Hard News: Awful in more than one way
256 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 4 5 6 7 8 … 11 Newer→ Last
-
killer writes violent plays.
someone better check tarantino's place for a gun collection, right now.
Yes. These things look at lot clearer with hindsight.
-
killer writes violent plays
Cough... who's up for broaching the subject with Peter Jackson?
-
These things look at lot clearer with hindsight.
i just thought it was great to hear that it was a crazed loner who did the shooting.
makes me rather sanctimonious about my policy of always taking time to talk to loners, engaging them in conversation with a 'real person', you know, neighbourly type stuff.
i'll be the one who's told to 'get, before someone gets hurt'.
-
What strikes me about these sorts of events is how strongly some men hold grudges and the determination to make as many people pay as possible. Women just don't do it. Not as often at least.
-
I haven't read all the posts here yet (shame on me!) but what I find fascinating after this tragedy is the use of message boards and 'social networking ' sites by these students trying to find some sense in all this. I think that this must be an amazing help for these people to be able to express themselves and seek some sort of common 'togetherness' in their grief.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/AFC006A0331E8856CC2572C10019E56C
-
Just to add my two cents as an ex pat kiwi living in Virginia where the impact of this massacre has been particularly profound. I have been surprised how the gun control issue has barely come up in conversations with colleagues about the massacre. I don't think people relate the two issues which still seems crazy to me, even after living here for a number of years.
I had two incidents in the first couple of years I was living here that gave me a fairly good picture of what the gun culture is really like here. Firstly I was at a church meeting and a friend of mine who is a police Sergeant adjusted his shirt and i realized he was carrying his gun off duty in the church meeting and simply did not understand why I was slightly freaked by that!
The second thing occurred when the gun control issue came up with a few friends, one of whom is a local pediatrician. She confirmed that she owned and at times carried a hand gun. At that point i pretty much gave up ever even attempting to understand the gun carrying mentality here, it is simply unfathomable to me. Also, despite living and breathing Virginia culture for four or five years, I am still repulsed by this attitude, even as i begin to understand it more.
-
What strikes me about these sorts of events is how strongly some men hold grudges and the determination to make as many people pay as possible. Women just don't do it.
i would suggest you've never worked in an office.
-
RB,
I agree, it is absolutely terrible, but I don't see a solution to this problem either. Simply calling for stricter gun control or bans of guns (like I used to) is just way too simplistic, the whole ball of wax is much more complex then to be solved by simple solutions like that.It is the people who pull the trigger that need to be focused on, but how you do that is tough. I agree that my idea of a mental health register is probably another good sounding idea that would be a governmental nightmare, but how the hell was nothing done about Cho at VT? The more you read, the worse it gets in terms of the signals he was giving off.
As you stated, crime in NZ in some categories is worse that the US. Here are some more stats that should have all those "America, the terrible crime waste land" stopped in their tracks. Beleive it or not, violent crime rates in countries with strict gun control like Aussie and the UK are significantly worse than in the US.
http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/guncontrol_20010302.html
So much for the gun control argument, it just doesn't fly. If it did fly, I would be all for it.
In additional to the stats at the link above, if you account for the fact that an extraordinary portion of violent crime in the US is young black male against young black male and/ or involves buying or selling drugs (another terrible fact, but a subject for another string), then my risk of being a victim of violent crime in the US is substantially lower still.
Strange as it may sound, I don’t think of the US as a dangerous place. The US has 75 times the population as NZ, so you can get 75 VTs for every Aramoana and be more or less even in terms of per capita risk (not accounting for the number of victims in each case).
Someone asked about buying a gun in the US as a resident alien. When I bought my shotgun, I needed my LA driver’s license, green card and passport and my social security number. The guy called up some kind of central database and they did a search to see if I had a criminal record or warrants outstanding etc. There isn’t a waiting period for a shotgun, so I could take it with me when nothing bad about me was found. There are checks in place, but if you have not had trouble with the law, you will be able to buy a gun quite easily in the US.
