People like to think Texas is a throw back to the wild west
Crickey, you're complaining that you can't carry a handgun when driving from your house to the local shops ("the laws prevent most people from being able to protect themselves while in transit")?
Sounds like the wild west to me if you need to carry a gun to safely buy a pint of milk from your corner store...
Apologies, crazy European who doesn't see a lot of guns. I accept you live in a very different culture. And I understand you were making a different point. But wow, that's a heck of a different culture that needs to carry guns to the shops and back to feel safe. Sounds pretty cowboy movie territory.
Have you spent any time in a poorer country? If so you'll know what a precarious living a lot of people have, and how many literally die on the streets from starvation or disease. 2.50 might get you more, but not a lot more.
People rioted this year in India over the price of onions rising. People have rioted in Tunisia and Algeria over the prices of cooking oil and flour. These are not wealthy people. These are not people rioting over not being able to put enough gas in their 8 litre SUV, or not being able to upgrade to the latest games console.
These are people rioting over not being able to eat enough to live. Onions, cooking oil, flour.
You should be ashamed of yourself. Or at least offer to live on the equivalent salary in your own country, a living so close to starvation that if the price of onions goes up you might die.
Ok, so you are telling us what our social problems are having never visited here. Hmm, sets you at a little bit of a disadvantage there in claiming to know our society....
I suppose this is valid if you can tell us how you've "heard" about the reason for social problems here. Bit of 'citation needed' issue I think.
"Why Europe ever let middle-eastern Muslims come in, I have no idea. It should have been obvious that they would never assimilate, and that is exactly what causes racial conflicts."
Because most of us get along just fine? Why is it 'obvious' that people will never assimilate, when so clearly lots of people do? You really have little experience of walking around European towns do you? Yes, this is personal, my best mate is of Middle Eastern heritage, went to school with him since I was ten, played in the same chess club, differed over football teams (how can anybody support QPR and hold their head high? I'll give you that point;-) ) been to too many parties together, he met a Norwegian girl, moved there for a while, they've got a beautiful little daughter, we still all hang out 30 years later and the kids all play on the beach in the town we grew up while us oldies chat about the crazy time when me Karim and Andy drove round France and Belgium in Karim's knackered old mini with all our stuff and 2 guitars...
Mate... you've never even been to Europe and you claim to know better than us? Hmmm.... I think you should come and visit some time...
I admit my experience of the USA has been limited, but at least I've seen a few cities, hung out in inner city Detroit with mates there, Spanish part of Manhattan with a mate there, drove from coast to coast and stayed in some small places on the way, been to Texas, seen a few places and talked to a few people...
"The "rest of you" don't have the same situation we do. If you're in Europe, you live in small, homogeneous countries, so you don't have all the race and poverty problems we do."
- If you consider the EU compared to the USA, we have a bigger population than you - we have 25+ nationalities with their own languages and cultures to start with
Even on an individual level, I wouldn't describe Europe as being "small homogeneous countries". May I ask how much European travelling you've done, out of interest?
- my brother taught in a school in London, there were 30 different mother tongues spoken by kids in this school of approx 300 children.
- "small" : well the UK has a population of 60m, France has a population of 65m. Small compared to the whole of the USA but equal to the combined population of several USA states each.
- "small" does not necessarily mean no poverty. I'd guess that your most populous states are not necessarily the wealthiest and the smallest are not necessarily the poorest. Check the level of income of Albania (3m) while you're at it.
- Alas homogeneous as well does not mean free of racism. I think there's quite a lot of evidence to suggest there is a lot of racism in strongly monocultural societies.
- "the rest of you" suggests you feel you are the exception to the rule, that the majority of the world has a different situation and that you need exceptional gun laws to survive. Would you think this is so?
I think you can reduce the number of guns and violence in your society and I wish you luck in doing so. It will be a long path though as your country is so awash with them and exports them freely to neighbouring countries as well. It appears that many Americans don't feel they can go to sleep safely unless they have a loaded gun in the house. I think few Europeans would say they'd sleep a lot better if they had a loaded gun in the house.
Good luck there, be safe. Feel free to visit any time.
Probably posted AC as lives in mum's basement, doesn't have a passport and thinks that France is an island off Key West... or is an American living in Paris and is scared of a thorough kicking from the French Foreign Legion
"Without the catholic church, there would not be any universities, nor would we even have knowledge of the classical age in the first place."
