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Having Your ID Stolen Leads to Job Loss, Prosecution
ConfusedVorlon writes "The BBC reports on the sad case of Simon Bunce. Mr. Bunce had his identity stolen, and credit cards were made to capitalize on the theft. Some of those cards were used at sites offering child pornography, and as a result Mr. Bunce was swept up in Operation Ore. The poor man was prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent, but in the meantime he lost his job. It took him six months to find another at a quarter of the salary. 'The police's computer technicians take several months to examine [his computers and records], and Mr Bunce could not afford to wait to repair the damage done to his reputation. "I knew there'd been a fundamental mistake made and so I had to investigate it." Recent surveys suggest that as many as one in four Britons have been affected by it. In 2007 more than 185,000 cases of identity theft were identified by Cifas, the UK's fraud prevention service, an increase of almost 8% on 2006.'"
no one will care, because thats acceptable to protect the children.
All ongoing posts will be the back and forth on this concept.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
How society prosecutes child pornography... like a lynch mob: guilty until proven innocent and no recompense for those poor souls that did not deserve to be labeled and treated like some monster.
There is way too much leniency given to law enforcement in the process of stopping child pornography. WAY TOO MUCH.
I'm not saying that child pornography is good or even just 'not bad'... I'm saying that lynch mob mentality in prosecuting anyone suspected of it is absolutely the wrong thing to do.
Sex crime laws and their enforcement (at least in the US) are criminal in themselves. They are, at best, mostly subjective in nature and enforced with the tact of a nuclear weapon.
Victims are stigmatized, penalized, emotionally brutalized, and then forever branded as someone that people can't trust.
Laws are good to have. Not all laws are good laws. A law set by a community that cannot be amended or repealed is not a law, it's a dogma. These laws need some changes, big ones.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Or Simon Buttle?
with few exceptions, 'justice' leans in particular ways. Where children and child support are concerned, it's children first and anything else is a secondary consideration such as whether or not a man is the ACTUAL father of the children.
In a case such as this, at least in the US, a person might at least be able to sue the government for malicious prosecution and collect damages specifying that since the accusation ruined his life, that the government should therefore pay for it for a long, long time.
I have personally experienced what an accusation can do to one's employability... not even a conviction, just an arrest or an accusation. Is this an acceptable part of the justice system? I don't think so. While it's important to 'care for the victims' it's EQUALLY important to protect the rights of the accused until there is enough evidence to prove something is wrong.
In the particular case under discussion, they should never have arrested him based on credit card transactions. That is not proof of identity or of anything other than a transaction was made. And if no other evidence of a crime was present, the most they should have done is attempt to verify whether or not it was actually he that made the transaction or someone else. They could do much of that without even bothering the poor guy.
The reality is that this man is a victim of a crime... not necessarily a crime that is actually described in law, but still a violation of his life. I can't see that as acceptable. I think England is one of the last places I'd want to live... but then so is the U.S... and that's where I am now.
This man's problems were caused not by ID theft, but by suspicion of crime. It would be no different if someone seeking revenge reported him on an "anonymous tipline".
The real problem, as I see it, is that even though one may legally be innocent until proven guilty, when it comes to dealing with the public at large, the accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent, and sometimes even afterward.
Mr. Bruce's problems were caused by the society in which he lives, not the ID theft.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If you can solve the "identity theft" problem, you won't have to worry about this in the future. Whether kiddie porn is involved or not.
And we've been over, often enough, the various means of solving "identity theft". The problem is that the burden is on the victim, not the bank issuing the cards. Despite the bank having far more information and resources than the victim.
If we would just validate the transaction instead of the "identity" of the purchaser, we'd be able to eliminate this fraud.
And it's not like it's far-fetched to think that the people purchasing child porn might use stolen or misappropriated credit cards to do so...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think other posters have missed the point a bit by focusing on the fact that this case was about child pornography. Yes, that's a particularly egregiously aggressively policed crime, but it's hardly the only time cops will use credit cards to track who they think committed a crime. (Nominal) ownership of the credit card used should *never* be considered sufficient evidence to charge someone with *any* crime. It's probable cause to investigate, sure, but not to charge. It's only about one step more reasonable than charging someone because their real name matched the screen name used.
From the Democratic Underground:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3100544
"You're fired!"
Those are the words that millions of Americans could hear if Congress passes the SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act would require every employer in the U.S. to use so-called "electronic employment verification," cross-checking all current and potential employees' citizenship status against databases that the government itself knows are filled with errors and inaccuracies.
And what if the Social Security Administration (SSA) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) get it wrong and can't verify a person's citizenship or right to work using their buggy database? Tough luck. That person is out of a job, with no right to appeal. And you don't even need to have your identity stolen to be so unlucky.
Does this idea bother you?
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
WTF? One in four? are you insane? that would be 15 million people. Does that really seem likely? Anecdotally I know substantialy more than four people and *none* of them have had their identity stolen. They are still the same people I used to know (although with ID theft the way it is who can tell?).
OK, Cifas (whoever they are) pursued 185k cases last year. There are 65M people in the uk. 65,000,000 - 185,000 = 65,000,000 (rounded up). That is not 25%, more like 0.025%. If they can only identify 0.1% of the fraud what are they actually doing? I know the gubment wastes money, but that is crazy.
Scenario: Build a database with every possible social security number.
Next, start gathering whatever information you can and entering it in that database. By theft or purchase or whatever.
How long will it be before you can, digitally, "prove" that you are any person in that database?
The attacks you are talking about are just the tip of the iceberg. It would be possible to perform such fraud on a nation-wide basis. Against just about any person in the nation.
And our system is NOT equipped to deal with such.
Okay, yeah, I've got nothing to say to that. I think I'm just going to go sit in my corner & cry about the state of the world.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Quote: "This man's problems were caused not by ID theft, but by suspicion of crime."
So many things have been happening like that, I wonder if there is an intent to overthrow the U.S. and U.K. governments. For example, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura said yesterday that he thinks the attack on the World Trade Center was a controlled demolition.
The U.S. Senate voted against Habeus Corpus, which provides legal protection from unlawful detention.
The U.S. government has been building prisons.
The laws, much like the new set of laws to arrest people for clicking on illegal hyperlinks, is by design set up to create an environment where even being suspected of, or attempting to view childporn is enough to get raided. Even if you have no child porn on your computer, you still get arrested and treated as a pedophile, and thats the problem with these sorts of laws. These sorts of laws cast such a wide net that it doesnt matter who is guilty or whos innocent, the purpose of the laws is simply to arrest anyone who LOOKS or SEEMS or ACTS like a pedophile, whether they actually are a pedophile or not. If you click a link, or search for child porn in Google, thats enough to get you raided because you're acting like a pedophile. And sure thats bad, or perhaps stupid, but the law says you can get prison time for ATTEMPTING to access child porn. The laws are vague enough where a lot of people can be set up, trapped, or end up in situations such as this guy.
You're right - it's a pretty good joke too.
Many like him have ACTUALLY been lynched, and killed, by the public.
Those sex offender databases often have incorrect addresses.
He had nothing to hide because he was innocent, so everything worked out in the end, right?
The same thing happened to a guy here : http://www.krem.com/topstories/stories/krem2_040208_chismcomputers.26cb2f44.html although they've yet to drag him through the courts.
A little background. Landslide was the company that sold the AVS and KEYZ age verification codes for access to adult sites. Despite the fact that they had thousands of sites, and their lawyers assured them they were not responsible for content, the government shut them down and prosecuted them over a couple of dodgy offshore sites, claiming the owners were "madams of a child porn bordello," and sent them to prison for life.
