Fair

The world is a strange and wondrous place. Some Africans are fighting a war over land using bows and arrows. It doesn't look like any war I've ever seen, but it seems to be pretty serious: 20 people have died in the fighting.


Automobilismo: Taruffi batte cinque primati mondiali.
    Then I'm watching a video about an old record setting Italian race car and the narrator is talking a mile a minute (in Italian. I don't understand just what does he say).
    I'm looking at this old car with absolutely no safety features and I'm reminded of ToddG's rant about gun safety and I realize that the gun community's attitude about safety is very similar to the attitude about automobile safety that was prevalent back in the 1950's. Yes, these machines can be dangerous if you are careless, so you should be careful, but even if you are careful, sometimes bad things happen and you have an accident and people get hurt. That's too bad, but that's just the way it is.
   Then it hits me: why don't mass murderers use automobiles to wreak their vengeance on the world? A car is at least as dangerous as a gun, maybe even more so, but you don't hear about nut cases deliberately driving into crowds of people with the intention of killing as many people as possible. I mean you occasionally hear about it happening by accident, and some of those accidents might have been deliberate, but those seem to be very rare.
    Getting back to our Africans. I suspect there is some kind of tradition or unspoken social contract that prevents them from using guns, and now I'm thinking that there is something similar going on that prevents people from using cars for mass murder.

P.S. Talking to Jack about the Africans the other day and he mentioned how Benjamin Franklin proposed arming the Continental Army with bows and arrows. They had almost the same range and were as least as accurate as the muskets the British were using, and they were a heck of a lot cheaper. Jack was of the opinion that they used guns because they didn't want to be laughed at. I think it was because little balls of lead were cheaper than an accurate hand made arrow. Plus balls of lead would be so deformed on impact as to render them useless for return fire, whereas arrows were more likely to be undamaged and sent back.

Update May 2020 replaced missing video. Using the wayback machine I found the term 'il bisiluro di Taruffi' which turned up a couple of similar videos. The other one can be found here. A later model Bisiluro has appeared here also.