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
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.
a) Aluminium isn't magnetic, it wouldn't hold the can closed
b) Is it really that good an idea to have a magnet that close to your ipod?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
I was hoping it'd show you how to dance like a maniac then fly off into the sky :(
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?
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
(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)
"he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide somethin'"
I give up. Where??
Now there's an interesting question there - is the rise in iPod thefts due to the fact that iPods, associated with white earbuds, are more popular and hence worth stealing? Or is it simply because the white earbuds are more visible at night, thus making their owner a more obvious target?
See in Scotland we dont have Ipods yet, but ukele and banjo crime has gone through the roof
Here are some of the recomendations from TFA:
If, after following all of the above guidelines, your iPod should happen to be stolen, contact the RIAA as quickly as possible and inform them of all the illegal music you have stored on it, then wait for them to subpeona your assailiant and recover your costs in an out of court settlement.
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."
If only these poor, confused youths knew that you can just get iPods for free, we wouldn't be in this situation!
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
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.
I don't know about you but I'm all for the right of people to bear quarterstaffs.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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
What happens in a fist/knife fight? You can fight, or you can run (well, most of the time). What happens in a gun fight? You let the bullets fly. Shooting first is best, as every cowboy western duel has taught us. Guns are almost a 100% guarantee that more situations will come down to an actual fight, and that more people will be hurt. If they have the drop on you, you're equally SOL if you have a knife at your throat or a gun at your head. Yes, some hardened criminals have guns around here as well - but they're usually after bigger fish than the few dollars in your pocket. Your average street thug or wacko doesn't have a gun - and if they do they're very much so wanted by the police. "Shots fired" actually get real attention here, and with modern communication you can expect the cops to arrive in a timely fashion.
What happens in a fist/knife fight when it is a 300 lb rapist versus a 100 lb girl? Guns are equalizers, they give anyone, man, woman, elderly, the ability to defend themselves. An armed society is a polite society. Anyone who has a concealed carry permit can tell you that being armed increases ones awareness to not get in such a situation where you might have to defend yourself. Most criminals don't have a death wish and don't want to get shot. Over 4 million times per year, armed citizens use their weapons to defend themselves from criminals. In the vast majority of these cases, the criminal flees once they see their target is armed.
The world has moved on since the Dark Ages. Your (or any other witnesses) cell phone is a more powerful tool than the gun in almost every situation. There are really extremely few situations where you would have time to pull out a gun, and where the gun would be more efficient than the police. Either you have no time at all and would be shot, or you have run off, barricaded or hidden yourself somewhere and the police will arrive in time. It was a different time when you could be all alone on the farm in the countryside, and noone would help if you screamed off the top of your lungs.
There are a few problems with relying on the government to protect you. Firstly, the average response time for a 911 call can be 5 minutes or higher. A criminal can mug you, rape you, or break into your house in far less time. If someone attacks you on the street, you won't have time to call 911 and wait for help. The idea that you could run and barricade yourself until the police come to rescue you is both rediculous and dangerous. There have been many cases where someone heard an attacker breaking into their house, they called the police, but they never came. Most famously, in 1981, this happened to three women who were brutally and repeatadly raped in their Washington D.C. home because the police never came. They sued the city, but the courts ruled that the police are not required nor responsible to respond or help any invididual, their duty is only to protect the public at large, meaning to catch and punish the criminal after they already robbed/raped/killed you.
Do you own a fire extinguisher in your home? I assume you do, because it is a tool that can be used to save your life and your property. You could just rely on 911 and call them for even small fires that you could put out yourself. But then again, a small fire could grow and burn your entire house down before the firefighters arrive.
2) Guns protecting "the people" from the government Sure, a bunch of guys with handguns could be the core of an army in 1776 or thereabouts. Maybe even well into the 19th century. Look around, there's fighter jets, bombers, tanks, artillery, mechanised infantry, machine guns, destroyers and battleships. Hundreds of thousands of men like that died on a single day in WWI, they'd last even shorter today. The closest thing they could mount to a defense would be trying to lead a guerilla war, but they couldn't hold any ground. Any armed revolution that wa