Not content with this, they then took Landslide's entire customer list, sorted it by country, and sent it out to foreign law enforcement organizations demanding they raid everyone on it. They couldn't prove anyone on it had even visited an alleged child porn site, or what they had looked at if they did, but they could use the list for "probable cause" to search the victims computers, and if they found illegal porn while doing do, they could prosecute them for that.
Most countries ignored the US demands, except for those conducting their own child abuse moral panics like the UK. The UK ran with the list, and called its version "Operation Ore."
So they ran around raiding everyone in the UK who had purchased an age verification code from Landslide, and managed to find porn on a few computers, and sometimes were able to terrorize people on the list into making incriminating admissions. Of course, everyone so targeted was featured in the UK press as "a person who had paid for access to child porn."
The problem here is not identity theft. The problem here is a fishing expedition into the lives of mostly innocent people based on something which no reasonable person would consider probable cause.
From the article:
Four years on, he is bringing a High Court action against the shopping website for allowing his personal details to be compromised. So no more internet shopping? "No, no, no. Once bitten, twice shy," says Mr Bunce, who now sells encryption services.Oh no.
http://outcampaign.org/
My reading of the story may be wrong, but I can't find anywhere in it where it says that he was prosecuted. Perhaps this is a transatlantic definition problem. Here in the UK, there are basically four stages to a criminal prosecution (yes, I have simplified).
- Arrest: The police suspect that you might have committed a crime.
- Charging: The police decide that their suspicions were correct and ask for the case to go to trial.
- Prosecution: The Crown Prosecution Service (a body independent from the police) decide that the case is likely to succeed and will be in the public interest. They prepare the prosecution case and go to the courts.
- Conviction or aquital: A court decided whether or not the defendant is guilty and if guilty imposes a penalty.
So far as I can tell, in this case Mr Bunce only passed through the first stage. The police eventually decided that he had not committed a crime and therefore didn't charge him. Now, that is not to minimise his suffering. He has clearly been very badly treated and he hope he succeeds with legal action against not only the web site, but also the police and his ex-employers. I should also point out that here in the UK police state, he will have had his finger prints and DNA taken and that these will now be retained forever (even after his death) even thought the police accept that he did nothing wrong.
A wrongful dismissal lawsuit might be helpful here. The man was innocent and the company should have supported him. If they did not trust him, they could have put him on leave. He should not have been fired unless his job performance was poor and even then they should have offered help.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
This is a case of fraud, not theft. This man's identity was not "stolen," but used fraudulently in an attempt to gain illegitimate access to goods and services under the guise of someone else. Using words like "identity theft" is no better than the RIAA calling copyright infringement "theft."
Child pornography is one of a few accusations where a person is presumed guilty until proven innocent... and even after he's proven innocent.
Maybe in your Bizzaro world you have this thing called Innocent until Proven Guilty... But here in the real world its Guilty until Proven Innocent unfortunately.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
When you say "the EU Constitution", do you mean the Lisbon Treaty? If so, has that entered into force yet? I thought Ireland still had to hold a referendum on it.
If he wins his case, pretty much every online store is going to have to do an extremely thorough review of their data protection, because if you get hit for a few million each time this happens and it happens often, then you won't have a business.
And it is well overdue. So many businesses have poor data security past the initial SSL client-browser to web-server communications it isn't funny. I'm sure it's improved for many since 2004, when this happened, but being liable for the losses and damages caused by being the source of leaked data used for identity theft should get them to buck their ideas up.
Of course also to blame were the police, for grossly misusing the data they were provided. Performing arrests without any investigation is beyond reproach, and the people involve should have been fired. This situation shouldn't have happened if they had done even some basic data verification and intelligence.
As for the employer who fired him, I can understand the logic, but the guy was innocent then, so as far as I am concerned it was wrongful dismissal. This guy had done nothing wrong at any point in the proceedings. Suspension without pay would have been a reasonable alternative, with his job available if he was entirely innocent.
Cases like this are also why the legal system in the UK needs a "totally innocent" verdict, so that people's reputations don't get sullied. I bet this guy is still on all the criminal databases and comes up in job searches (hence the difficulty for someone who was clearly skilled at his job to earn £120,000 ($240,000) a year to get another job, until he settled on a £30,000 job).
Ohhh... I'm sooo scared Mr. Policeman, please use biometrics
on me, put a camera me all day and night, bug my phones and read my
mail... so I can be safe, please Mr. Policeman, I don't want to
got to jaiiiill..
So first they fix things so that SSNs and other identity information
is more or less freely accessible to anyone that wants it, then
they fix it too that once its "stolen" you're in a deep world of
hurt and shit, putting the burden of proof of innocence on you
and making it a slooow process to get out of like with Mr. Bunce here... so we all are eager to line up, be thumb-printed,
iris-scanned and infrared T-ray imaged. And get "Lifelock" too at
$$ a month so we can be saaafe.
Well you know what, I'm still not going to get in line for your
stupid Real ID scheme, ass wipes!
Mod parent flamebait/troll.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Actually I had such a dispute. Damaged my credit pretty badly at the time. I still refused to pay. To make a long story short, a man's word is not worth gold anymore, a man's word is worth not a penny, while other men's words about that man are worth more than gold.
Makes you wonder why so few people are responsible nowadays... perhaps because all they have to do is be robots at work, and vege at night. Had they had to live up to what it was they said, life might be a bit different... for all of us.
The question that must be asked is... "what makes a bunch of bankers and liars for a living, make their word more worthwhile in people's eyes than the word of a man who actually produces something tangible and sells it for a living and therefore has at least some chance that he isn't just a liar for a living?"
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
.. Oh wait, I do have something to fear after all..
This is a typical poster child to that crap defense on privacy violations.
morons.
yea it is. im no psychopath, badass wannabee or anything. i just recognize stellar shit when i see it.
this 'child pornography' scare has been made into a modern day witch hunt. its totally stupid and idiotic. no less than a medieval witch hunt - you just need to be accused by someone to be prosecuted. try it. just accuse someone, and watch their computers getting confiscated. their sensitive data, passwords, everything passing through some obscure personas in local police department.
mankind really lacking in wisdom. higher the level of disgust/horror a crime induces, the higher they are regarding that crime.
hundreds of thousands of people around the world are dying every year due to various atrocity related events, genocides, strifes, terrorism, repression, disease, hunger. but our current overly politically correct public is more appalled at the wake of pathetically negligible percentage of child pornography cases than hundreds of thousands of people dying. what ? when a child grows up, s/he is not important anymore ? s/he dying due to hunger whilst the world has the means to aid them is not something more horrible than a child pornography case ? if you just read this last sentence, and thought that child pornography is a more horrible and bigger crime, even if a second, you need to really straighten up yourself and get smart - because you yourself are judging the seriousness of a crime by the horror it induces, not its real merit. right to life is the foremost right on the face of the earth.
Read radical news here
I should have said,
Quote: "This man's problems were caused not by ID theft, but by suspicion of crime."
This man's problems were caused by government corruption, which was the point of my parent post.
Are there people who are child molesters? Yes. Is everyone who is charged, convicted, or treated for child molestation a child molester? Nope.
What happens with this crime and several others is they become weapons for women to use against men. It's very simple; accuse your husband / boyfriend of this crime and the police will arrest him immediately. Make that complaint Friday evening and you'll have 3 or 4 days to clean out the bank accounts, conceal assets, etc. before he can bail out.
Does this happen? You better believe it does. More often than most people can imagine. This abuse of the legal system (and others like it) are brought to you courtesy of your elected representatives who are giving you what you ask for: crack down on child molesters, wife abusers, etc. Too many are getting away, let's make the laws a bit more general and a bit more "guilty until proven innocent". For the win, make them so that the accused is guilty until proven guilty.
