My Italian friends think it's a bit odd that you can't buy one of those in the US, because they're dangerous for children, but you can let 9 year olds loose with fully automatic weapons, and of course buy all kinds of guns. I can't do much more than shrug: every place has its contradictions.

Additionally: I personally hate the damn things. My kids love to get them because of the stupid surprise. Sometimes my daughter just ignores the chocolate completely. It's a bit of marketing akin to the McDonalds Happy Meal with the cheap plastic toy. A far greater injustice in the world is not being able to import prosciuttos and similar cured meats.

>> but you can let 9 year olds loose with fully automatic weapons, and of course buy all kinds of guns.

You really don't know how the US or guns work, do you?

Perhaps "loose" could be debated, but something like this would likely not happen in most European countries:

http://www.snopes.com/info/news/uzi.asp

And this kind of thing is much rarer:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/20/us/fsu-incident/index.html...

I'm from the US and know quite well how things work.

I'll also add this link, as I think it's an excellent, and nuanced view that a lot of people elsewhere don't know about or see:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/04/gun...

It's not likely to happen in the US either, but sometimes unlikely things happen. That shooting instructor died because he was stupid. If he were smarter, he would have known not to give a kid a gun that even adults have difficulty shooting. And a single article of someone doing something stupid does not a picture of an entire culture paint. And US does not have a monopoly on stupidity, or shootings.

Statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-re...

> And US does not have a monopoly on stupidity

No, it doesn't. That's a universal thing.

Yep, those are all 9 year olds accidentally killing shooting instructors. The neighborhood gun range is the head of a river of blood flowing through our streets.

It's an extremely narrow, decontextualized view of the situation. It's far more important to ask why people are violent than with what tool they perpetrate that violence. I would say our issue is not guns, it's our "War on Drugs" and our relative proximity to all of those nearly-failed-states in Central- and South America that rank higher than us in those categories that are the center for production of those drugs, and the cartels that control them.

This specific example is surely meant to represent the wider range of accidents involving guns and children [1], and through that the yet more general issue of gun safety overall.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/children-and-guns-the-h..., for instance

> It's far more important to ask why people are violent than with what tool they perpetrate that violence.

Well the former question is certainly a good one. Maybe you're right that it's the most important one.

However, tools matter too - a gun is a way more efficient way of killing a lot of people quickly than a knife is. Both are far more lethal than Kinder Surprise eggs.

Further to the _more efficient way_ point, they're also far quicker, so a very brief murderous impulse has more chance of being followed through with.

That's a very odd table. Did you notice that if you sort by Homicide, nearly all the top 20 are in the Americas?

Its only 75 "countries and dependencies" in a world of something like 190 countries (not counting dependencies).

I suspect that the weighting toward the Americas isn't that the Americas are more violent, but that the Americas happened to host the countries in the intersection of higher gun homicide rates and sufficient stability to collect and report meaningful statistics.

There are things like this absolutely everywhere. My favourite is that where I come from you can't fill your own LPG gas tank in the car, it has to be done by a "qualified" person(because it's too dangerous to do it yourself!), which means you have to ask someone at the station to do it for you, but when filling any other fuel we have those little locks on the pistol which let you put it in and leave it until the tank is full.

In the UK on the other hand it is the exact opposite. You can fill your own LPG tank no problem, but I have not seen any pistols with the locks on them, because "it would be dangerous, what if you leave it in and forget about it??". It's just a matter of interpretation, a thing that is seen as dangerous in one country is completely fine in another.

See also:

  UK: It's illegal to sell washed eggs

  US: It's illegal to sell unwashed Eggs

Spoiler: In the UK, we keep eggs outside the fridge, and with the natural protection on the eggs (Removed when washed), they tend to keep for weeks. In the US, they tend to keep eggs in the fridge. Also a lot to do with how the chickens are kept. If you're not allowed to wash eggs (UK), it's more likely the chickens will be kept in sanitary, good conditions.

OTOH, It's cheaper for the producer to keep chickens in worse conditions, wash the eggs removing the protection and make consumers keep eggs in the fridge!

It has almost nothing to do with the breeding conditions. Factory farming techniques are pretty much identical across the globe. The reason is salmonella.

USDA mandates egg washing to combat salmonella. But the washing process also destroys the egg's outer most protective layer, the cuticle. Thus American eggs must be refrigerated, unlike almost everywhere else in the world.

In the UK, all chickens are already vaccinated against salmonella so their eggs don't need to be washed, nor refrigerated. This has a couple of benefits:

1. The cuticle remains intact, thus the egg is naturally protected against contamination during transport and storage.

2. Refrigerated eggs undergo temperature swings during transport, causing moistures to collect, which could lead to harmful bacterial growth.

3. A botched washing job leads to excess moisture and thus bacteria growth, and is worst than no washing job at all.

That's why it's actually illegal for the farm to wash the eggs in the UK.

That's true, and I'd forgotten the point about salmonella.

I'm sure a lot of it does have to do with conditions though. If you have to wash the eggs anyway, you can keep them in factory conditions, and wash off all the shit. If you're not allowed to wash the eggs, then you tend to be a bit more careful, and keep them in better conditions.

Yep - the state I'm from in the US, Oregon, has a law that says you can't pump your own gasoline.

Wasn't that law implemented to create more jobs, rather than for safety?

IIRC correctly its actually has to do with insurance premiums rather than blanket "safety" reasons.

Same for New Jersey. I was informed somewhere along the line that it was originally for safety and never got repealed. Now it seems to have morphed into a jobs "plan".

We have a lock, it just disables when the tank is full.

Well, I live in the UK and I have literally never seen a pistol with a functional locking clip. Ever. Maybe there are petrol stations here which have them working,but I am yet to see one.

Crappy chocolate, crappy toy. Yet somehow, put them together and kids find them irresistible.

fwii you couldn't take them from Canada into the US until very recently, I read something or the other about now being allowed, don't quote me at the border.