Matthew McConaughey: Take the time to watch the whole thing if you can. He was born in Uvalde, where his mother taught kindergarten less than a kilometre from Robb Elementary school, where the latest Texas school shooting took place. That shouldn't make any difference, but to me, it does. (I realise this is a crunching gear change but it reminds about wondering why Joanna Lumley was so involved in the Gurkha Justice Campaign until I found out that her father served as an officer in the British Indian Army's 6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles in Burma during World War II. She was probably brought up on stories of the wonder and valour of Gurkhas.) Shouldn't make any difference, but to me, it does. Cleanses the palate of any suspicion of bandwagon jumping or virtue signalling.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Well that's it, that one sentence above. Americans talk about it as if Moses brought it down from Mount Sinai inscribed onto a stone tablet. A truth they hold to be self evident. To almost anyone brought up in the UK, I would suggest, it is all but incomprehensible. What was it that Wilde wrote? 'We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language'. It is a cultural chasm.
Take a look at this video of Niall Ferguson, born in Scotland but now a naturatlised US citizen and one of the few people in public life to right of me https://youtu.be/LBxw53tEurY?t=3520
Condoleezza Rice, former US secretary of state joins Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, and John Cochrane to discuss what the scourge of gun violence says about America’s social and cultural divides. Ferguson, as I do, appears to think that the other three have gone stark staring mad.
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