That's quite a grand claim. Perhaps it is also possible to claim that without beer, or the spade, there wouldn't be any universities either.
- A lot of knowledge and texts from the classical age were held in African and Asian countries by non-Christians while the there was little regard for 'heathen learning' after the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. What is your argument against the diffusion of classical knowledge outwith the European church run education system?
- A lot of institutions of higher education developed outside of Europe before the European universities started. A bit rich I would have thought to tell Indian, Chinese etc scholars that their learning and teaching methodologies don't count. Technically these places might not have been universities ("associations of students and teachers with collective legal rights usually guaranteed by charters issued by princes, prelates, or the towns in which they were located") but I'd be willing to guess some of them closely resembled this model.
unfortunately we seem to be following your lawyer driven society here in the UK as well. Can see it working in quite a few European countries though...
Tough call that is to make, whether MUDS are "vitally relevant" (to whom, I wonder?).
But to be fair as a librarian I'd say it's not for us to judge. But there are plenty of peer-reviewed journals out there for those who believe they are vitally relevant to publish in, or indeed they could pay to self publish books on the subject. Wikipedia would then be happy to have these works referenced.
Easier to drive across an lightly checked border 5 miles than ship across an ocean.
BBC News did an article on the issue of importing of weapons from USA to Mexico. The BBC guys drove from the USA across the border with no vehicle check at all, despite their SUV being full of flight cases (with camera gear). Their observation was that vehicles don't really get stopped and checked driving USA-Mexico, the security is all on the Mexico-USA direction. they estimated it would be trivial to drive vehicles south loaded with whatever you want.
They interviewed some Texas cops who say they have a real problem with low income folk in Texas with no criminal record who are willing to buy guns for other people (i.e. connected to Mexican crime) in exchange for 100 dollars or so in cash to help them through paying the bills.
I don't doubt that stuff gets shipped into Mexico from overseas but it looks like its incredibly trivial for Mexican criminals just to purchase guns from 20 miles away and drive them home.
Well, it sounds like most of the border activity between USA and Mexico is about keeping people travelling from South to North.
I'd make a guess that with a long land border, one of the main places that illegal goods of any description get smuggled into Mexico will be via the USA. So that would be my guess. From the USA.
Of course Mexico has land borders with Guatemala and Belize, so its likely illegal goods including guns come from there as well.
Ooh, contentious, making it harder to buy guns in the USA. I can't see that going down too favourably. After all, with the latest highly publicised shooting the general agreement was the one thing that shouldn't be done was to tighten gun laws, in fact lots of people were saying the solution was *more* guns.
Actually I think lots of folk in the USA believe the answer to most things is more guns. So good luck with your idea, as sensible as it sounds.
I've also heard that the Mexican crime groups buy most of their guns in the USA and ship them over the border.
Perhaps a simpler solution would be to search vehicles leaving the USA and arrest folk who can't provide good reasons for transporting the guns, or provide ownership papers? You're not allowed to take guns on international flights without strict paperwork for example.
But I have to take my hat off to your lot, you've got it down to a fine art! Our lot still call laws things like the "Constitutional Reform and Governance Act".
Hardly works the same with rednecks eh? you can't give somebody a hard time by saying "hey buddy, you're not un-CRGA -tic are you?";-)
I love the way US laws are given these cheesy, sometimes forced, acronyms.
I think you guys are doing yourself a disservice as they seem to dumb down the often complex debates and arguments covered by these acts, and force folk into simplistic positions based on the naming of the acts. It must be hard to argue against a PATRIOT act: most people don't want to appear 'unpatriotic'.
I am guessing there are civil servants paid to make up some of these acronyms, some of them must have taken some thinking! ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001" - impressive!).
But what about the people who say that fluorescent tube lights flicker at a frequency that gives them headaches etc? Oh boy there will be office workers complain these lights give them migraines, cancer, the lot.
Plus the occasional crazy telling us that the lights were speaking to him....
I don't think anybody is likely to attack the USA by force. Way too expensive, the USA has nukes anyway. Too many people would die.
I think they would be far more likely to make you dependent on their resources (say cheap clothes and raw materials) and then slowly influence your policies over a few decades to be favourable to their country and gradually take over you indirectly through influence and getting preferential deals for all their trade.
Why would anybody need to invade you if they control your resources? People only used to invade other countries because they wanted the land for people to settle on, the riches of the other country, the resources at a preferential deal, or the politicians of the other country to favour them. There are other ways to achieve that today.
