Why don't they care anymore?

Today, Europe reacted to the masacre at Virginia Tech.

The roughest part is how horribly inaccurate so much of this is. Suggestions that it's easier to get a machine gun than a driver's license, that this individual - who happens to be a Korean national - is indicitave of the violence inherant in American culture, that this has something to do with assault weapons or automatic weapons, or that rates of violent crime are rising are just flat out wrong. The bottom line is that college campuses are the most disarmed areas of American life. A single individual with a concealed firearm could have dramatically reduced the number killed.

Bild makes the most interesting points. They suggest, laughably, that it's easier to get a machine gun than a driver's license in the U.S. However, I can't help but point out that cars kill a whole lot more people than guns in the U.S. Also, the do mention the tragedies at Erfurt and Emsdetten. Germany is a country with a much smaller population, with vastly fewer firearms and they have had their own share of these horrors equalling our own. If anything proves that the strict control of firearms does nothing to prevent these sorts of horrors, Erfurt and Emsdetten do.

I do want to point out the editorial from Italy's Il Messaggero - "During the period following World war II, America was seen as the guardian of democracy and was equated with the defense of liberty; today, America is a superpower that begins wars and lives with the constant necessity of having to defend itself against the enemy..." This is an attitude throughout the world reflected when the view the U.S. What is so disconcerting is that the actions of the U.S. haven't changed, except that we're less likely to engage in warfare than we were in the "period following World War II". What's changed is only the perceptions of Europe. It's amazing how little some care for the spread of democracy when their own democracy isn't being threatened.

Why should the people of Italy or Germany or France or, hell, the American Left care about the plight of women in the middle east (regularly murdered as punishment for being raped, denied the right to vote, subject to beatings from their husbands, fathers, and brothers, treated as prisoners in their own home, denied the ability to earn their own livings outside of “temporary marriages” if they are divorced or widowed, denied education)? Why should they care about the slaughtered innocents of Darfur? Why should they care about the tyrannical oppression of the North Korean people? Why should they care about terrorists wanting to exterminate the Jews or reconquer southern Spain? Why should they care about narcoterrorists in Central America? Being the guardian of democracy and the defender of liberty sometimes means that you have to do the dirty work of deposing a dictator. Of course, it’s much easier for Europe or the American Left to pretend that the women of Iraq chose the rape rooms and the people of North Korea chose starving to death and the people or Darfur chose the systematic annihilation of their homes and their children. That’s their government and it would be wrong of us to impose our on them. It’s much easier for Europe and the American Left to sit back in their benighted racism and assume that the peoples of Africa, south-eastern Asia, and the Middle East are animals incapable of determining their own fates, incapable of living in a democratic country with liberty for all.