Americans hold a range of views on the Second Amendment and on gun rights in general. That's nothing new.
But we couldn't help but notice the sheer silliness of an anti-gun policy in extremely liberal San Francisco. The city not only bans guns on public transit, but it bans even "images" of guns.
For instance, bus stops in San Francisco were forbidden to display the mass-produced posters advertising a recent action film called "The Other Guys." That's because the posters depicted actors holding guns. Before the posters could be displayed, they had to be altered. The guns that appeared in the original posters were replaced - with pepper spray canisters!
That reminds us of some anti-smoking zealots who have taken their cause to absurd extremes. Back in June, a reproduction of a famous photo of the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was altered. The photo, which hung over the main entrance to a museum in London that honors Churchill, was "corrected" to remove the cigar he was smoking when the photo was taken.
We respect differences of opinions on guns, and there are certainly excellent reasons not to smoke. But does it make sense to misrepresent the content of a movie just to avoid images of guns? And is it reasonable to "cleanse" the past by pretending that some great figures in history did not smoke?