The British have banned handguns from the citizenry, but maybe Britain would be safer if they took the guns away from the royal guards. They’ve had a number of screw-ups in the past couple years with their firearms involving accidental discharges and, just recently, losing the keys to their gun lock up so they couldn’t access them when they were needed (recent crime statistics show that criminals in Britain have not had quite so much trouble accessing their firearms). Many gun rights advocates (like myself) criticize the harsh gun laws in Europe, but now I’m beginning to think there is reason to be cautious about arming everyone there. As these goof ups and Europeans’ reaction to the war on terror have illustrated, quite a lot of people in Europe are idiots.

The son of the woman recently killed for allegedly being an Israeli collaborator says he was tortured into making up a story of his mother’s involvement with a militants’s death. So how again is it going to bring peace to give the Palestinians a state when the place is run by evil murderers? I don’t know how someone can blame a travesty like this on the Israelis, but I’m sure there’s someone in is Europe smart enough to figure out that conundrum.

Maureen Dowd has a new column out today and I thought I’d try my hand at bashing it like everyone else, but instead I’ve decided to take the road less traveled and defend her writing. I got confused early on in the editorial, though, when she made reference to how Reagan could not walk. If that’s some sort of symbolic dig at him, I don’t get it. Anyway, I gathered that the main point of her column is that Bush is more focused on jogging than doing anything substantial which is decent enough (though her column is the most I’ve ever heard of Bush jogging). The point is not the point she makes, though, it’s the technical accomplishment of it. Dowd spends most of the column taking a very negative tone towards Bush and making many of her opinion of him quite clear while barely every making an actual argument on any issue. Hell, there’s probably two sentences worth of argument in that whole column, and yet, there is a whole column! If I had her efficiency at using resources, I could write whole books using just the political arguments I come up with in one hour. Naysayers may claim that anyone could write like that, but I would then challenge them to match Dowd’s tone for an entire column. Maybe someone could do it for a few sentences, but not for a whole editorial? I doubt it. And, until you can, I’d say cut Maureen Dowd some slack.

On another note, there was some poetry in her column: “At the risk of sounding feline, I must say that ‘bovine’ leaves me supine and is not fit for ‘Nightline,’ much less ‘Frontline.'” That gave me a chuckle, though I have no clue what it means.

Laurence Simon has analyzed the painstaking detail the U.S. Army put into the different scenarios in the computer game America’s Army. He got the idea for the post from reading one of mine, which, by the unwritten rules of the IMAO website, means the idea is my idea. Thus, if you like the post, remember to come back and praise me for it.