Nope, not me. But I've seen this scenario play out time and time again. I feel bad for what our country has become and cast a worried eye at England. They seem to be leading the way in the race to Fascism...
"He had nothing to hide because he was innocent, so everything worked out in the end, right~"
Fixed it for you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I dunno....I like to drop about 200-300 rounds every couple of weekends. I'm fairly proficient.
If someone is in my house....I pretty much guarantee I have much more firepower than they do...and I'm not even starting to ask for names till I've emptied a few clips.
And if the bastard happens to make it outside of the house, no problem, the cops down here in NOLA have been known to help you drag the body back inside before the photographes are taken.
Also I don't know where you get your stats from...but, the cops down here quite often have their suspects taken away in body bags any time they are forced to draw and fire their weapons. Not many ever end up 'wounded' and in the hospital, they end up in the morgue.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Do you have any idea how much tragedy has been preceded by your kind of posturing bluster?
/rambleon
/rambleoff
it's public employees that have the least privacy and thus the least respect for continued protection of privacy laws. Even non-sensitive, non-financial positions frequently have full credit report disclosure (nevermind that this is basically the gov't using private sector financial systems geared toward business and the middle-class and that have a record of discrimination against minorities). I've also seen full mental health record disclosure and monitoring and polygraph for sensitive positions without any explanation of _what_ was being evaluated in a risk analysis sense (no oversight).
As a result, the people I know in police and psych and general gov't don't even bat a fucking eye about invasive information gathering and unexplained (mis)usage of information. It's all for security and risk protections--and exceptions are given under the table, on an as needed basis, etc. Again, no oversight...all good old boy. And for the record, the government is exempted from the section of the civil rights act that prohibits hiring systems that create a pattern of discrimination.
In other words, the article is dead on...though a little too nice since there is almost no quality control with the private credit agencies and still a bit hidden because it's generally only abused in govt hiring. That will probably change as agencies become better integrated and the cost of going full background checks goes down.
that will take your job for half the pay. What utterly unique skills do you have that are worth double the going rate of pay? [...] Jobs are going to go to the lowest bidder, and as an employer I get to choose, you don't. There are laws about employment discrimination that make it illegal to use just about any form of constructive "discrimination", like choosing to only hire native-born Americans.
If US companies can't hire cheap labor in the US, they are going to move their facilities to Mexico or China and save even more money.
No nation owns jobs, and any nation that tries to keep salaries artificially high is going to make itself uncompetitive and destroy its purchasing power and its industrial base.
Besides, what moral justification do you have for making several times the amount of money as a Mexican or Chinese for the same work? Where do you think the difference in salary is coming from? It's being paid, one way or another, in part by other US workersand in part by people in the rest of the world, and neither is fair.
Most macho gun nuts I know would probably wet themselves in an actual firefight and I'm guessing you're no exception. What odds? The odds that having a gun in your house increases your chances of getting shot? That's obviously a load of crap, and if you bother to check, you'll find that it's wholly unsupported. Most cops are crap shots - your average gun enthusiast is a better shot, especially when the average cop only shoots twice a year to qualify.
Most people period will freeze up when being shot at. Cops aren't likely to be any different.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I picture the scenario as such:
... and scary as hell, I imagine. However, it's still an inferior threat.) A blade may scare away that burglar with a knife, or the rapist with a box cutter, but will do nothing when they have a pistol, and may even aggravate their intentions.
Person enters my house without permission.
Person is either unarmed, or armed.
Person's intentions are either to steal from me or to hurt/rape my family.
Now, finding that an invader is in my home, I do not know how armed or hostile the adversary is. In such a case, it seems imprudent to be overly optimistic. If my goal is to maximize the safety of my family, I need to assume the worst: the adversary is both armed, and intends to harm my family. My threat-response choices should be based on this expectation.
So, versus an armed hostile adversary, my options are, in increasing levels of severity:
1) Run away. Get everyone out of the house, in the car, and Far Away.
2) Threaten adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process.
3) Harm adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process.
4) Kill adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process.
Let us examine the viability of each of these.
1) Run Away.
If this is possible, I want to do it. I'd much rather avoid confrontation, and make sure that no one gets hurt. However, in the case of a home invasion, the invader is quite likely to be between my family and the exit. If the adversary is hostile, we could be at risk. (Yes, we could open a window and escape that way; this isn't always guaranteed.)
Additionally, if I were to find the adversary already harming my family (or me), it's too late to do this (to an extent).
2) Threaten Adversary.
-- Call the police, and notify the adversary that they are on the way. Unarmed assailants are likely to be scared off, but I am not optimistic that an armed assailant would be convinced to go. They might take hostages. I realize this is not reasonable, but crazy people, psychos, or people who are high on $Drug are unlikely to be thinking completely rationally.
-- Any other threat I might make (to harm or kill the adversary myself) requires that the adversary believe I can and will do such a thing. Thus, this requires that I arm myself in a manner which will be percieved as a threat by all attackers.
A knife, sword, or spear won't do. A firearm is the weapon of choice, and I'd prefer a shotgun. Anything less is an automatic failure versus an assailant with a gun. (Yes, I know about the lethal distance. Yes, a short spear would be fantastic for CQ fighting in my house
Threats also have a chance to escalate into a combat situation ("You're welcome to try, have at thee!"). In such a case, I'd much prefer that I have an unfair advantage.
3) Harm Adversary.
This is both legally and ethically problematic, to me. If someone is an active threat to the life of my family or me, I do not feel it is prudent to try to "injure" them (not to mention that it's likely to impede my performance, as "shooting to wound" doesn't work). If someone is NOT an active threat to my life or my family, then I would be liable (legally) for having assaulted the invader. Anyone that I'd feel it's ethical to harm in self defense is an enemy which would be better completely unable to harm me, and therefore dead.
If I could disarm them safely, and then further ensure that they couldn't hurt me or my family, that see
If somebody steals my identity and I kill them, is it suicide? Or, since I am still alive, it is only attempted suicide?
Can you even back up your claim that you are more likely to get shot with your own gun?
And then you claim that police are highly trained!
HAhahahaha!
Just google "how often do police have to qualify" and you will get this as the first link: http://forums.officer.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-9835.html
Reading it you will find out that some police have to qualify ONCE a year, if that. And the qualification is to hit a man sized target at 10 feet. Some departments don't even provide funds for the officers to train and qualify and they must do it on their own time and money
Certainly there are police departments where the standards are much higher. But your erroneous statement of "getting shot with your own gun" is a complete fabrication.
Really? I think you'd be hard pressed to find one case, not involving a police officer, where someone was shot with his own gun while actively trying to defend himself or his home.
He was not "prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent". "Prosecuted" implies there was a trial. He was arrested, and later the charges were dropped.
He shouldn't have been arrested either, given how slight the evidence against him was. A search was justified, but no more.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
You're an immigrant. Glad to have you! Half my neighbors are immigrants from India - and they are wonderful. However, this thread is about aliens, otherwise known as illegal immigrants. So your observations don't apply.
Most of the reason why hiring aliens is so cheap has less to do with wages, and more to do with not paying social security, employment insurance, tax withholding, medicare, etc, and all because the "employee" doesn't exist in the tax system. All it takes is a little creative accounting to cover where the (cash) wages are going to.
Yeah, here's a hint: people break and enter to steal your DVD player or TV, not to tie the females of the household up and torment them sexually.
Spear or sword? What kind of frothing at the mouth idiot are you?
The only thing worse than you is the people who spot someone on their property at the property line, and rather than call law enforcement, decide they're going to actively lay in wait.
You're a clown. Most cities would only have maybe one per 100,000, at most "family terrorized in home by intruders" stories per year.
