* Based on the reported data. I suspect that the actual number of extant firearms is substantiall higher in the nations which nominally ban or severely restrict civilian firearms ownership.

I recognise that none of this has anything to do with your post ! But I smelt a tiny whiff of “how silly humans are to blindly follow the ways of the past” in your post. As Hayek correctly pointed out, it is not necessary to know why a custom is sensible, for it to be sensible. Human nature, as it has contingently evolved, sets constraints on the “rational” reconstruction of society. And if armed libertarians have any role on this planet, it is to start cocking their pistols when idealists start promoting the idea of changing human nature.

I’m confident that my knowledge of physics would be regarded as nil, to the nearest decimal point, but I have a feeling that statistically at least there is a fundamental difference between the universe at present and the universe at any time in the future. The latter will have more entropy.

So yes, economically important at the moment but conceptually arbitrary in a universal sense.

Anyway, I was merely trying to excuse the absence from the posting of a big world-changing annoucement by pointing out that underneath the assignments of units with fancy names there is no fundamental difference in the nature of the universe at 23:59:59 in 2012 and 00:00:00 in 2013, or indeed – if I understand physics correctly – at any other time.

@Brian, thanks – once again – for the linkage.

Optimistically, imagine what 2000 people actually looks like when crowded together, then dare to assume the real number is perhaps one third larger and that the whole crowd will now disperse and go for a beer in 2000 different pubs with 20,000 different acquaintences, and so on. I’m not surprised that it momentarily cooked my little web server.