Does anyone care that the murder rate in the US is lower than it has been in a long time?

[hunter]

68. That's an awful truth. I breathed a lot of lead as a kid in Los Angeles.

Yep, maybe that's why I'm an asshole.

I've got relatives who were so good with guns they were ordered to stay home here in the U.S.A. training shooters. My dad's cousin married a guy who volunteered for service in Korea but the Army, in all of it's wisdom, threw him into the Olympics as a trainer.

I'm competent enough with guns myself. I don't have to like that.

My dad's dad wanted to be the romantic pilot in World War II, women swooning, all that. But he was too old, and had too many mad engineering skills. The Army Air Force put him to work supervising people deemed essential to the war effort, people more eccentric then himself. He was an explainer and protector of the people whose work he was explaining. He acquired mad skills with titanium at some point, he wouldn't talk about that, and was later an engineer for the Apollo project.

My dad's a nearsighted MASH Radar O'Reily sort, and an artist. He did his military service in California, and they repaid him with a university arts degree. My wife's dad escaped the Korean conflict too, but was used as a guinea pig in nuclear weapons testing in Nevada, witnessing a nuclear explosion from a hole in the ground, marching across ground zero, and scrubbing off the radioactive dust in field showers.