t'aint natural laments about "gun freaks":
We're not getting at Americans here... just gun freaks.
Despite what you might think, only a minority of Americans are gun freaks.
We have our own gun freaks in the UK - the chap who perpetrated the Dunblane massacre springs to mind.
We have had one such incident, while America has had dozens, because our gun freaks can't get the tools.
Let's have a peek at the numbers, eh what? The U.K. has approximately 60,000,000 people who've lived under a monarchy since history began.
The U.S. has approximately 285,000,000 people, many of whom went there to escape that sort of tyrannical government in the first place.
Many people look at and admire the U.S. with its free, open society. Yet they are quick to hop on their soapbox and criticize the entire nation for things that result from having that free society.
The U.S. has always allowed relatively unrestricted access to firearms...primarily and originally out of necessity due to the wild, untamed areas of the country (and no, I'm not talking about NYC) where having a firearm meant the difference between maintaining your place on the food chain...or not. There were other reasons, of course: the "every man a militia man" attitude of the first settlers being one of them.
Yes, Americans do die from gunshots, accidentally and on purpose. They believe this to be the "cost of doing business" in a free, open society. Better than the U.K.? Or just different? If Americans were really as outraged about their "gun problem" as the rest of the world would LIKE them to be about it, the laws would have changed long ago. It is to everyone <i>else's</i> high indignation that they're not.
But blaming the U.S. for the "gun problem" in the rest of the world is like blaming Colombia or Turkey or Afghanistan for the "drug problem" in the rest of the world.
What does this have to do with helicopters? Well, when a chap fires a rifle at a helicopter, the two subjects sort of become related, no? If it was not the first time it happened, it will certainly not be the last in these post-9/11 times.