Another Gun Free Zone that isn't

general
384

This is where we cannot agree. WE literally look at that and you see something worse because the guy has a gun. Forget the fact that he could choke her to death, break her neck, stab her in the chest and let her bleed to death, to you him having a gun makes it worse and to me he already had the power to kill her.

And, she’s never going to use her gun other than for practice and self defense, so what’s it matter to anyone else that she has it?

This was a response to fighting nuclear weapons with AKs. No western government is going to fight an insurgency with nukes and those countries showed how much damage yokels with rifles can do to the best military in the world.

Not the case, his Imam knew him by name and reputation. In addition he told 911 he was doing this for ISIS and apparently was yelling Aloha Snackbar during the attack.

So far it’s been the Muslims exercising the xenophobia here. Jews are still attacked more than Muslims for their beliefs. The type of people who make these attacks are the type who don’t want to fit in, they want to live in the “promised land” but somehow make it just like the hellhole they left. Europe has just as much violent crime, maybe a bit more, or a bit less, just because they use fists, clubs, or knives doesn’t mean it’s less violent than a gun.

I think I can sum up some of our difference here as well. I see an attempted rape end with the criminal dead on the ground and the woman unraped and count that a good thing. You aren’t so sure. I would go farther and change the crime to a mugging or any other violent crime, and I’ll still believe criminal dead and victim unharmed is the next best result to them not doing it in the first place. Now, I realize that I’m putting words in your mouth, but that’s the impression I get.

Except in France you get both. In many countries you get both, albeit with a different weapon. I get the thought, and if I could make that trade, and guarantee it, I would. Timothy McVeigh took down a whole building because he knew he couldn’t do as much with a gun.

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385

I like have conversations with people who hold different views than myself. If I only talked to people that agreed with me I’d be like Nixon, or Obama. It’s even better when it can be held on a more civil level than a most people out there in the wild wild web seem to speak to each other. We’re not two random people screaming at each other out there.

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I would guarantee I don’t walk past a gun a day. Yes, I’m in NZ, not GB, and I probably walk past a lot less people, but we just don’t have that many guns here. I’d probably be lucky to walk past a gun a year.[quote=“Woodman, post:381, topic:459”]
Yes, if you think the problem is the gun and not the crime. OTOH, gasoline and a match in a crowded theater do just as good of a job, or some fertilizer, gasoline and some cans did pretty well for an elementary school.

We could be GB and half the police just watch a couple dudes saw a guys head off with a machete because the “specials” aren’t there yet. We could be China and have two or three dudes attack and kill or injure 140 with knives. Japan and have a school janitor poison an entire school. Are those somehow better because there wasn’t a knife?
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The problem with your examples is that they are exceptional events. In America you are getting a mass shooting every couple of days
We’re 164 days into 2016. We’ve had 133 mass shootings

I’m not saying that banning guns is the answer. I don’t even know if it would be possible at this point. But if you are going to use other mass killings in your arguments, please compare like with like.

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You certainly could attempt to ban the manufacture & sale of all guns. But that doesn’t really solve the problem, does it? You can’t confiscate & destroy them all without completely destroying the Constitution.

As one acquaintance pointed out on Facebook, “'we have said it’s more acceptable to interfere with one right (the 4th Amendment) but not another (2nd Amendment). So, for all of you ‘constitutionalists’, you can’t have it both ways.”

For the non-USians, the 4th Amendment is what the government was taking a dump all over until Snowden spoke up, and then many Americans said “that’s OK, I had nothing to hide anyway.”

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A shooting where four people are slightly wounded does not compare to a killing of 50 people. We are talking about an exceptional event by definition, and 1929 is still the leader in mass shootings.

I compare a massive knife attack to a massive shooting. I can’t compare a minor shooting to a minor knife attack, or baseball attack, or whatever, because people don’t track those. 140 dead from knives, which never happens, to 50 dead from a gun, which never happens, that’s apples to apples.

The number of people killed annually by guns, or anything, in America is going down. What we’re doing is working. This is like reducing the speed limit on the highway when accidents are getting rarer because some drunk dude caused a 10 car pileup.