Can you think of any other reason why somebody should invade you?
What is this pen tablet you speak of? vi doesn't need this, what could be more intuitive than 'k' to move up, 'j' to move down, 'h' to move left and 'l' to move right. All children and new computer users understand this without tuition and it is guaranteed RSI free! Easiest way of working in a document!
Call us when you've been sacked from your job and forbidden from working in a field as a result (like socialists and communists were in the 1950s). Until then it's just hot air, surely?
- of course I am open to hearing some examples of the harassment people get by declaring themselves as libertarians, to help me modify my opinion.
For sure, not personally as I am not that old but aware that the USA has its own culture. Your rights, your decisions. From over this side of the pond it seems an interesting anachronism, you needed them in 1776 but then your founding fathers also thought slaves were a good idea and you've got over that. So clearly as a country you have changed in some of your views over time. Just to put your mind at rest: we're not thinking of invading again, we kind of left that behind a couple of hundred years ago. Over here we just tend to get by without guns. Nobody really thinks about owning one apart from farmers and a very small number of hunters and hobby shooters.
I am still interested in a response to my question though, do you and your friends feel unsafe if you go out without weapons? Say to watch a movie or go shopping or similar?
Cost and international treaties are two big reasons why merchant ships aren't armed. If you want military on board with weapons, well a 24/7 hour crew is going to cost a fair bit of money. Merchant shipping tries to cut costs as much as possible.And you aren't just going to put a crate of machine guns and sniper rifles on board and hope that the ship's cook or the 18 year trainee engineer on a cruise ship are going to know how to operate them correctly in an emergency situation, probably more likely to end up hurting themselves or the passengers than anybody else.
Plus international treaties come into play. It's all well and good suggesting you're going to mount miniguns etc or even just AK47s on your ship but a lot of countries aren't too happy about armed merchant ships turning up in their harbours. Can't imagine American authorities would be too happy about accepting an Iranian ship sailing into New York with a crew of marines on board manning deck mounted rapid fire machine guns.
""Off with their heads! Off with their heads!" sound like a reasonable UK response to you?"
Over here in the UK we go for ironic humour a lot more. I think you might have missed the inherent joke being made by the students at this point. The quote was from Alice in Wonderland. Students know their European history as well so were alluding to the French Revolution and the guillotine. But the idea that you'd seriously cut royalty's heads off to effect political change would be laughed at here. It was clearly a joke. Even republicans who want to get rid of the monarchy would be happy for them just to be pensioned off to a small house in the countryside, we don't tend to go for death sentences as a legal response here.
Curiously, its interesting to note the undoubtedly armed police officers in the following vehicles didn't feel the need to present their weapons, let alone fire them, in this situation. I guess this shows how little threat they felt the royalty to be in. I suppose in the USA they'd be considering the likelihood of the protestors being armed and would have been more ready to act more aggressively?
Here in the UK me and my friends and the vast majority of the population don't own guns, and we get by quite nicely without them. Screwdrivers are useful for fixing bicycles and lights, Hammers are useful for fixing pictures to the wall. Spades are useful for digging the vegetable patch. Lots of tools are useful.
But semi-automatic handguns? No, never found myself walking along the street and thinking "dang! what I need to make my life easier would be a semi-automatic handgun!".
Self-defence? I get the feeling in the USA quite a few people don't feel safe unless they have a gun at home. Here very few people would consider getting a gun to protect themselves at home. Different culture I think. We just don't really have many guns here. Even the majority of our police don't carry them.
Is this also true of going out in the evening? do lots of people in the USA feel unsafe about going out to the movies with friends, or going shopping unless they carry a gun?
Usual problem of 'eternity' in the computing world meaning about ten years or so. I've got a professor friend who proudly shows off his PhD thesis, it's all done on punched cards. It amuses him highly that neither he nor anybody else could read it these days, the machines just don't exist any more.
Well maintained paper: 1000 year life span easily if kept in dry cool conditions.
Your data on disc, or online: couple of decades maybe?
Back to the usual issue of how to maintain long term memories. I wouldn't leave it to a couple of apple mac carrying hipsters anyway.... better off with the Library of Congress...
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People like to think Texas is a throw back to the wild west
Crickey, you're complaining that you can't carry a handgun when driving from your house to the local shops ("the laws prevent most people from being able to protect themselves while in transit")?
