Good.

Walk tall there, boy!

Stay safe, stay 2nd amendment......or somesuch NRA bulls***.

Well I think Simon's head is large; always involved in espionage. (Name that tune)

"Get off your horse and drink your milk"

"Everything is air-droppable at least once."

"When the going gets tough, the tough call for close air support."

Was sat in a bar in New York over Christmas and a bloke dropped his gun on the floor. Picked it up, pocketed it and and carried on walking in. Was really, really scary especially as I had young family round, but I guess that's the norm in the US, which seems completely bonkers to me, and I suspect most people who have never witnessed it before.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

One thing that jumped out at me when first moving here, was the casual indifference to the law. Basically, if it's a law that people don't like, they ignore it. Mostly, the cops don't bother enforcing it either.

As an example, I moved to Texas in 1994, and people were very upset with recent changes to drinking laws, including the prohibition of drinking and driving. I argued that driving under the influence is a bad thing but I was corrected: what had been outlawed was doing both at the same time! To this day, though, every gas station has a big bin of iced beer by the counter, and people still grab a beer for the drive home* - now simply covering it with a brown paper bag. I have not heard of anyone being pulled over for swigging from a beer on the road - you pretty much have to be paralytic and actually smash into a cop car to get arrested for drink-driving over here.

Same with guns. Concealed carry has been legal for a while, but even before that it was (of course) legal to own guns as long as you kept them on your own property (which includes your car). Regardless, people would carry their guns around in holsters because what use is it left in the glove box?

* Texas is so big that people will give you driving distances by time. It makes total sense, even in Houston, where 3 miles can take 5 minutes or an hour depending if it's rush hour. Back in the day, distance would be given by beers, as that was the salient measure. "How far is it to your hunting lease?" "Oh, about a six-pack". So, know you know; you need a six-pack for the drive there, another for the drive home and however many you think you're going to drink while there.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

So the conservatives / gun nuts over here are freaking out about Obama's (read that name through gritted teeth for the appropriate effect) executive action to close some gaping holes in the background check system. They see it as an assault on their liberty/freedom/constitutional rights/small p****.

Of course, Obama is only taking action because a relatively small overhaul of the background check system - in that everyone has to have one to buy a gun - put forward after the Sandy Hook school massacre was blocked in the Senate by Republicans (and two bloody-handed Democrats). So now he's trying to close some of the holes in the swiss cheese of regulation around background checks, and the inevitable - hilarious if it wasn't so scary/serious - freakout is in full swing.

By way of background (pun intended), I always thought that it was illegal for regular people to have fully automatic weapons. It's not. At all. For a person to get one, they're required to go through an enhanced level of screening, which is a good thing. But I said person; what if the fully automatic weapon was being acquired by a corporation or trust? No background check. None. Nada. So if you want one, it's easier to set up a gun trust to buy it on your behalf than it is to buy it yourself. It's also harder to trace and there is no ability of the authorities to know where or to whom that incredibly dangerous weapon is going.

In 2000, there were 900 purchases of fully automatic weapons made by corporations/trusts. I'm assuming that a lot are for the movie industry, but there's still some private individuals in there. In 2014, there were 90,000...NINETY THOUSAND. Coincidentally (or not), since Obama became president, the number of militia groups in the U.S. has tripled.

The NRA endlessly bleats that the only protection against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. What if the bad guy has a bigger gun...that's fully automatic?

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.