And New Zealand has 22 guns per 100 people, 22nd in the world. It’s still more likely for him because of population density. But the key here is concealed carry, if it’s concealed, you can’t see it, you really don’t know, and if you walk by a couple hundred people a day, that’s at least a couple dozen gun owners, and one of them is paranoid enough to risk jail time for self protection, maybe, I dunno, I don’t live there so you’re the judge. It’s a higher percentage of ownership than I thought though.

And this is interesting…

I’d bet the truth is somewhere between Vox and that site.

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This really f#$&s me off.

The whole “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is an insidious piece of crap.
Privacy is not about “hiding stuff” - that’s an extremely manipulative way of minimising legitimate concerns. Privacy is about not wanting your neighbour to know your bank account details. It’s about not wanting the entire world to watch you getting undressed. It’s about having some quiet time to think about things, read a book etc.
Privacy is about so many different things that pigeonholing it as “having something to hide” is a very dangerous thing.
There is so much I could rant about this, but you get the picture.

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I think you’re preaching to the choir on the “nothing to hide” thing, Mike. Some people just don’t get it though. My girlfriend has massive trust issues and sometimes gets irritated at me when she asks questions about what I’m doing and I don’t give her every last detail. We’re working on it and she’s getting better but it’s still a thing. She told me I shouldn’t be concerned if I have nothing to hide. I told her that’s what the Nazis said and she didn’t appreciate the comparison.

I don’t understand that whole mentality. Just because I have nothing to hide doesn’t mean I’m OK with people and/or the government being all up in my business. The gun issue is a bit thornier. Americans aren’t a very trusting people, so any perceived attempt to take away the ability to protect oneself is likely to met with resistance.

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Saying that other countries also have gun problems doesn’t alter the fact that America does too. All I’m really saying is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to kill a lot of people with a gun than with other methods, due to things like availability, effectiveness, ease of use. I don’t think comparing a mass gun killing with a machete attack is a useful comparison, when there are so many more mass gun killings than machete attacks, or mass poisonings, or whatever.

As to the availability of guns in NZ, I would expect that 21.75 of those 22 guns are locked away most of the time. We have a reasonably large rural population and a lot of those rural types will have guns for things like keeping rabbits or possums down. The police also have a few guns locked away.
I know a few people with guns - but they are all recreational hunters and do keep their guns locked up.
The criminal element who have guns tend to be clustered in lower socioeconomic areas and I don’t tend to go there.

Probably, but I still felt the need to rant :smile:

I thought it was interesting that the last Harry Potter movie also used the “nothing to hide” line when the death eaters took over. Obviously the film makers were trying to get a message across too - though I suspect it went over the heads of most people.

392

Maybe this what we need. From Not Always Related: “We Need More Bacon Control”

 
Brother: trying a new sandwich “It’s not half bad.”

Me: “So it’s ALL bad?”

Brother: “Whoops, I’ve gone British again. I think ‘not half bad’ is a British phrase. I meant … badness constitutes less than half of this sandwich’s entire essence!”

Me: “Yeah, that’s the ‘Murican way to put it …”

Dad: “No, the American way to put it is: More guns. More bacon.”

Brother: “BACON GUNS!”

Dad: “Lo, a bald eagle! It was called to us by your phrase!”

(A few minutes later we ended up with the idea of bacon guns shooting out tiny bald eagles that sing the national anthem, then burst into fireworks in the shape of the American flag.)

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393

That’s the point. People who think nothing of their right to privacy being violated get royally pissed off when there’s a hint that Obama’s gonna come into their house and steal their hunting rifles that they use exclusively for providing food for their family.

You can’t have it both ways - you can’t be so cavalier about giving up your 4th Amendment protections and then get crazy because someone might infringe on your 2nd Amendment. It’s a package deal, you don’t get to pick and choose which parts of the Constitution you cling to and which parts you don’t care about. The whole thing is the law of the land.

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You have to admit that the government hasn’t exactly given us a lot of reasons to trust them in the first place.