Sounds like the wild west to me if you need to carry a gun to safely buy a pint of milk from your corner store...
Apologies, crazy European who doesn't see a lot of guns. I accept you live in a very different culture. And I understand you were making a different point. But wow, that's a heck of a different culture that needs to carry guns to the shops and back to feel safe. Sounds pretty cowboy movie territory.
Have you spent any time in a poorer country? If so you'll know what a precarious living a lot of people have, and how many literally die on the streets from starvation or disease. 2.50 might get you more, but not a lot more.
People rioted this year in India over the price of onions rising. People have rioted in Tunisia and Algeria over the prices of cooking oil and flour. These are not wealthy people. These are not people rioting over not being able to put enough gas in their 8 litre SUV, or not being able to upgrade to the latest games console.
These are people rioting over not being able to eat enough to live. Onions, cooking oil, flour.
You should be ashamed of yourself. Or at least offer to live on the equivalent salary in your own country, a living so close to starvation that if the price of onions goes up you might die.
Ok, so you are telling us what our social problems are having never visited here. Hmm, sets you at a little bit of a disadvantage there in claiming to know our society....
I suppose this is valid if you can tell us how you've "heard" about the reason for social problems here. Bit of 'citation needed' issue I think.
"Why Europe ever let middle-eastern Muslims come in, I have no idea. It should have been obvious that they would never assimilate, and that is exactly what causes racial conflicts."
Because most of us get along just fine? Why is it 'obvious' that people will never assimilate, when so clearly lots of people do? You really have little experience of walking around European towns do you? Yes, this is personal, my best mate is of Middle Eastern heritage, went to school with him since I was ten, played in the same chess club, differed over football teams (how can anybody support QPR and hold their head high? I'll give you that point ;-) ) been to too many parties together, he met a Norwegian girl, moved there for a while, they've got a beautiful little daughter, we still all hang out 30 years later and the kids all play on the beach in the town we grew up while us oldies chat about the crazy time when me Karim and Andy drove round France and Belgium in Karim's knackered old mini with all our stuff and 2 guitars...
Mate... you've never even been to Europe and you claim to know better than us? Hmmm.... I think you should come and visit some time...
I admit my experience of the USA has been limited, but at least I've seen a few cities, hung out in inner city Detroit with mates there, Spanish part of Manhattan with a mate there, drove from coast to coast and stayed in some small places on the way, been to Texas, seen a few places and talked to a few people...
"The "rest of you" don't have the same situation we do. If you're in Europe, you live in small, homogeneous countries, so you don't have all the race and poverty problems we do."
- If you consider the EU compared to the USA, we have a bigger population than you
- we have 25+ nationalities with their own languages and cultures to start with
Even on an individual level, I wouldn't describe Europe as being "small homogeneous countries". May I ask how much European travelling you've done, out of interest?
- my brother taught in a school in London, there were 30 different mother tongues spoken by kids in this school of approx 300 children.
- "small" : well the UK has a population of 60m, France has a population of 65m. Small compared to the whole of the USA but equal to the combined population of several USA states each.
- "small" does not necessarily mean no poverty. I'd guess that your most populous states are not necessarily the wealthiest and the smallest are not necessarily the poorest. Check the level of income of Albania (3m) while you're at it.
- Alas homogeneous as well does not mean free of racism. I think there's quite a lot of evidence to suggest there is a lot of racism in strongly monocultural societies.
- "the rest of you" suggests you feel you are the exception to the rule, that the majority of the world has a different situation and that you need exceptional gun laws to survive. Would you think this is so?
I think you can reduce the number of guns and violence in your society and I wish you luck in doing so. It will be a long path though as your country is so awash with them and exports them freely to neighbouring countries as well. It appears that many Americans don't feel they can go to sleep safely unless they have a loaded gun in the house. I think few Europeans would say they'd sleep a lot better if they had a loaded gun in the house.
Good luck there, be safe. Feel free to visit any time.
Probably posted AC as lives in mum's basement, doesn't have a passport and thinks that France is an island off Key West... or is an American living in Paris and is scared of a thorough kicking from the French Foreign Legion
"Without the catholic church, there would not be any universities, nor would we even have knowledge of the classical age in the first place."
That's quite a grand claim. Perhaps it is also possible to claim that without beer, or the spade, there wouldn't be any universities either.
- A lot of knowledge and texts from the classical age were held in African and Asian countries by non-Christians while the there was little regard for 'heathen learning' after the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. What is your argument against the diffusion of classical knowledge outwith the European church run education system?