If you want to understand how the apparent contradiction of right to carry laws reduce the incidence of multiple victim public shootings, read the following paper. It is long, but appears to me to be very solid. The conclusion is on page 22.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=272929
After you have read the paper you may well come to believe that maybe those people calling for carry laws in response to the VT shooting aren’t just a bunch of crazed redneck Americans after all. As hard as it may be for many on this blog to accept, they appear to have the facts on their side.
The paper is very interesting stuff and goes to show that this whole issue is much more complicated than most of us are aware, and is certainly not going to be solved by emotional knee jerk reactions calling for stricter gun control after a terrible incident. That is the worst way to make public policy.
-
Following the "logic" here, airline passengers should be issued with a gun on boarding planes. Clearly, that would've prevented September 11...
-
Would you break into someone's house if you thought they may well be armed? Probably not.
But if you did, the first thing you'd do is kill the occupants before they could get to their guns. I'd be interested to see how many home invasions result in deaths over there compared to over here.
-
killer writes violent plays
Cough... who's up for broaching the subject with Peter Jackson?
Who interestingly also has one of the largest private collection of firearms in New Zealand.
-
The idea here is that you know any kind of conflict or altercation is likely to result in firearms being used. Because people fear death and injury as caused by firearms, this reduces the risk of conflict.
Wonderfully microcephalic reasoning that.
-
merc,
And afterall, we all live under the nuclear umbrella, protected by M.A.D.
-
Yes. These things look at lot clearer with hindsight.
Hum... I don't know if you're going to much like my PA Radio piece this week. Hindsight is invariably perfect, but again I've got to wonder whether shovelling the shy, lonely and depressed into compulsory counselling on the precautionary principle is much of an improvement. I don't envy any academic who is going to have to work the mother of all highwire acts in a litigious and therapy-crazed culture.
-
Just to be clear James, I think given the prevalence of firearms in the US, imposing gun control there at this stage is likely futile. I'm kind of reminded of the Simpsons gag "Alcohol: the solution to, and cause of, all our problems!" I can see that going for handguns too.
But maybe we can draw conclusions for here on what happens when you have a lot of concealed weapons around.
-
Hindsight is invariably perfect, but again I've got to wonder whether shovelling the shy, lonely and depressed into compulsory counselling on the precautionary principle is much of an improvement.
Well, yes. There was a spate of it after Columbine, with kids who were dark or different suddenly regarded as potential serial killers, which probably didn't help them. I speak as the father of a child who declared a desire to blow up his primary school ...
I don't envy any academic who is going to have to work the mother of all highwire acts in a litigious and therapy-crazed culture.
Indeed. And if you're going to task yourself with trying to track down and determine the real-world intentions of people who make threatening or alarming comments online, you're really opening a can of worms.
-
I really don't know how anyone can be confident stricter firearm control wouldn't work in the US. It hasn't been tried.
Places where it has been tried it has worked. They could even do it in a few trial states to see the effect. All the arguments in the world are no substitute for an experiment.
-
I really don't know how anyone can be confident stricter firearm control wouldn't work in the US. It hasn't been tried.
Places where it has been tried it has worked. They could even do it in a few trial states to see the effect. All the arguments in the world are no substitute for an experiment.
My thinking is that
a) you can't try it, because of the very deep political and cultural attachment to the "right to bear arms"
b) trial areas are doomed because there are no secure borders between any such areas and areas where guns are allowed. Also there is a huge pool of guns out there that might be hard to bring into the gun control regime.
So I suppose yes, I agree we could indeed hav e lot of fun, if we had a pony.
-
Ben,
You wrote about gun control that "Places where it has been tried it has worked. "
That is a myth, not an accurate statement.
The assault weapon ban tried here had no impact, which was why it was allowed to expire with barely a whisper from anyone.
Gun control has been tried in the UK and Aussie, and apparently it doesn't work as advertised.
See the link I posted in another post.
http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/guncontrol_20010302.html
Some key points from the article.
