American actor David Carradine and his brothers Bruce, John, Keith, and Robert are leading a public service announcement to promote the right to bear arms by China's equivalent of the National Rifle Association (NRA) following a week in which two unrelated Chinese men carried out separate knife attacks against innocent bystanders.
Last week, a Chinese man stabbed and killed fellow passenger Tim McLean while on a passenger bus outside Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Three days later at the Olympics in Beijing, another Chinese man with a knife killed tourist Todd Bachman and seriously injured his wife Barbara. Police do not believe the two killings are related.
Citing vast cultural differences between the West and China, Mr. Carradine ventured:
"We think it's a big deal to carry around a knife. But in China everyone carries a knife of some kind. They are as ubiquitous as guns are in the United States."
Fed up with the spate of knife-related killings and the number of knife-manufacturing jobs lost to Chinese workers over the past several years, the NRA has issued a general directive to shoot on sight any Chinese man holding a knife. "We'll shoot first, then ask questions later," emphasized NRA spokesman Lou 'Lefty' Lupie. "And I'd like to point out that we are only targeting Chinese men at this point," he added. "Not just anyone who 'looks' Chinese."
In a related controversy, the (Topeka) Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church has announced its own explanation of the knife attacks -- calling them God's retribution for everybody's failure to listen to them.