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And hey, it looks like you’re on your way to having a choice between someone who repeatedly bankrupts his corporations and wants to build a wall on a scale that would make Emperor Hadrian say “Steady on there, chaps!” and a woman who is being actively investigated by the FBI for at least three different flavours of fraud.

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Don’t remind me. I’m depressed enough about our potential president as it is… Maybe we should all write in Mickey Mouse?

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His current soundbite is “ban all Muslims coming from countries that support terrorism”. This tasty bit of hate speech which his supporters (and I mean that in the athletic sense) are just eating up completely glosses over the fact that the Orlando nutjob was a US citizen, born and raised in the US. “Ban immigrants from these countries” would be as effective as a screen door on a battleship.

Puh-lease. The current investigations aren’t even in the top 10 of “shady $#!7 the Clintons have been involved with.” There were already enough skeletons in that closet to fully cast a sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas.

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398

I’m going with Minnie. On her new Apple Watch clockface you can change the colour of her dress. Far superior to Mickey.

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399

Oh great, I read that in the Cinema Snob voice :stuck_out_tongue:

Vaguest. Sentence. Ever. Countries that support terrorism currently include the UK, because we fund a rebel group in Syria that the official Syrian government has labeled terrorists. Or the UAE, where oil comes from. Heck, there is still support for the IRA in Ireland, does that make Ireland a country that supports terrorism?

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For that matter, I’m pretty sure you can count the US in this group as well.

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Yup, knowing America I’m sure if you can find an extremist group labelled terrorists there is someone here supporting them.

Don’t forget the trampling of the third when the police invade the home of the neighbor of the person they are interested in. And the 5th when they violate the spirit of the law by saying you can be forced to unlock your phone with your fingerprint.

The abuse of the 4th ticked me off when the Patriot Act was enacted, and it still pisses me off now.

But when you count mass shootings as anything where 4 or more people are injured during a gun use, and no one anywhere counts the number of times 4 people are stabbed, or four people are beaten with sticks, or four or more are hit with a car, then you actually can’t compare it.

If you take Vox’s numbers for gun violence, then you need to have something that counts the number of times 4 or more people were injured with a blunt object, or whatever. Since no one counts that, then what good is the gun violence number? How can you say that there is more mass violence here than somewhere else when no one has counts of the alternative? If Canada had 175 mass blunt object attacks this year, would anyone even know? Let’s change that number for population. 30 million compared to 300 million. 17.5 violent blunt object attacks, or 17.5 knife attacks, or 17.5 malicious car attacks, or a combination of the three injuring four or more people so far this year.

If you look at larger numbers than let’s say 20, then bombs compete just as well with guns, along with arson.

Nice thing about the US is that we mix up most of our areas like that. I couldn’t avoid them if I tried. The worst areas are still clustered, Detroit, but in most places we’re pretty desegregated socially and economically. The very high end and very low end are the only exceptions.

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Actually pretty much every country in Europe and Scandinavia records this data. There are even interactive maps for crime with different layers. I’ll see if I can find one quickly… Here’s one that works by month by Police District, my local one for Blyth. While it doesn’t separate violent crimes on the public version, the Police Federation version has details down to the weapons used.

There are also national maps but Crimemapper seems to be having server problems today.

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103 violent crimes in one town in one month. I don’t have a reference on whether that’s good or bad, but it’s not an aggregation site like Vox has done. How many of those violent crimes actually injured someone, since at least in America the threat of violence counts as a violent crime, and how many of those injuirous (New word, just made it up) incidents were more than 3 people.

We have something similar here in some areas, and they don’t give that information either. Most places get their counts from news stories and the FBI totals, and a fight with four people injured isn’t going to hit the news, or even the FBI, hell, it might not even be reported at all.

I also think it’s interesting that with 103 violent and sexual attacks there are 0 weapons crimes. So 103 times one or more people were victimized with nothing but muscle, with no way to defend themselves.

I tried to find my town’s map, but there’s only been one crime in town in the last few months, so kind of silly, we’re really small. Though we did have a guy a few years ago with an illegally modified full auto AK lose his shit. Killed a couple people in his house and a K-9 before blowing his own brains out after hiding in someone’s garage overnight. My neighbor was in on that one.