The International Crime Victims Survey, conducted by Leiden University in Holland, found that England and Wales ranked second overall in violent crime among industrialized nations.
Twenty-six percent of English citizens -- roughly one-quarter of the population -- have been victimized by violent crime. Australia led the list with more than 30 percent of its population victimized.
The United States didn't even make the "top 10" list of industrialized nations whose citizens were victimized by crime.
The United States, despite its high murder rate, was among the middle ranking countries with a 21 percent victimization rate," the London Telegraph said.
More specifics on Aussie sine it enacted its gun ban:
Countrywide, homicides are up 3.2 percent.
Assaults are up 8.6 percent.
Amazingly, armed robberies have climbed nearly 45 percent.
In the Australian state of Victoria, gun homicides have climbed 300 percent.
In the 25 years before the gun bans, crime in Australia had been dropping steadily.
There has been a reported "dramatic increase" in home burglaries and assaults on the elderly. -
James,
John Lott, your second source, is simply not credible in the gun debate.
see:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/lott/more_guns_less_crime/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/lott/cherrypicking/
http://timlambert.org/category/lott/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/lott/misc/
http://timlambert.org/category/lott/cherry-picking/
http://timlambert.org/category/lott/more_guns_less_crime/And most of the other stuff on Lambert's website under Lott.
If anyone's interested, Tim Lambert has a whole heap of good stuff on his website countering the more guns less crime argument.
-
Number one key point: that story is from 2001, the information from a single source is based on data older than that, and selectively picked to advocate a case.
I fail to see how being armed protects me as I'm walking down the street, minding my own business, and someone comes up and shoots me with his or her concealed weapon. Maybe I should always be vigilant and prepared to draw my gun in case anyone does something suspicious?
What's apparent though is that the gun advocates are more keen on spreading fear than working on reducing crime. This can't be done, because then all those heroic gunbattles between villains and the armed citizenry would never take place...
-
James, tell me where in Ozzie I could have walked into a store and purchased a gun with no license?
There are certainly differing studies on the effects of gun control in Oz.
Stephen, "trial areas are doomed because..." - you need to *try* it before making that kind of conclusion.
-
You need to be careful about taking these analyses as presented, James.
Up until 1993, the US had world-leading rates of gun ownership and violent crime victimisation. Then the great American crime plunge of the Clinton years happened.
Gun ownership rates didn't change (indeed, more controls were imposed) but overall wealth a demographics did. I don't think anyone really understands the fall in crime in the US, but it can't be ascribed to an increase in gun ownership, which is roughly the same now as it was 30 years ago.
Comparisons are also perilous. The violent crime rate in Canada looks higher than that in the US, but the US statistics only count aggravated assault, while those in Canada count all assaults.
There's also studies like this:
Results. In region- and state-level analyses, a robust association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide was found. Regionally, the association exists for victims aged 5 to 14 years and those 35 years and older. At the state level, the association exists for every age group over age 5, even after controlling for poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, and nonlethal violent crime.
Conclusions. Although our study cannot determine causation, we found that in areas where household firearm ownership rates were higher, a disproportionately large number of people died from homicide.
And the Australian figures are selective to the point of dishonesty. Gun-related crime fell in the years after stronger controls were introduced, so recent increases come up from a low point. Also, only one in five armed robberies in Australia actually involve firearms.
-
I have to say I'm skeptical that gun control laws succeed in stopping criminals from getting guns. But fatalities from guns seem to be less where there are laws. It's guns in the hands of average joe that really seem to be the problem. If you have a gun, you might want to use it, and if you're thinking that way, so is the other guy.
-
James:
Here's another couple of links to try:
assaults
murder
Murder with gunsBased on governmental stats rather than a telephone survey.
Victimization can mean a lot of things from a slap outside the pub to a gun in ones face with menace. And I wonder how many of the potential assaults in the US had a fatal consequence which they would not have had in the UK, thus moving them from one statistic to the next.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.