Posts by Russell Brown
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, mad props to Ryan for being there - whatever happened to you, Russell?
Well, I had been up since 5am working so I could come to Wellington. I was also effing slaughtered.
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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.
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When I first arrived here I was all in favor of strict gun control, or even banning guns, but now I am not so sure. Even if you could ban all guns and had a magic wand that could make all guns in the US disappear overnight, the next day guns would be coming across the border by the container load.
I fear you're right. As I said earlier, there are simply too many guns in circulation, and too many more where they came from.
And iirc, you're right about different forms of crime. The burglary rate in NZ is high, and the rate in the US is lower than NZ, Australia, the UK, etc.
OTOH, the US murder rate is much higher than that of any comparable country and the rate of forcible rape is very high. The US robbery rate has fallen off the top slot in recent years, probably as gun prevalence in the UK, Spain and Portgual has increased.
But I can't buy the idea that you can fix it by predicting behaviour, or keeping a mental health register. That's a hell of a lot of poking around in the heads of citizens. How many Americans are on prozac?
We've seen this turn into a kind of fear of youth after previous school massacres (goths copped it after Columbine), but the fact is many adolescents get a bit dark on it and most of them don't commit mass-murder.
So, no, I can't see a solution.
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perfectly serious hadyn. when something intrinsically rewarding is changed to being extrinsically rewarding, the peasure diminishes.
don't believe me? try it some time. or google some of the literature on the topic.Bollocks. I love writing. I love it more when I get paid.
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This would get coverage regardless of the actual means, just because Virginia happens to be in a hugely competitive media market with ready access to airports, hotels, and a high degree of safety (lol?). So it is easy to cover, to send reporters to. Then it spreads rapidly because other media sources are hungry for ready made, self publicising news stories that have plenty of human interest + horrible glossy photos.
Also, VTech has highly-wired students who do stuff like setting up survivor clearing houses on Facebook. That story got a lot of coverage, and the student cellphone video (which was made compelling by the steady series of gunshots echoing on its track) was aired on CNN.
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Just as a thought experiment, does anything this this would have received the same level of media attention if (say) Cho Seung-Hui had been a totally screwed up engineering student who'd killed thirty four people by planting a fire bomb in a residential hall? And if not, why not?
Because the story of the blank-faced, stalking shooter is a more compelling narrative. It plays out of a longer period, during which TV can go live to the scene, and survivors have more interesting stories to tell. Hostage situations are especially good.
It's also part of an established story arc. School shootings happen a lot in the US - three in one week last year - and school bombings hardly ever. Every time, people say "but he equally could have used a bomb!" but it actually never happens. (They don't do their assasinations that way either.)
But the suicide bombing at the (wow!) Edgar Alan Poe Elementary School in 1959 is a fairly horrifying story.
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Top Gear s09e03
is that the one where they paint the slogans on their cars? It gets very frightening very quickly.
All on YouTube, naturally:
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Matt Drudge's link text for a story that says this:
Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior majoring in English, arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said.
Is: POLICE: Campus killer is Cho Seung-Hui, 23, native of South Korea....
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