On a Wednesday, a short school day in France, one of my classmates had brought a whole group of kids to his house. The parents were away at the office so we tasted a few drops of his dad's Scotch, checked out his older brother's collection of Playboy magazine, then, as if we needed to complete our transgressions, our young host led us upstairs, opened a drawer in the master bedroom, and pulled out this mass of black metal.
Many of us had seen our grandfathers' hunting rifles, but this was the real thing -- designed to pierce big holes in human bodies. And as we passed the gun along, some of us refused to touch it. The weapon conveyed less the glamorous image of Hollywood thrillers than the ghastly and realistic press account of the end of a gangster, riddled with bullets by the police in the middle of Paris a few weeks before.
Read more: France: Where fear and taboo control guns more than laws - CNN.com
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