Slashdot Mirror
UK Street Crime Rise Blamed on iPods
CNET reports that the British Government today attributed the country's 22% rise in street crime to iPod robberies. This has hit CNET close to home. Guy Cocker, a CNET (Gamespot) journalist based in London, was mugged last week. The muggers held 'a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head and told him, "we're taking all your stuff"'. CNET's solution to the problem is suggestions on how to conceal your iPod from attackers. These include 'The gaffer tape method,' 'The Coke can method,' and 'The Christopher Walken method.'
wthout those baaad baaad guns this would have never happened!
Oh wait...
how long until
So it's our jobs' fault for giving us money that can be stolen?
The fault of car makers that cars get stolen?
I'm a bit confused.
Really, now... is this the fault of the iPod and not the punk-ass thugs doing this crap?
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Replace the earplugs with ones with black cables.
How about walking around without listening to music the whole time?
98,204 - 90,747 = 7,457 More
7,457 / 90,747 = 8.2% Rise from the original level
22%? WTF?
As far as I can tell, a big part of the reason for having an iPod is meant to be because it looks stylish. Basically, the whole point is for it to be seen. If you're going to start trying to disguise your iPod, wouldn't it be a better option to just get a cheaper and/or better music player from another company?
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
Summary:
TFA:
For all I know an opened glass coke bottle feels exactly like a semi-automatic weapon when it is pressed into the back of a persons head. The words felt like make all the difference.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
TFA misses out on the interesting bit of the article:
"His assailants held what felt like a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head"
Wow, he can differentiate a semi-automatic from a nonautomatic from an automatic, just based on how it presses against the back of his head.
Note how the Slashdot summary changes things:
"The muggers held 'a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head"
(Before anyone turns this into a matter of gun control alone, note that countries like Switzerland and Norway, with HUGE amounts of weapons in private ownership, including AG-3's in about 1/3'd of homes in Norway, have firearms related violence rates not much different from the UK - it's much more complicated than gun control or not)
Do you blame car thefts on the awesomeness of a car? How about rape on the attractiveness of the victim? Why then would you blame ipods for getting stolen? Blame the criminals.
Yeah, because letting people run around with guns really solved the USA's violent crime problem, didn't it?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
As a Londoner I'm pretty sure there was no gun involved. This guy was the victim of the classic 'banana in the small of the back' scam as portrayed in so many movies. It can be scary if the guy looks mad enough. Happened to me once, 5 years ago and I never saw the gun - just a 6'4 crackhead. In the end I just walked away with half of me just waiting to be shot in the back. It didn't happen fortunately.
As someone else said, if you've got a real gun in London you're not jacking iPods with it - you're doing something a little larger in scope. However, I'm not sure that this isn't changing with some younger people - gun crime is certainly increasing.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I would reword the grandparent as:
When walking through dodgy parts of town, best to keep your wits about you.
Pumping loud music through your ears when you should be using your senses for protection and information is idiotic at best.
liqbase
this is largely an American idea "the right to bear arms"
Actually, it's an idea from the English common law, which was preserved in America while England abandoned the traditional rights of Englishmen. Before the suppression of the Jacobites, there wasn't much dispute in Britain that free men are entitled to posess arms for their own defense.
In America, we wrote it into our bill of rights, because having just overthrown our king about a decade earlier, we decided that placing a monopoly on armaments in the hands of government was a very dangerous idea.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Poverty does correlate to higher crime rates. So do a lot of things - like lack of education. Poverty and education do not steal iPods, however.
The GPs point was that even if you have a situation that may be favorable for increasing crime rates, the crimes are still committed by PEOPLE. If you have a libertarian bent, or if you belief in human autonomy at all, then in any given crime you blame the criminal FIRST.
There's a belief out there that those with a more liberal bent tend to eclipse personal responsibility and act as though being poor somehow makes you less responsible for your own actions - less human. The response from those with a more conservative bent (e.g. me) is that if you're poor you have more to gain and less to lose from crime, but this means you have incentive to commit a crime. Having incentive to commit a crime is not the same as being forced to commit a crime. And so I, and many others, would consider the mugger to be responsible for the mugging.
So poverty - which creates incentive - really should be listed as a separate issue then the personal responsibility of those who commit the crimes.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
But that's beside the point - no, you are not being "forced" to commit crimes. However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.
That does not mean that they are not responsible. However it's just downright stupid to point the finger at the choices of individual criminals for the crime rates, which is what I responded to. The criminals are responsible for their individual crimes, not "street crime" in general.
Society is responsible for the conditions that drive these people to make these choices, and poverty is the largest single driver for this kind of low level crime.
If you want to discuss a single crime, then sure, we can discuss the choices of that criminal. But as long as the issue is street crime in general, the criminals individual choices are not relevant.
Crime is much more complicated than whether or not the citizenry is armed. There are many countries with near prohibitions on guns that have high crime, and many countries with lots of guns that have low crime, and vice versa. Allowing responsible citizens to be armed, however, never really increases gun crime, so there is little reason to prevent it. As the saying goes, if you put a bunch of guns in the middle of a town with low crime, you will get low crime. Guns don't magically make people into criminals. They do, however, put law-abiding citizens on a level playing field with criminals. And that, I think, is the best we can expect to do.
The real secret to fighting crime is to catch criminals and make sure that they stay in jail until they are no longer a threat to society. This novel concept appears to be diminishing as time goes on. I recall that Britain just passed a law that allows burgulars to essentially get the first one free. That makes utterly no sense and will serve only to increase the rate of burglary in the UK.
~moofbong
If 'con' is the opposite of 'pro', what is the opposite of 'progress'?
If I had to listen to bagpipe music all the time, I'd probably buy a gun too.
Because NOT letting people run around with guns really solved Washington DC's and Chicago's violent crime problem, didn't it?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Man, this makes me laugh every time I see this tired old argument.
And I do not say this to mock you. Truly. The concept of keeping the citizenry armed, to keep the government in check.. that's beautiful. I love it.
But do you honestly think that if "they" want to come get you, that your guns are going to stop them?
Do you know what kind of shit they can deploy? You wouldn't even see them coming! What's your Glock going to do against a sonic array? Or chemical attack?
You want to keep guns and shoot them as a hobby, fine, go for it. But don't pretend they give you any extra insurance or autonomy whatsoever against the United States Government; that is a laughable, delusional fiction.
(By the way, your Constitution was written at a time when people had to deal with bears on their property, ferfuxsake! It was a fact of life at the time, the need to own a gun. Not so much now. Crime's at an all-time low.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.