Shooting at paper targets is a lot different from shooting at live human beings while amped up on adrenaline in a low light situation such as your home.
And then you find out that your your son/daughter/wife took a round or two from the "few clips" you just emptied.
That aside, you are aware that bullets will go through drywall like hot knives through butter, aren't you? Guess what - you probably just wounded or killed one of your neighbours too. Now you've exposed yourself to ruinous civil liability as well as to a long, long stretch in the cooler with a cellie named Bubba who has a thing for 5'6" skinny computer geekboys.
Have you ever heard the saying that it's better to remain quiet and be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and end all doubt? Well, obviously not, because you just did. You don't really think the homicide dicks won't notice the trail of blood/dirt/body parts leading from the outside of your house to the inside, do you? You're obviously the kind of macho asshole who shouldn't be allowed to own a Super Soaker, much less any kind of firearm.
I'd like to know where you get yours. The rejected police applicants (for failing the psychological test, most typically) you meet at the gun club don't count.
I'm sure he'll find out one day.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Your wish is my command.
A gun in your home is 22 times more likely to kill a member of your family than an intruder.
ever heard of BTK killer?
Then there are those of us who don't care if we die.
Qxe4
Yes, because every time someone tries to be a hero in real life, a million billion things that can go wrong, will. The intruder is going to bounce around like a rabbit, the gun owner is going to miss the the intruder and shoot his wife and daughter, the shots that hit the wife and daughter are going to travel through the house into someone next door who happens to be standing there, and the police happen to be the detectives from CSI Las Vegas.
You're so paralyzed with fear I don't know how you get up from bed in the morning.
ACTUALLY you are repeating a falsehood. The ONLY reasons why people are more likely to be killed with a gun they own are suicides, family violence and accidents. instances where an un armed intruder (or anybody else)takes a gun and uses it on the owner are VERY rare. if you live alone, are not suicidal, and have your fire arm maintained by a pro..you are not at all likely to be shot with your own weapon.
Police miss 90% of the time because they are shooting at moving targets, usually somebody running away. This is fine. Most people do not mind using a few extra rounds on an intruder.
I might ad that for every law abiding citizen shot with a fire arm, 10 criminals are stopped (by law abiding ARMED citizens) from committing a crime. In more than 95% of these instances NO shots are fired, merely brandishing the weapon is enough to deter the criminal.
Criminals are predatory, e.i. they look for WEAKER targets. There is little payoff for a fare fight. Nobody but the dumbest person will pick an armed target when there are so many un armed people to rob/rape etc. Even armed crooks do not want to get in a fire fight, they might get shot!
The kinds of criminals willing to risk armed targets get paid for it. They are not gonna rob a house and get a few grand Max in cash and fenced goods. They are gonna stick up stores or jewelers and get the big money. Hell i have a friend who drove a brinks truck. They where instructed not to shoot back unless in danger!
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
Frankly I'm too irritated to say what I'm really thinking so I'll do 2 things. First I'll tell you to read this. Second I'll tell you that you're a fucking idiot.
This is just ridiculous. No, plain stupid. Agree, not more than still using feet and pound for creating machines.
Why not make an encrypted 6 digits PIN code?
This is an example as the USA spreads its ineffective obsolete technology around the globe using soft power: advertising, marketing, etc.
anti gun advocates always bring up this statistic. It is based on bad logic. The most famous study only said that people who own guns are more likely to be shot vs the population as a whole. It DID not specify that the owner was shot with his/her own gun. http://www.gunowners.org/fs0404.htm. In fact they did not even have to be shot in there own home to be counted as a gun owner being shot. The main flaws with this kind of study are : Guns DO NOT CAUSE SUICIDE. However anybody wanting to shoot him/herself will need to own a gun. Outlaw guns and people will just use rope. The majority of US gun deaths are suicide (from wikipedia) People who are in dangerous areas are more likely to get shot. Of course they are more likely to own guns. people with jobs that make them "targets" (jewelers, carry lots of cash, work late/alone) are more likely to own guns. People whom are targeted(have an actual person/s intent on harming them) are more likely to own guns. wiki has an interesting article that explains why studies like this are ofyen wrong headed read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy and find out
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
Sadly, the UK is somewhat less litigious than the US, and the chances of any more than a "So sorry, better luck next time" are small.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
I know you are anonymous... But you know this is what bothers me. Yes you are being cynical or funny.
And the worst part is that I feel that I have to explain myself:
SerpentMage: Tracy Hickman, and Margret Weiss Death Gate Cycle series. One of my favorite book series and my favorite character was SerpentMage. A good read.
But getting back to the point, this is what goes through people's mind...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I see you lack a fundamental grasp of statistics and causality. The larger likelihood of family members being shot by a gun doesn't mean that a single intruder getting shot magically caused your entire family getting shot. It means that for your one example of an intruder getting shot without harm to your family, there are 22 examples of family members getting shot by a gun without an intruder getting shot by it.
It may not have happened with your particular gun, but it has happened with lots of similar guns that people had in their homes.
Where are your friends living, Afghanistan ?
If they were living in Afghanistan then they would probably be sensible to live in such a well defended community but in the US it's just a ridiculous affection of the rich who are so paranoid and out of touch with the real world they prefer to hide themselves away and give up on their responsibilities to society at large. Certainly it is one way of life but in my opinion quite a cowardly one.
It depends on what you call affected. I have a joint account with my wife, and her card was compromised. I guess the compromise was at the bank because the first we heard was a call from the bank saying that the card had been compromised but they had proof it was a fraud and all the transactions had been refunded. Anyway that would be two people affected, and I could believe one in 6 or one in 8.
Macho bullshit aside, his point remains valid: There are those of us who are never threatened by crime, and then there are those of us who are victimized, for whom the government protection we paid for failed, and typically for whom the government-enforced justice we paid for fails. When you compare crime rates to conviction rates, you see that the vast majority of crimes go unsolved and unpunished.
So what exactly are we paying for? I want the cops out there finding violent criminals and putting rapists behind bars, not harassing kids for skateboarding at the Lincoln Monument.
I think his chances are small, as the police would have had to act negligently. The courts and the police see arrest without charge as a small, everyday occurrence, and they would say it is not their fault if other people made wrong assumptions.
He would probably stand a better chance of suing his former employer for unfair dismissal.
"consider that police officers miss nearly 90% of the time when they discharge their weapons. They have lots of training up front and ongoing training in firearms use which you almost certainly do not have. What makes you think your skills are better than theirs?"
I'd say because most of them are normal balanced human being who try not to kill if they don't absolutely have to. Shooting in the general direction of an armed criminal is usualy a good way of forcing him to seek a cover in which you could trap him or surrender instead of firing back efficiently so the bullet hit ratio is rarely a good metric, the outcome of the incidents is (criminal arested, no one hurt=very good; violent criminal shot down=good; criminal at large=bad; policeman or bystander hurt=very bad).
Would it not be fair to ask the amount of tragedy precluded at the same time?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Yes I'd like that too but the cops are not the sole guardians of society and just as they have a role to play in their capacity as paid public servants to keep the peace everyone else has a role to play in their capacity as a member of society.
Annexing yourself off from society to whoop it up with your privileged friends behind layers of armed security does nothing at all to improve society generally and is a cowardly abdication of responsibility for which their children and their childrens children will not thank them.
Don't be a norbert. You don't need everything to go wrong to have an unintended injury with a gun, you just need one thing to go wrong. And the facts are that it is more likely that one thing will go wrong and there will be an unintended injury than that there will be an intended injury.
... ie on average, a household is more likely to suffer an injury if it has a gun than if it doesn't.
