verging_on_random

9/11 changed everything

September 23, 2007 on 10:05 am | In Uncategorized |

Hard though it might be to credit, US politicians appear even more prepared than their Australian counterparts to shift public positions in response to the perceived wishes of an audience.

Take Rudy Giuliani, ex-Mayor of New York, now running for President. Back in his crime-fighting mayoral days, Rudy was really strong on gun control, ’saying in a 1995 interview that the NRA’s “defense of assault weapons, and their unwillingness to deal with some of the realities here that we face in our cities is a terrible, terrible mistake.”‘

Nevertheless in giving a wannabe-president speech to the self-same National Rifle Association the other day, Rudy suggested that “there are some major intervening events — September 11, which cast somewhat of a different light on the Second Amendment [the right to bear arms provision in the US Constitution]”.

I get it. Americans now need to carry assault rifles so that any time they see an approaching hijacked airliner they can shoot the bastard out of the sky before it hits the skyscraper.

Makes perfect sense.