There are guns everywhere in Guatemala City.
Even a little low-middle-class colonia such as the one where I’m staying has a guard-station with two security-guards, each with a shoulder-slung pistol-grip shotgun, checking each vehicle in and out through the gates.
In the shopping-mall, it’s pretty much gun-city. Just about everywhere there are uniformed security-guards, toting pistols and batons. Even the fast-food place I ate at the other day had its own armed security-guard, barely sixteen at a guess, opening doors politely and timidly for the clients, pistol at his side. His uniform was simply too big for him; he certainly didn’t look old enough to know how to use the gun for real. But in a city where the homicide rate is heading towards ten thousand people a year, and ‘protection’ rackets are big business in any unprotected area, the guns do mean something, I suppose.
So it was really nice to look out of the upper window of the upmarket café we were working in today, to see the car-park security-guard playing air-guitar on his shotgun, changing chords as he went. Pity I didn’t have my video-camera to hand – better luck next time, perhaps?
Came across this one in this week’s edition of the BMJ (British Medical Journal).
You’ve heard of the Palm Pilot: well, now we have the Palm Pistol – “an ergonomically innovative single shot double action only defensive firearm”.
It gets worse. It’s being specifically sold as “ideal for seniors, disabled or others who may have limited strength or manual dexterity”. In other words, a gun specifically for the aged (or demented, more like).
It gets worse again. The manufacturers have formally applied for “medical equipment coding from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services”, so that the gun can be prescribed by doctors as an aid to “extension of life expectancy” and “prevention of sudden onset death”, fully paid for by the state.
And yes, it gets worse again, because, as reported at MedGadget, some lunatic at the FDA (US Food and Drugs Administration) actually approved the thing:
The handgun will be listed as a Class I Medical Device, exempt from 510(k) Pre-Market Notification in accordance with 21 CFR 890.5050 “Daily Activity Assist Device.”
Only in America, perhaps, could anyone be so insane as to describe an instrument of intentional murder as a “Class 1 Medical Device”.
Yikes…
[Update: seems there is some sanity in the world after all: in a later blog-entry, MedGadget reports that the FDA have now rescinded their initial approval, with a rather lame assertion that they'd been misinformed by the manufacturers. Hmm...]