"Abrasive" fits you rather well. Just got to love someone who starts arguments, hurls insults, but can't stand to own up to their own remarks. Attacking my character does not win the argument for you. You did not back up your opinions with any strong facts.

Think there needs to be serious debate about gun ownership. A girl owning a hand gun for self defence against would be invaders/rapists, fine, but letting nutjobs getting their hands on something that can blow holes through concrete, well, not such a good idea imho.

Who really NEEDS automatic weapons?

You might be from a ghetto area of Britain.
The guy was on about getting beaten to a pulp downtown, which is not a ghetto area! And if he lives in a ghetto, that 's irrelevant! Stop twisting what people say!
As for your country, gun crime is a very serious problem. So don't give us your society as something to be followed, especially with the unbridled snooping by your security services on your citizens! Get real, man.

You obviously have zero experience of living in Britain, as the rougher areas in most towns, tend not to be so far from the downtown areas. Well, I guess in America it could be similar, with all those studies into 'white flight' where the wealthy (and usually white, hence the not so PC name) tend to migrate away from the town to the more pleasant suburbs.

Asides from in some larger cities like London and Manchester, most wealthy people I know of tend to like to avoid living downtown, they tend to commute from the leafier suburbs. One or two younger guys might go for the big centrally based luxury apartment, but most won't.

Anyway, unless you have young children to bring up; you can be pretty much considered to be a bit of pussyole if you really fear living in the 'ghetto areas' that much. In fact, I find that certain rougher areas tend to have more character, livelier underground/alternative scenes and can be in a strange way; actually safer. Habitual burglars and the like don't like shitting on their own doorstep and gang members tend to look after their ends, those involved in the real crime are quite discreet, for example: dealers will often be making over a grand a week at least very easily, yet will drive around in a shitty clapped out Ford Fiesta to avoid attention. Those of certain ethnicities such as the Turks or Pakistanis will often stick together and make sure that not too go much shit goes off around their area too.

To the wumao:
Thank you for your "insightful" opinion on how rough Britain has become. I suppose the island will collapse upon itself soon and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

As for the USA, all these guns will mean that the government will ultimately lose control of the people, in which many of them will run roughshod over the world including your gimpy little @$$. Guns, guns, and guns will only make governments more afraid to impose tripe on its people like blocking Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Such instruments are seen as a possible source of "revolution" in the minds of some monkeys...errh I mean bosses like the people you work for.

Get some more original propaganda next time you try to talk back. Your jaded accusations are as laughable as the melamine infested milk you just drank this morning (feel some hardness like little pebbles around your waist?) or the mercury laden rocket fuel that you call alcohol. You're probably developing a new form of migraines just by getting worked up from what I wrote.

That's what you call a response.

Well, regarding the last paragraph about the girl, here's the account from what I heard from an acquaintence of this pedo's. He claims that she seduced him first by "sitting in his lap". I did not get any more details than that.

As for the principle of whether this is wrong or right, THE GIRL WAS ONLY FOURTEEN AT THE TIME! She was also the sexual assaulter's own student at the public school. I am sure wumao's like tosh, ww, greg, and mr. flintoff have no problems with this kind of thing since they never acknowledge it as ever happening in a "safe, secure country full of culture". But she was a child when this happened, and is still a child. I heard she transferred to another school. But the fixed prejudice that all western men like 'em young is probably never going to leave her mind.

Like the freedom to go down-town without much risk of being beaten to a pulp by drunks, as in The UK.
This has happened to laowai who worked in China as well. You might be from a ghetto area of Britain. I have never been to your country but I am quite sure places like Chelsea are not filled with drunks or gangs wondering around.

I myself was assaulted by a drunk once at a train station in the state that I reside in. With that being said, the police were on to him in a matter of minutes after I reported the incident. A foreign teacher in China who is married to a Chinese woman happens to know a local Chinese police official who is a close friend of the woman. He has repeatedly asked the police to get involved with a case of pedophilia where a 14 year old girl was sexually assaulted by a Canadian man in his late 40's. He got the response supposedly that the police cannot do anything about things like that.

No society has ever gotten completely rid of things like poverty and crime. The better ones marginalize the criminals to the fringes. The worst ones let the criminals run the country for thousands of years!

I think that he has been reading the Daily Mail too much! Maybe he is quite a small lad that can't handle himself too.

I actually do come from one of the roughest areas of the U.K and although there are certain areas that you shouldn't walk around at night, I mostly feel ok as long as I keep an eye out. It is not even drunk adults that you have to worry about, it is the gangs of teenagers (some who are actually quite big and armed!) that need not fear any real consequences of the actions because they are too young to get a full prison sentence. They will tend to happily rob people just for a buzz, for cash or gang related reasons.

China admittedly, does feel safer but not as safe as it used to. There's more hostility to foreigners these days and the Chinese aren't really known to fight one on one.

Was that girl sexually assaulted as in a consensual statutory way or forcefully, against her will? I think if it was the latter, the Police would do something. If not, I think just sneakily informing a few slightly nationalist Chinese guys, even just the male students would do the trick.

Can't help posting some excerpts of this interesting article for those of you interested in the directions that China could or could not take based or not based on the past... Enjoy!

It is certainly not taught in textbooks, but Mao’s record was nothing short of a disaster: The Great Famine of 1958-61 — the result of a course of industrialization known as the Great Leap Forward — caused starvation not seen on a scale since Stalin’s collectivization. Meticulous research by the journalist Yang Jisheng and the historian Frank Dikötter has estimated the death toll at anywhere from 36 million to 45 million. Meanwhile, Mao lived in luxury. […] Politically weakened by the economic disaster, Mao in 1966 launched the Cultural Revolution, plunging the country into a decade of turmoil, tearing families apart and eliminating what decency remained in society.

The “reform and opening” that Deng began in the late 1970s, after Mao’s death, led to unprecedented economic growth, but also yawning imbalances in the distribution of wealth and soaring inequality. Coupled with a lack of respect for land rights, many peasants and workers have felt powerless in the midst of head-spinning economic change, internal migration and choking pollution. […]Therefore, many Chinese became nostalgic for the leftism of the Mao era. […] The cult of Mao is the greatest obstacle to social transformation in China. Looking backward will lead China away from what it needs today: real political reform. China must embrace the rule of law, not the lawlessness that could lead to a modern-day Cultural Revolution.
"China Must Purge Mao's Ghost" on the New York Times of Dec 25 2013

Crikey, what a good post! As a result I have ordered Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter. Thanks ,mate.

I will say this though. In general China has some freedoms which many of us do not have in the west. Like the freedom to go down-town without much risk of being beaten to a pulp by drunks, as in The UK. It is generally safer for women and children to wander unescorted in China than it would be in the West. Let's hope they don't copy us too closely in the future.