It strikes me that it's less about his being paralysed with fear than your being so hopped up on testosterone that you're not willing to look at the cold hard facts, which is that guns have a net negative impact on the safety of US households
I'm a little confused...not to make you responsible for this argument, but...
...Not to mention to accurately depict them, rather than frame one side as a bunch of pussies and the other as a bunch of armed sociopaths.
We have one faction here who says, basically, 911 is a joke so I'm going to live in a fortress community and when I'm not there, I and my family, including newborns, will be packing. We will drop anyone who acts remotely threatening.
Then we have the faction who says, you are macho idiots for saying that, and cowards to boot.
We need some common sense to navigate between these!
I agree with you that the cops are not the sole guardians of society. So what exactly do you propose be put into practice?
Right now I'm living in Germany. They have taken some non-police steps to reduce the incidence of rape and assault on women (since some majority of assaults are by men upon women). For instance, women get preferential parking in garages--near the door and near the security station, so they don't have to walk late at night through a dark garage alone. There are also phones on the trains that they can use so when they're getting off at a stop late at night, there can be a taxi waiting on them.
What is your opinion of these measures? Is this the sort of thing you mean, or something else?
Your post seriously lacks insight. Why do you think intruders are breaking into the home when they know there are people at home?
There's no need to be a gung-ho idiot with firearms, but I would pack heat if the law allowed me to. It's when people cop out of their responsibilities to protect themselves and others that they let their families and their communities down.
Not intending to Godwin this but:
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." -Adolph Hitler
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." --Adolph Hiter
Make more sense now?
A big lawsuit against the UK government, most probable carried to the EU level, not only will result in a big compensation (for psychological damages), but also make agencies to be more careful.
The best IDs were invented pre war days with IBMs help etc.... using census info and guess what the nazis used that data for'?
Yes... persecution.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
My neighbor was on the forced entry team in the local PD and the last time he discharged, all ten rounds hit center of mass. the fucktard lived with his Mother and had a daughter on the premises who witnessed the event. The moral of the story is when you do crack, you don't fall down when the police shoot you until your well past dead; and it is really hard on your loved ones when you sell crack out of the house they live in when the Police come to the door.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
My former Boss lived in such a place and his next door neighbor was assassinated at his breakfast table, the shot was taken from half a mile away. He was alleged to be a made man, and the hit was very clearly a professional military grade job. While 99.99% of the time that level of physical security is just pandering to paranoia, 0.01% of the time gets you 100% dead, and their are no do-overs.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Do you have any idea how much tragedy has been preceded by the idea that fighting back is wrong, that the law will deal with it and that the state should have a monopoly on violence?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
10 killed over 17 years, out of a population of around 360,000.(Sedgwick county population figures, 1986 from Wikipedia) So that would be 0.16 per 100,000 per year from him. Your point is?
So it wasn't paranoia- they were really out to get him...
In this case what I was really trying to say is that I think it's a bad idea for people to live in their own little enclaves seperated from other groups who although they live nearby there is no social interaction with.
As we are seeing now in the UK in places like Bradford and Birmingham it doesn't take much for entire communities to be at each throats because even though they live in a small area close to each other there are no shared values or experiences and through a lack of positive interaction a feeling mutal distrust and animosity has developed. This situation is only likely to be magnified by rich gated communities occupied by paranoid gun wielding weekend warriors in close vicinity to poorer areas with a large number of armed criminals.
If you are genuinely living somewhere where there is a good chance that if you don't have 24/7 armed guards you or your family will be raped and murdered, somewhere like Afghanistan for example, then you clearly have very serious problems with your country and are most likely totally fucked. Otherwise the more decent law abiding people there are living in a particular area exerting their influence the harder it is for criminal socities to flourish which is why I'm arguing that by hiding away in armed enclaves rather than standing up for decency and good behaviour out on the streets is a somewhat cowardly course of action.
Clearly you're going to have to be very brave to move you, your family, or your business into a gangland ghetto but instead other forces can be brought into play which cause this to happen, in the UK house prices are forcing lots of young professional couples into areas which are currently considered to be a bit dodgy and planning laws can be used to ensure lower cost housing is spread out in otherwise affluent neighbourhoods.
Some people will always be criminals, crime will always occur and some people will always suffer by it but by over reacting now, doing nothing to tackle the problem and cutting yourself off from reality is definitely not going to do anything to help in the long term except polarise communities even more until something cracks and the rioting starts.
You play way too many FPS games. Get yourself a loud alarm that you can trigger if you suspect there's an intruder in the house. Chances are they'll run away and find somewhere quieter to rob. Also it means you don't risk shooting the electricity meter reader, or some neighbor kid visiting your kids.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Even seeing a baby smile can make my day. I like playing with children. But they don't turn me on in any way at all. Never have, and I can't image they ever will. But I have started to pay less attention to children in general for the above reasons.
The sad thing about these situations is also thus. If your choice to flee is unavailable, and the only other is to confront your invader (likely leading to physical confrontation), you are actually more likely to get through court proceedings if he/she is dead.
There are enough cases where an invader has broken into a home, and threatened the occupants, but been beaten off, only to threaten them again through the courts. Dead invaders, on the other hand, do not have such an options, and in most cases the justice system does have better things to do than make a case for a dead criminal (unless he/she was obviously killed while not a threat, e.g. shot in the back while on the ground, etc).
Why am I not surprised by any of this?
Under UK law, if you are accused even informally of so much as thinking about looking at child pornography (which is defined as any picture apparently depicting a child -- even if they are over 18 in real life, even if they are fully-clothed, and even non-photo-realistic drawings count) then you are automatically considered guilty, even despite possibly being later proved innocent.
It's already got to the point where parents aren't allowed to film their kids' school nativity plays (in case the recordings get into the wrong hands) and adults are unwilling to volunteer to work with kids (because of the bureaucracy, the paperwork and the interviews; it's considerably less bother for an ex-embezzler who's served his time to get a job cleaning bank vaults after all the staff have gone home). Next thing, schools won't even put on plays at all.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Actually, beyond they bare minimum required, many law enforcement officers don't really practice a lot. I know many "macho gun nuts" who practice FAR more often than the local police do.
Now, combine that with that fact that the vast majority of police officers NEVER, their whole career, fire their weapon in an actual life threatening scenario, and I'd place just as much faith in most "gun nuts" ability to resolve an issue than that of the local law enforcement. It'd probably be the first time for either, and my money says the "gun nut" has practiced a lot more.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
- That's
the issue.Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
TFA didn't mention Mr. Bunce's armaments, fortunately he was attacked from Indonesia so no lives were lost.
"The odds are much better that you'll get shot with your own gun in the scenario you describe."
These odds you mention, I have heard before. (derision deleted)
"consider that police officers miss nearly 90% of the time when they discharge their weapons. They have lots of training up front and ongoing training in firearms use which you almost certainly do not have. What makes you think your skills are better than theirs?"
Considering the native aptitude of some of the people selected for police service, which no amount of training can compensate for, a 10% hit rate sounds about right. I'm guessing those were mostly within three meters.
I can't speak for DaedalusHKX, but I have been shot at, and if I'd been armed at the time, I'd have returned fire calmly and accurately. Instead I had to calmly walk over and take the rifle away from the guy and beat him for a while.
