Crooks and Liars reports that travel book king Arthur Frommer is boycotting Arizona. Apparently he refuses to visit a place whose citizens are encouraged to carry assault weapons to public events. This, Frommer suggests, is not only terribly wrong but bloody dangerous.
Of course he's right. But Arizona is hardly alone in providing a safe haven for heavily armed citizens who believe their liberties, or perhaps it's their manhoods, depend on carrying a loaded firearm at all times. In fact in the country at large there are more firearms than people, suggesting that Arizonans have a great deal of company. Company, it's no exaggeration to say, in the millions.
By coincidence today's New York Times, echoing this week's Economist, is painting a dire picture of conditions in Afghanistan. Terrible and getting worse is the consensus view of the situation in that benighted spot. The Economist likens the place to Mad Max, the movie about a time and place so irredeemably awful it makes Mel Gibson look sane and good. The New York Times says more or less the same though more stodgily. Both agree that although it's probably futile in the long run, far more NATO troops are needed to impose even a semblance of order on the Afghanistanian chaos.
Unfortunately sending more forces into Afghanistan means more casualties. And if the whole enterprise is futile in the long run, that's a terrible waste of the lives of the young men and women who are ordered there. Especially because their involvement in the first place is likely to have been through no fault of their own.
On the one hand, millions of heavily armed US citizens in greater or lesser stages of derangement whose trigger fingers are itching to water the tree of liberty with good red blood. On the other, a total Central Asian anarchy in which the innocent civilian majority is terrorized on all sides by clueless foreign troops, corrupt domestic security forces, and home-grown thugs. In the middle, a man whose very name is a byword for flawless travel.
The solution is obvious. Have Frommer book passage to Afghanistan for all our gun crazies. There they can use their beloved weapons at will, with no pesky rules and regulations or even criminal prosecutions to annoy them. No one will care if they shoot each other, and if they happen to hit some of the local bad guys in the crossfire, so much the better. By return trip, send our troops, along with any Afghan civilian who wants out, to the US. The latter can take over the vacated homes of the gun crazies as free lodging, there to tend their goats and gardens unmolested.
Banish any fears these latest immigrants to our shores might feel homesick. Used to living in one of the most inhospitable regions on earth, by contrast even Arizona will seem like the promised land. Especially once the place is completely stripped of its amateur gunmen.