- A lot of institutions of higher education developed outside of Europe before the European universities started. A bit rich I would have thought to tell Indian, Chinese etc scholars that their learning and teaching methodologies don't count. Technically these places might not have been universities ("associations of students and teachers with collective legal rights usually guaranteed by charters issued by princes, prelates, or the towns in which they were located") but I'd be willing to guess some of them closely resembled this model.
- The University of Bologna began as a law school teaching the ius gentium or Roman law of peoples which was in demand across Europe for those defending the right of incipient nations against empire and church.
unfortunately we seem to be following your lawyer driven society here in the UK as well. Can see it working in quite a few European countries though...
Tough call that is to make, whether MUDS are "vitally relevant" (to whom, I wonder?).
But to be fair as a librarian I'd say it's not for us to judge. But there are plenty of peer-reviewed journals out there for those who believe they are vitally relevant to publish in, or indeed they could pay to self publish books on the subject. Wikipedia would then be happy to have these works referenced.
Easier to drive across an lightly checked border 5 miles than ship across an ocean.
BBC News did an article on the issue of importing of weapons from USA to Mexico. The BBC guys drove from the USA across the border with no vehicle check at all, despite their SUV being full of flight cases (with camera gear). Their observation was that vehicles don't really get stopped and checked driving USA-Mexico, the security is all on the Mexico-USA direction. they estimated it would be trivial to drive vehicles south loaded with whatever you want.
They interviewed some Texas cops who say they have a real problem with low income folk in Texas with no criminal record who are willing to buy guns for other people (i.e. connected to Mexican crime) in exchange for 100 dollars or so in cash to help them through paying the bills.
I don't doubt that stuff gets shipped into Mexico from overseas but it looks like its incredibly trivial for Mexican criminals just to purchase guns from 20 miles away and drive them home.
Blackmail is blackmail, its an offense offline or online. The issue here is helping educate people to be more secure in their online transactions.
Well, it sounds like most of the border activity between USA and Mexico is about keeping people travelling from South to North.
I'd make a guess that with a long land border, one of the main places that illegal goods of any description get smuggled into Mexico will be via the USA. So that would be my guess. From the USA.
Of course Mexico has land borders with Guatemala and Belize, so its likely illegal goods including guns come from there as well.
Ooh, contentious, making it harder to buy guns in the USA. I can't see that going down too favourably. After all, with the latest highly publicised shooting the general agreement was the one thing that shouldn't be done was to tighten gun laws, in fact lots of people were saying the solution was *more* guns.
Actually I think lots of folk in the USA believe the answer to most things is more guns. So good luck with your idea, as sensible as it sounds.
I've also heard that the Mexican crime groups buy most of their guns in the USA and ship them over the border.
Perhaps a simpler solution would be to search vehicles leaving the USA and arrest folk who can't provide good reasons for transporting the guns, or provide ownership papers? You're not allowed to take guns on international flights without strict paperwork for example.
But I have to take my hat off to your lot, you've got it down to a fine art! Our lot still call laws things like the "Constitutional Reform and Governance Act".
Hardly works the same with rednecks eh? you can't give somebody a hard time by saying "hey buddy, you're not un-CRGA -tic are you?" ;-)
Totally agree. Anything anybody writes using LaTeX must be important and clever because the default font is so darn ugly.
I love the way US laws are given these cheesy, sometimes forced, acronyms.
I think you guys are doing yourself a disservice as they seem to dumb down the often complex debates and arguments covered by these acts, and force folk into simplistic positions based on the naming of the acts. It must be hard to argue against a PATRIOT act: most people don't want to appear 'unpatriotic'.
I am guessing there are civil servants paid to make up some of these acronyms, some of them must have taken some thinking! ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001" - impressive!).
But what about the people who say that fluorescent tube lights flicker at a frequency that gives them headaches etc? Oh boy there will be office workers complain these lights give them migraines, cancer, the lot.
Plus the occasional crazy telling us that the lights were speaking to him....
I don't think anybody is likely to attack the USA by force. Way too expensive, the USA has nukes anyway. Too many people would die.
I think they would be far more likely to make you dependent on their resources (say cheap clothes and raw materials) and then slowly influence your policies over a few decades to be favourable to their country and gradually take over you indirectly through influence and getting preferential deals for all their trade.