I can recall four times I've asked for service from the police, the times when the thief was there, the cops didn't even take their names. Otherwise, it was "probable cause" for a check on my bonafides, and my gun's. I hate to be down on cops, Its a bad job that I don't want, But most of the people available are NOT QUALIFIED and we all need to look out for ourselves.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Uh, it doesn't take a genius TV detective to notice blood outside, but you can always clean it up etc. I agree with the rest though, I think having guns for self defence is reasonably when the criminals have easy access to guns too. In the UK I feel safe enough without a gun though. I've had some martial arts training, though I'm not sure how much use it would be in a real fight, especially if the attacker had a knife or somesuch. My 'apartment' is so small that anyone who broke in with hostile intentions would probably be able to get to me before I realised what was going on and grabbed my bokken :P I'd probably be more comfortable just punching/kicking their ass to the ground anyway..
which is totally what she said
which is totally what she said
I still keep my primary home protection guns loaded with Black Talons, or the equivalent. These shells expand rapidly on impact for maximum 'meat' damage, and generally will not go through a person or wall.
"Have you ever heard the saying that it's better to remain quiet and be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and end all doubt? Well, obviously not, because you just did. You don't really think the homicide dicks won't notice the trail of blood/dirt/body parts leading from the outside of your house to the inside, do you?"
Just telling you of what I know from 1st hand accounts down here in the south. The cops are on the homeowners side, and want the criminal to get the blame, not the victim of home invasion.
You seem to be under that misguided perception that the police are there to protect you. No...that isn't the case. If you are in a break in situation...you will be dead long before the cops get there. It is up to you to protect yourself and your family. The cops are just there to investigate the crime after it has happened 99% of the time.
Hey, it is a free country. Feel free not to own or use firearms, and good luck to you. However, don't try to denigrate or deny my right to defend myself, family and property.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There's a simple formula you can apply to mobs:
The inverse of the IQ of a mob is equal to the sum of the inverses of the IQs of each of its individual members.
Just like resistors in parallel.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
That'll teach his mum for telling him that breakfast is the most important meal of the day
which is totally what she said
No..care to expand on this rather limited comment? I'm just saying I like to keep prepared to defend myself as needed. I happen to enjoy shooting guns too, so it is a win win situation.
I thought LONG and hard about if I would shoot and try to kill someone if my life was in jeopardy before I decided to own guns and get a carry concealed license. I decided that if my life or loved ones were in jeopardy, I'd have no compunction whatsoever to pulling the trigger till my enemy was stone cold dead. Not an easy decision to make, but, one you have to think of carefully before you are a gun owner with the thoughts of defending oneself.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have to say..the first thing that can go wrong IS the fact that some asshole has broken into my home and is armed himself. With no weapon of my own, we are fucked and at the 'mercy' of the criminal that has broken in intending to do harm.
Frankly at that point, ever innocent person in my home is in peril and a probable target to injury or death. At that point, I'd just as soon take my chances that less of us will be harmed if I can take the intruder out. Unarmed, he could kill everyone.....if I'm armed and fight back, hopfully I can lessen the casualty rate to one.....the criminal.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
First, let me acknowledge that the plural of anecdote is not data. However, others have already provided the statistics indicating that a gun in the home is overwhelmingly more likely to harm a family member than an intruder.
Caveats aside: my home has been broken into once. It was a drunk guy looking for the party next door. With this nuke-'em-from-orbit bullshit attitude, a couple of things might have happened: 1) there might have been a largely innocent dead guy fouling up the carpet or 2) there might have been a truly innocent family member spilling loosing bodily fluids to the carpet. With a more reasoned guns-do-kill-people attitude, we ended up in a situation where a) the cops were called, b) a drunk guy got a ride home or to a holding cell and c) we went back to bed. Note that in the real scenario, my father was not dead, I was not dead, my mother was not raped, and our money was not stolen.
Emptying a clip because you-have-more-firepower-than-him is pretty much guaranteed to end in tragedy. Insightful my ass.
I didn't add that clause. The claim was that "The odds are much better that you'll get shot with your own gun in the scenario you describe. ", said scenario being a break-in.
As for your statistics, even for the weakened claim, they only include the one side of the equation. Defenses with guns don't have to result in death for anyone, and usually don't.
This all comes down to the crazy law system (on both sides of the Atlantic), that allows anonymity for the "victims" or crime, and / or valuable witnesses in such cases, but allows the accused to have his name and photo smeared all over the front page of the local rag.
Innocent until proven guilty is one thing, but in the real world, you are innocent only up to the point The Sun or The National Inquirer decides you are not. Once you are identified for the world to see, innocence is no defense against the cynicism and general "I thought there was something shifty about him" mentality that pervades our society.
That's why I always save a levelup, just in case you need to put points in the Kill Adversary skill on short notice.
There are several flaws with this supposed statistic. First, the "22 times" ratio is way off, and even Kellerman, the principal author of the study, later revised this to much lower numbers.
Second, it is phrased to give the impression that a gun in the house is 22 times more likely to be a negative than a positive. But unless you are Chuck Norris, most positive outcomes don't involve killing intruders. If you get your gun and the intruder leaves the premises or is held at gunpoint until the police arrive, those are even better outcomes that the statistic deliberately ignores.
Also, while the soundbite makes it seem that a gun in the house is likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, less than 10% of the shootings in the study were of this category. The rest were guns in the households of criminal or suicidal people that skew the statistics and do nothing to predict what effect on safety a gun in the house of a rational, lawful person would have.
The Kellerman study has been thoroughly debunked to the point that repeating it is about as responsible as stating "Al Gore claims to have singlehandedly invented the Internet."
I agree with most of what you said, however I have to point out one fallacy:
Also, consider that police officers miss nearly 90% of the time when they discharge their weapons. They have lots of training up front and ongoing training in firearms use which you almost certainly do not have.
The fact is that many police departments have little to no formalized training in shooting, and in particular, in gun handling, which is as important (being able to get your gun smoothly and confidently, reloading, etc.). The only requirements are a certain level of accuracy tested yearly at a gun ranger, with little to no simulated stress.
I personally find chest beaters like the original poster to be repellent, but private gun owners (which includes gun nuts, but is not all-inclusive, of course) spend a lot more time on their own time learning to shoot and handle guns.
These issues do vary from department to department, but I guarantee you that the larger the police force, the less formalized training. My experience is from a competition shooter (same guy who taught me to handle guns) who is also the firearms instructor (a police officer, of course) for multiple departments. He often laments these facts, as they are a serious problem, as one can imagine.
I've seen police training at the shooting range... From my observations, the best place to be in a police shootout would probably behind the police's intended target.
Ethics seem to be subjective. CYA plus "SAVE THE CHILDREN" have trumped this now and malicious prosecution is legally protected/required. Letting an innocent man escape prosecution is obviously more than their jobs are worth.
I guess data security and integrity are too high a price if it might inconvenience one person's access to easy credit.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Let's see, first you claim that intruders are always there to commit theft, and never rape anyone. Presumably people who have had such a thing happen to them are lying.
Then, having dismissed defending one's home with a gun as a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, you state that using a lesser weapon in its stead makes one a "frothing at the mouth idiot".
Next, you describe how if you detected someone breaking into your house, you would rather they come in while you are talking on the telephone instead of ready to fend your attacker off. This despite the fact that if the police response time in your area is longer than an encounter with an intruder is expected to last, the police won't be there until after the fact anyway.
Finally, you conclude your post by indicating that someone who protects against dangers that befall only one household per 100,000 annually are not just overly wary, but a "clown".
Ah, yes. I can certainly see how you got +5 Insightful with that post.
(For the record, I have none of these.)
I believe in a strategy of strategic ambiguity. If I tell people I have weapons, I become a target for people who want to steal weapons (they are valuable to criminals). If I tell people I don't have weapons, I become a target for people who want to commit crimes against defenseless people.
So whether you choose to own weapons or now, please don't advertise. No need to give the criminals operational intelligence.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
You really don't get it.
I'm not anti-gun. I'm anti-stupid bravado and an overwillingness to use them. This guy has a Dirty Harry fantasy in his head, and it will end in tragedy.
