A good friend of mine who is a film professor is teaching for a semester at the University of Pecs in Hungary. The lineage of this university goes back to the 1300s, so it qualifies as one of the oldest in Europe.

My friend has been communicating back home via email and an excellent blog, with photos and video. Last week she put up a video of a trip to a modern U.S. style mall along with some commentary about how American culture seems to be spreading out all over the world, even to places where you'd never expect it. You can find a McDonald's and/or a Starbuck's just about anyplace there are people with money. It's the homogenization of the world. Unfortunately.

It's almost impossible to escape the "malling of America" in the U.S. because even small towns have their Wal-Marts and strip malls. You can still escape it in many European cities, but not entirely and not if you get on the outer edges of the city. McDonald's has become big in Paris. American movies, American TV shows, American music, American styles of dress are popular all over Europe.

In the late '80's I had a 3-week trip to France to do some video production work. I asked my contact before I left if there was anything he'd like from the U.S. He wanted a Jack Daniels ball cap. It's no longer just Jerry Lewis who's big in France.

Which brings me to the sad point of this post. Just a couple of days ago a student at the University of Pecs went on a rampage with a handgun. One student was killed and some others are seriously injured. I don't know if any others have died.

In telling me about it, my friend had a subject line in her email: Just like America. The idea that we may be exporting our gun violence as well as fast food and rock 'n roll is inescapable. We are the most violent nation on earth. More than 20,000 Americans are killed by other Americans every year with handguns alone. Most parts of Baghdad are safer than any number of American cities.

The tragedy in Pecs is made worse because it's never happened before there. No student has ever been shot on campus. You can't legally own a handgun there without belonging to some sort of organization. The killer had legal ownership of a gun as a member of a shooting club. And that brings up something I've said for years: A handgun is designed for one purpose only--to kill another human at close quarters. It's only a very small step from owning a handgun to using one for its intended purpose.

Guns are such an intimate part of American culture, especially in the South, that one state (so far) is giving tax breaks if you buy one. You can't make up something that crazy: here is the link.

Anytime a politician refers to the U.S. as a "peace loving nation," I am appalled. It is simply not true. We have bought into the NRA hype that owning weapons to kill other people is a good thing. In every single country in the world where gun ownership is restricted, there are thousands fewer murders every year. That means just about every other civilized country in the world. The NRA, as well as Republicans and talk show hate mongers, like to say guns don't kill people, people do. Wrong. People with guns kill people. If they didn't have guns, they wouldn't kill so many other people. The NRA's response to a campus killing would be to say that all students should carry guns. Insanity rules parts of our society.

I sincerely hope the Pecs police don't find that the university murderer was an Ameriphile, that he has NRA posters on his wall and rock music on his iPod. I don't want to believe that we are exporting the gun culture along with fast food. I can't escape the thought that maybe we are. No, I'm not saying it's our fault this idiot went off the deep end. But I can't help thinking that as our "culture" spreads, all of it will spread equally. I thnk most Europeans would be shocked at the very idea of thousands of people walking around with guns in their pockets and purses--legally. Did the Pecs killer know about that? Maybe yes, maybe no. Did he admire the gun toters? Why was he in a shooting club?

I do know one thing: If the kid in Pecs didn't own a gun, he wouldn't have shot another human to death that day. I can say the same thing about the thousands of deaths we have in this country every year. It's a lot more difficult to kill another person with a knife or a baseball bat than by simply pulling the trigger while shooting through a car window. Killers will kill more when the killing is easy.

Gun ownership in the U.S., of course, funds the NRA, which buys many politicians to keep the gun laws favorable to the killers. "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," they like to screech. Not if they're all confiscated and melted down. Unfortunately, there are so many millions of handguns in the U.S. that every manufacturer of handguns could go out of business today and we would still have millions of functioning handguns a hundred years from now. We've reached, and passed, critical mass on that issue and it probably can never be changed. Let's hope, for humanity's sake, the rest of the world never catches up with us on two fronts: Gun ownership and right wing hate shows on TV and radio.

This is one of the most disgusting things ever said by one of the fundamentalist crazies. Unfortunately, the right wing talk shows put these people on the air.

There's not much more a person can say about this crap.

At first I didn't believe it. I was on the way to work but planned on grabbing a burger first since I was early. I decided to go ahead and go in. We didn't have cell phones yet. Actually, I had a little transistor radio in my car but it didn't work very well unless it was hanging by its strap from the mirror. I hung it up there and was able to pick up a little news over the AM static. Nothing was definite but they thought the President had been shot. All thoughts of that burger left my mind as I broke all speed limits and got from Norman to OKC in record time.

I ended up working all night, all day the next day and into the next night. They thought the Russians were coming. It was a Communist plot seemed to be the big opinion at the time.

Somebody on the newsdesk made copies of all the AP flashes, and I still have my copy in a drawer someplace. Looking back, I can still recall the feeling of total confusion and disbelief. It was a really, really rotten time for the country.

Had Kennedy lived, it would have been a different world. The riots of '68 might have been prevented with the work that Kennedy would have done in a second term. Would Nixon have been prevented as well? Maybe. Who knows. Would Al Gore not have had the election stolen from him? If so, then he probably would have paid attention to the memo about the upcoming 9-11 attach and maybe that could have been prevented and we wouldn't be drowning in the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe the Reagan and Bush II years could have been prevented. Without Reagan, we wouldn't have hate radio and hate TV today, since he was the one who did away with the fair use act. We might be a more civil country today. Who knows what course history would have taken.

Maybe Kennedy would have lost the second term and the Republicans took over even earlier. Alternate universe speculation of the third kind.

One little remembrance...I usually handled Page 2, which was the "jump" page--all stories that continued from Page 1 jumped to Page 2, where if really long they might go on to inside pages. Page 2 layout was right down to the wire because you never knew too far in advance how much space you had. There were usually no ads on Page 2 and I always filled empty spots with little stories. So in the morning paper the next morning, 100% of the stories were about the assassination. Except for one small 3" or 4" story I managed to squeeze in to Page 2. It was Aldous Huxley's death. The Daily Oklahoman might have been the only paper in America that reported Huxley's death that day.

I'm a little bit of a conspiracy nut about this. Not that Oswald didn't do it, he did. But I think others were behind it. Did you ever read Norman Mailer's big huge historical novel about it? Fascinating read. But I never believed all that till recent years, now that I've seen how the anti abortionist crazies and right wing gay bashers can influence their lunatic fringe to take action while they hide in safety, saying, "We didn't do it--he's a nut case." Dr. Tiller in Wichita is the most recent example. They've killed others. And people don't just decide one day to hate gays, they are told to. There in an AP story in our paper today about the right wing militia groups forming all over the country these days. A huge upsurge since Obama's election. And they have killed several people, and the death threats against Obama are in the hundreds, just as they were with Kennedy. Finally one of them took action. I also think that's why Jack Ruby shot Oswald. Some group, CIA rogues according to Mailer, probably convinced him he would be an American hero if he silenced Oswald. The power of words. I wouldn't have got to this point of thinking that without the actions of hate groups today. With the 24 hour a day garbage spewed out on the right wing air waves, it's not that difficult to get somebody to pull the trigger. The lunatic fringe is always out there, just waiting.