Tunisia

It occurs to me that we could file this one under The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.

With all the sound and fury here in the US over "2nd Amendment Remedies", and "If ballots don't work, bullets will" - with all the potential for bellicose rhetoric to turn into real bloodshed, it's strangely reassuring to look at events in Iran and now Tunisia, and draw the conclusion: The revolution will not only be televised, but will actually be fought with cell phones and video cameras.

Disarming your citizens can have the unintended consequence of effectively neutering your government's authority to use force.  If you shoot an unarmed protestor, you aren't defending some lofty sounding governing principle.  You're just an asshole.

I don't know a lot about what's going on in Tunisia.  I only know that Ben Ali's government has been tagged as repressive for years, but now there's video on the web that shows unarmed citizens being gunned down in the streets.



And here's a write-up from Foreign Policy.