The funny thing about data brokerages: I can't recall ever hearing a legitimate argument for having them in the first place.
"You know, Doris, what this country really needs a is a vast corporate entity collecting everyone's personal data for sale at a profit without our knowledge. Only then will we know true happiness and freedom."
The whole industry was set up without voluntary customer involvement and its high effing time the customers demanded a say in how their information is managed, or profited from. That's the real identity theft.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
This is interesting. Not having done any actual research, I had to develop this theory out of nothing but paranoid delusion: 'After giving up Vietnam to the local government, certain factions of the US government decided that the failure of that particular bit of foreign policy was due to abuse of civil rights by American Citizens. Constitutional loopholes, particularly the First Amendment, had to be closed. Local police got free surplus helicopters if they could conform to the new federal guidelines.' (I've always wondered if the Hitler Youth haircuts on the rookie cops since then were just coincidence.)
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I find the irony of your comment combined with your signature extremely amusing.
I got nothin'
If that fund came from the budget of the "Public Service" department that created the problem, it might work, OTOH it might add to their incentive to cover up their malfeasance even more than present SOP. The "Police Code" is not a myth. I hate to use this example, but what happened to Rodney King was not any sort of abberation, only that a videotape was released. Maybe if we added amendments to our Constitution to protect our citizens from the govern- oh wait...
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
That aside, let's look at the self-contradictions in your post. 1) Run away. Get everyone out of the house, in the car, and Far Away.
2) Threaten adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process.
3) Harm adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process.
4) Kill adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process. 1) is obviously the best choice, because it is precisely what you should be practicing regularly if you're seriously concerned about the far greater threat to your safety, fire.
You pointed out that 1) might not work, because the intruder might be blocking the primary exit. The exact same thing is true of a fire. If you're really concerned about security, you'll be practicing this regularly, which means it has the advantage of being the security response you're already best at.
Re: 2) -- you say you're not convinced that an armed assailant would be willing to go. However, people are animals, and animals are more responsive to threats when they know they're in hostile territory. But remember that this is intimidation -- which means that if it's doing anything, your attacker will be scared. It is entirely possible that someone scared like that will shoot first without thinking, while you're still in the "parley" stage of this encounter. Better to make the threat without revealing your location (the alarm system).
Remember, they're going to have that "fight or flight" response too. Human nature says they'll choose flight -- unless there's an obvious target to fight and no obvious exit. You never want an opponent to feel cornered, and you never want them to know where to shoot.
Anyway, just a couple other points --
Assuming you're actually in a combat situation -- your firearm is locked in the closet in a safe. You're going to take the time to find the keys, get in the closet, open the case, load up, and then confront your adversary? When this whole scenario was predicated on the idea that you didn't have time to get away? If my opponent has a hostage, I am much less likely to be able to do something with a melee weapon than with a firearm. That's crap. Your shotgun would kill both your hostage and your assailant. Even if you had a more precise weapon, are you *really* a good enough shot to take out an assailant while they have a hostage? No, the answer to a hostage situation is backup. That's what your alarm system was for. Mexican standoffs are entertaining in movies. many people have a very visceral reaction to the sound of a round being chambered. Yes... and that reaction may be to start blindly pulling the trigger. - Aluminum bat. Hallways are too narrow for a sword. A hallway too narrow for a sword is too narrow for a good swing (unless you're trying to disable your drywall). You can stab with a sword. Either way, suboptimal, but still.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
...according to the usual stats. Here's a table with live-birth statistics based on gender/race: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005083.html
I don't care how charged of an issue rape is. It's absurd to treat half the world's population like potential criminals because a tiny percentage of them are sexual predators. People who are so terrified of life and human interaction because they might encounter someone in that teeny, tiny minority should probably never leave their homes, or stop hanging out in high-risk areas. Judge people based on BEHAVIOR, not on superficial traits. Enough of this victim of fear culture.
Finally, some further stats that anyone who wants to talk about rape or child molestation should look into, in order to take educated precautions rather than just cower in ignorant fear. I know the gist of them, but not the specific numbers, so I won't just make them up. :)
--The overwhelming majority of sexual assaults and rapes are perpetrated by acquaintances and friends of the victim. Strangers are certainly on the radar, but these sorts of crimes mostly involve dysfunctions in existing relationships, rather than strangers preying on archetypes involved in their disturbed psyches.
--The overwhelming majority of child molestation and abduction incidents are perpetrated by friends, acquaintances, or family members as well, for many of the same reasons.
--Most rapes go unreported. I'd hazard a guess that the least-reported types of rape are the most common ones too-- those that would cause embarrassment and legal problems within a family, which makes sexual assault by strangers appear to be a larger part of the problem than it actually is by proportion.
All in all, in a city of around 100,000, there seem to be incidents roughly every 5 or so years where shadowy strangers accost women who are walking alone at night or break into their homes and assault them. I think people get struck by lightning here more often. It's just silly to jump to conclusions based on someone's outward traits (i.e., gender, age, ethnicity) without taking into account personality, demeanor, and behavior. And a little good, old-fashioned vigilance is good too. Yeah, I'd keep a closer eye if some guy was trolling around in a library and approaching kids who I knew didn't accompany him into the building. I might even wander into the boy's restroom for a check if I saw a guy go in there and take longer than seemed reasonable, just to make sure he wasn't staking it out. But walking through a library without stopping to browse as if looking for someone? I'd probably assume he was looking for someone. Judging the behavior is a better method of profiling a potential ne'er-do-well than acting like a bigot out of fear.
If I felt someone was profiling me based on my gender alone, I wouldn't hesitate to call them on it. I would not be sympathetic to their unfounded fears, and would try to combat the ignorance component of their perceptions. I've done it before. And I AM very conscious of suspicious behavior, since I work around kids. I know how to stay out of questionable situations, and I pay attention to what's going on around me and occasionally intercept unfamiliar adults who I'm not sure should be here with a friendly, "Are you looking for someone?" just to judge their reactions and reasons for being here.
Simply put, if you steal someone's life, you should loose your own.
That's exactly my point too. As a trainee pilot, I can say that "overconfidence in personal ability" leads to many, many accidents. This guy has a lot of it and hasn't considered the possible consequences of his actions.
No.
A) First world = USA's cold war sphere of influence
B) Second world = USSR's cold war sphere of influence
C) Third world = Countries not developed enough to be taken seriously during the conflict.
All three terms are 'deprecated' in a sense, though they have leeched into modern usage for historical convenience.
Okay, what we have here is what logicians call a "false dichotomy."
On the one hand, we have cayenne8's macho bullshit. In his words, "I'm not even starting to ask for names till I've emptied a few clips."
It's either that, say the gun-lovers, or all guns should be banned and the state should have a monopoly on the use of force.
I never said I favoured banning guns. All I said was that this guy's Rambo attitude is likely to get himself or somebody he loves seriously injured or killed. The ability to end someone's life is an awesome responsibility and one that carries with it some very serious consequences. This guy, with his "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude has obviously failed to consider the possible consequences of his actions and I wanted to make him more aware of them.
Another poster said that Kellerman himself admitted that his "22 times more likely" statistic needed to be revised downward. Fine, it still means that, despite the gun industry's and the NRA's propaganda, a gun in the home makes the home less safe, not more safe.
My personal view is that people should be allowed to own guns, but only after completing an appropriate training course that includes written and practical examinations. That's the law of the land in many states, including the loonie leftist bastions of Arizona, Texas and Florida.
That is a local story for me. They didn't find any child porn on home or work computers from what the newspaper is reporting.
