What a dumb thing to say. If they had US gunlaws, there would have been guns on both sides and a lot of deaths
On the one hand, honest law-abiding citizens often don't think they need guns, while criminals know they do.
On the other hand, one could have laws which make it easy for responsible citizens like shopowners to get guns, easy for security guards to be armed, but which don't permit the less well-established to get permits.
Still, armed shopkeepers would hardly have done much in a riot of this size. But one would expect armed police - acting under a policy which says it's better to use deadly force on a massive scale than sit back and let even one more window get broken - to have changed the riot to one that lasted for hours instead of days.
While addressing the issue needs to be done in a way that avoids the appearance of giving in to blackmail, however, widespread poverty and unemployment should not be allowed to persist; it
is asking for trouble. An economy that denies many people a reasonable opportunity to convert their labor to wealth is flawed, and bleating about "competitiveness" and "globalization" as excuses for doing nothing is not acceptable.
but sometimes even non-violent protesting is portrayed in a derogatory sense by the mainstream media, also.
You mean like the protests in San Francisco that resulted in innocent law-abiding citizens experiencing delays in getting home from work, because some BART stations had to be closed for safety reasons?
Let me make this clear:
It's wrong to violate the rights of other people in
any way, great or small.
It's wrong to do violence on their persons.
It's wrong to steal or damage their property.
It's wrong to inconvenience them by blocking streets, interfering with traffic, or otherwise hindering their lawful movements.
There is, of course, the political agenda of affirming the premise that the democratic governments of the industrialized world are so wonderful that there are no imperfections they have that can't be fixed by writing letters to the editor and going to the ballot box. While I agree that we don't need a violent revolution, it does
also seem to be true that just choosing between the two major parties is not going to result in the steps being taken that are needed to bring the world out of its economic morass and provide a decent life for all.
Write whole books instead of letters to the editor.
Form a third party instead of just voting.
That, I think, is the appropriate level of response to the current situation, not violent rioting or violent revolution.
