How Much?

You might have already seen it, or at least heard about it. There's a movie called United 93. Yep; that Flight 93 (more can be found here). Through the first link you can view a trailer as well as a timeline of events on September the 11th of 2001. Or you can go to the IMDb page for less hassle in getting to the trailer. It's supposed to be released on April 28th if I'm reading things correctly.

I dunno. It's going to be an emotional thing for a lot of people so that tells me it'll be easier to get away with a bad job on the script &/or movie itself. Hell, look what a fellow whose name rhymes with Ducas did with 3 eagerly awaited films.

I admit I got a little misty when watching the trailer. & it wasn't that much of a trailer.

I do think that a few things will be left out. I mean it is a dramatization & there's no way of being sure that certain things happened, or were said.

But when one of the passengers "armed" himself with a table knife, I'm just thinking that he might've wished it was a S&W. I don't see any of the actors uttering something along the lines of "I wish I had my 1911 with me right now" even though I'm damned sure that any of those passengers wished they had any 1911. Hell, I bet they'd even settle for one of those "junk guns" (formerly "saturday night specials") that the state of California has so graciously banned for the good of its own people.

We make fun of Lorcin's & Jennings & similar models our damn selves (& not entirely without reason) but any one of them would have been a blessing in the hands of the passengers that day.

As it stands they lost an arms race to punks with knives. Hell I have knives that would out-tech anything those miscreants used to hijack the planes that day & any kid from my neighborhood could have used it effectively by the time they were in 10th grade.

But a pistol would have been better.

I've said it a few times & I'll keep saying it cause I don't think people hear me, or want to hear me:

It's a crying shame that a country with a guarantee of the Right to Arms in its controlling document lost an arms race to 19 punks with knives because the government ignored it.

I've heard all sorts of arguments on why there should be restrictions on the people that carry as well as places people may carry. Every justification I've heard for civilian disarmament has been bullshit.

But there's a question I haven't had a chance to spring yet on someone arguing that some restrictions should be in place. I would like to see some hint of it or its meaning in the movie, but I doubt that will happen.

The question is simply this:

On September 11th of 2001 at 09:32 E.S.T. how much do you think Todd Beamer would have paid for a handgun?

Posted by Publicola at April 13, 2006 07:38 AM | TrackBack