The good folks at Daytime Toronto will be interviewing me about Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe on Thursday, January 17, 2008 at 11am (I understand the show will be re-broadcast the same day at 4pm and 11pm).
Speaking of Under Arrest (which is back in stock at amazon.ca *ahem*), and it's startling (*ahem*) relevance to your daily life, Chapter Two (entitled, rather unimaginatively, "A Gunfight at High Noon? Too Uncivilized") should have been required reading for this guy, charged as he is with 42 counts of promoting and/or being present at an illegal "prize fight". Charges for illegal prize fighting are fairly rare these days: in my research the most recent reported case I found was from a 1998 mixed martial arts tournament in Ontario. Among other things, Under Arrest covers the history and law of duelling in Canada, along with prize fights (which used to be prosecuted with a fair bit of vigour), hockey violence and animal fights. I quote:
Immersed in a world where on-demand savagery is available for download, saturated with violent imagery from boxing matches, bench-clearing brawls on television, movies, mixed martial arts tournaments and the exploits of their peers, perhaps the lifting of the cap on consensual violence has led to its normalization as part of the social fabric. The assessment of whether that is good or ill, and the inevitable legal response to the problem, is likely to resemble the legal history we have already seen.
Pick up the book to find out what that legal history is.
Great! I bought my dueling sword and musketeer hat for nothing!
Posted by: The Self-Loathing Multiculturalist | January 16, 2008 at 05:39 PM