deterrent than I think that
few
>would go beserk in the South, in places like Arkansas.
If you are referring to the two kids in Arkansas who shot the girl students and a teacher, they knew damned well that there would be no return fire. But more generally people who go berserk are surely not necessarily acting on a "rational calculation" of the odds against them. K.Mickey