Why would anybody need to invade you if they control your resources? People only used to invade other countries because they wanted the land for people to settle on, the riches of the other country, the resources at a preferential deal, or the politicians of the other country to favour them. There are other ways to achieve that today.
Can you think of any other reason why somebody should invade you?
What is this pen tablet you speak of? vi doesn't need this, what could be more intuitive than 'k' to move up, 'j' to move down, 'h' to move left and 'l' to move right. All children and new computer users understand this without tuition and it is guaranteed RSI free! Easiest way of working in a document!
Call us when you've been sacked from your job and forbidden from working in a field as a result (like socialists and communists were in the 1950s). Until then it's just hot air, surely?
- of course I am open to hearing some examples of the harassment people get by declaring themselves as libertarians, to help me modify my opinion.
Does anybody know if this was a global database or one region only?
cheers.
For sure, not personally as I am not that old but aware that the USA has its own culture. Your rights, your decisions. From over this side of the pond it seems an interesting anachronism, you needed them in 1776 but then your founding fathers also thought slaves were a good idea and you've got over that. So clearly as a country you have changed in some of your views over time. Just to put your mind at rest: we're not thinking of invading again, we kind of left that behind a couple of hundred years ago. Over here we just tend to get by without guns. Nobody really thinks about owning one apart from farmers and a very small number of hunters and hobby shooters.
I am still interested in a response to my question though, do you and your friends feel unsafe if you go out without weapons? Say to watch a movie or go shopping or similar?
Cost and international treaties are two big reasons why merchant ships aren't armed. If you want military on board with weapons, well a 24/7 hour crew is going to cost a fair bit of money. Merchant shipping tries to cut costs as much as possible.And you aren't just going to put a crate of machine guns and sniper rifles on board and hope that the ship's cook or the 18 year trainee engineer on a cruise ship are going to know how to operate them correctly in an emergency situation, probably more likely to end up hurting themselves or the passengers than anybody else.
Plus international treaties come into play. It's all well and good suggesting you're going to mount miniguns etc or even just AK47s on your ship but a lot of countries aren't too happy about armed merchant ships turning up in their harbours. Can't imagine American authorities would be too happy about accepting an Iranian ship sailing into New York with a crew of marines on board manning deck mounted rapid fire machine guns.
""Off with their heads! Off with their heads!"
sound like a reasonable UK response to you?"
Over here in the UK we go for ironic humour a lot more. I think you might have missed the inherent joke being made by the students at this point. The quote was from Alice in Wonderland. Students know their European history as well so were alluding to the French Revolution and the guillotine. But the idea that you'd seriously cut royalty's heads off to effect political change would be laughed at here. It was clearly a joke. Even republicans who want to get rid of the monarchy would be happy for them just to be pensioned off to a small house in the countryside, we don't tend to go for death sentences as a legal response here.
Curiously, its interesting to note the undoubtedly armed police officers in the following vehicles didn't feel the need to present their weapons, let alone fire them, in this situation. I guess this shows how little threat they felt the royalty to be in. I suppose in the USA they'd be considering the likelihood of the protestors being armed and would have been more ready to act more aggressively?
Here in the UK me and my friends and the vast majority of the population don't own guns, and we get by quite nicely without them. Screwdrivers are useful for fixing bicycles and lights, Hammers are useful for fixing pictures to the wall. Spades are useful for digging the vegetable patch. Lots of tools are useful.
But semi-automatic handguns? No, never found myself walking along the street and thinking "dang! what I need to make my life easier would be a semi-automatic handgun!".
Self-defence? I get the feeling in the USA quite a few people don't feel safe unless they have a gun at home. Here very few people would consider getting a gun to protect themselves at home. Different culture I think. We just don't really have many guns here. Even the majority of our police don't carry them.
Is this also true of going out in the evening? do lots of people in the USA feel unsafe about going out to the movies with friends, or going shopping unless they carry a gun?
Usual problem of 'eternity' in the computing world meaning about ten years or so. I've got a professor friend who proudly shows off his PhD thesis, it's all done on punched cards. It amuses him highly that neither he nor anybody else could read it these days, the machines just don't exist any more.
Well maintained paper: 1000 year life span easily if kept in dry cool conditions.
Your data on disc, or online: couple of decades maybe?
Back to the usual issue of how to maintain long term memories. I wouldn't leave it to a couple of apple mac carrying hipsters anyway.... better off with the Library of Congress...