They did find some hints of illegal drug use, which may result in misdemeanor charges. Of course, given all the other problems with the case, including the person's frequent mentions that the account had been compromised, those charges might not appear.
You have experience at shooting targets but do you have experience at close quarters combat?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Um... no. It doesn't necessarily mean dead. It might just as well mean unconscious, and/or physically incapacitated.
Interestingly since men are more likely to be assaulted than women, such measures are inherently sexist and frankly I'd be extremely fucking annoyed were the UK to follow a similar path.
Again, there's a difficult path to tread between reaction, over-reaction and apathy.
Yeah, that happened 8 times already just this month.
Which reality are you living in?
The bottom line is, the situation wherein someone has broken into your house with you in it with the intent to do you harm, for all the media sensationalization, is ridiculously rare. It is sort of like the opposite of winning the lottery.
On the other hand, the scenario wherein your son has been out all night partying, unbeknown to you, and he sneaks into the house and you mistake him for an intruder and shoot him is significantly *more common* (though thankfully still rare).
For my money, I feel safer without a gun. The odds aren't in your favor if you go the other direction. We live in a free society, and the benefit of that is you get to make your own choice -- and no one else is going to tell you which choice to make. But I think it's pretty clear where the *smart* money lies.
I spend more time socializing IRL with a vast group of my neighbors now that I'm out in the boonies than I did living in the big city (i've lived in several big cities so far on the East Coast of the USA) I have yet to come to the conclusion that simply because everyone there lives in a match box which is easily breached by assailants (which often happens, despite their heavily enforced "gun control") that they are safer or spend more time with shared values.
.357 snubby. That is one woman whose consent you will need before getting into her pants. If only more women were like that, we could fire the rape cops and worry about more important things. (Don't forget, women like that would survive long enough and healthy enough to become mothers, and hopefully raise children as self sufficient as themselves. Such can only be a dream for me, but like to live it whenever I can.)
I am quite amicable in person... though I'm not exactly a fan of being disarmed so some professional victim group can "feel safer". If they don't feel safe then they simply leave me be, and I'll nod my salute to them and be on my way with the late I bought from the mom and pop coffee joint down the road from starbucks (at half the price).
Shared values, are one thing, but pretending that forcing everyone to live in matchbox apartments next door to each other in the armpits of the world (big cities) so they will "share values" is like when the communists subverted my grandparents homeland and said "all will be equally well off"... without truly saying "all will be equally POOR, and poorer than before".
Semantics, I'm sure, except that a lot of those screaming for communism and control of those "evil rich separatists" ended up being trodden underfoot by their beloved regime. Thus I'm a fan of everyone looking out for their families by doing what they think is best for themselves and family. If that involves NOT putting targets on their backs by sending them to "gun free/ disarmed victim zones" known as public schools, or by choosing to be ready to stay healthy and alive, then that is a GOOD thing.
Given that the rapists of the world have often spent time getting raped in prison, and that HIV and full blown AIDS are making massive percentages in prisons, rape is basically a death sentence nowadays. My last girlfriend practiced Krav Maga, but after she and I spent time together, she was also very proficient with a
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Not being afraid of death does not mean that I have to stop the life I am enjoying right now and let some schmuck ruin my ride.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Only an idiot fires at a target he's not sure of. As to the rest of your post, indeed, a break in with the INTENT to cause harm is somewhat rare, but break-in's in general where you can be caused harm if you discover the perpetrator are quite, quite common. Many times the gun need not even be fired to do it's job. You walk in on a coke head stealing your TV and he can easily take a stab at you with a knife, or shoot you with his own gun if he's carrying one, just to make sure you're not around to give a description. If they see a gun though, even if they have one of their own, they know at that point that it's a gamble. If I attempt to attack or otherwise harm this person there is a very high likelihood that I will end up dead. The perp at that point is quite likely to flee without a shot being fired. The bottom line here is: DO YOU TRUST YOURSELF? The gun isn't evil. It doesn't wake up in the middle of the night and go shoot innocent kids, and it doesn't whisper "Kill! Kill!" into your ear while you're sleeping. It's a tool. It's a tool that can be used very effectively to protect yourself and others around you. To dispute that statement is laughable - every police agency in the country uses them to just such an extent (and BTW, opinions vary from one group to the next, but most cops I know consider someone who doesn't keep their own gun a fool - they catch people who commit crimes. Rarely are they present to prevent them in the first place). If you avoid it on the belief that you're safer you only acknowledge your own self-assured incompetence in the ability to handle the tool, and show that you're rather put that responsibility into the hands of another. It's no wonder that anyone is surprised when people bitch about the other "sheeple" who won't support open source software or who won't stand up to unfair copyright laws when they themselves don't even have the confidence to defend their own life. Instead if the time comes you're rather sit in a corner and piss yourself just hoping that the big bad man doesn't hurt you before he leaves.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
In the US, something like 97% of victims of sexual assault are female, and the overwhelming majority of these are perpetrated by males.
Are the statistics so radically different in the US?
The OP is complaining because he thinks people are using inductive reasoning to say, basically, "All rapists are males, so he might be a rapist." In fact, most males are not rapists, so he feels somewhat put upon.
But, as with other violent crimes, say if only one subset of the population does this--one confluence of factors like age, socioeconomic status, etc., then it's perfectly valid to profile a someone as a "possible" even when you don't know everything else about them.
I'm sure this would be a great application of Bayesian stats if I could figure it out--from a Bayesian standpoint, a subjective standpoint--which is how most people operate--you would ask "What are the odds this guy's a rapist? Whereas from a traditional statistical analysis you would say, what are the odds of picking a male rapist out of the general population?
In any case, from either perspective it is somewhat unfair, but once you understand how people make these decisions--is the guy in the library a potential child molester or what?--you UNDERSTAND their position. Pissing and moaning about it doesn't help. If there is a constructive way to fight this kind of prejudice, I'd love to know what it is.
The statistics in the US back up my point exactly:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/vsx2.htm
Yes, women are more likely to be victims of _sexual_ assault. Men are more likely to be victims of _assault_.
My point is that by focussing specifically on reducing sexual assaults on women you are increasing the chances of assaults on men - even though the statistics demonstrate that men are more vulnerable.
I wasn't disagreeing with the gp, I was highlighting an additional complexity around trying to tackle such perceptions.
By preventing rape...we increase the chances that men will be attacked, because men are more vulnerable than women.
Are you sure you've thought this through?
First, let me acknowledge that the plural of anecdote is not data. However, others have already provided the statistics indicating that a gun in the home is overwhelmingly more likely to harm a family member than an intruder.
Caveats aside: my home has been broken into once. It was a drunk guy looking for the party next door. With this nuke-'em-from-orbit bullshit attitude, a couple of things might have happened: 1) there might have been a largely innocent dead guy fouling up the carpet or 2) there might have been a truly innocent family member spilling loosing bodily fluids to the carpet. With a more reasoned guns-do-kill-people attitude, we ended up in a situation where a) the cops were called, b) a drunk guy got a ride home or to a holding cell and c) we went back to bed. Note that in the real scenario, my father was not dead, I was not dead, my mother was not raped, and our money was not stolen.
Emptying a clip because you-have-more-firepower-than-him is pretty much guaranteed to end in tragedy. Insightful my ass.
well, you presume that I share the gp's "nuke-'em-from-orbit" attitude. In fact I don't have that attitude. In your situation, you used good judgment and called the police; as you said, the only interest the guy had was getting to a party. I would have done the same thing you did. But like you said, the plural of anecdote is not data. There are people out there that have the intent of entering another person's home to deprive them of their life or property, or to victimize them in another manner. There is no other reason to purposefully enter another person's home. And ultimately, though your life, liberty, and property may be granted to you by your government and there are punishments for those who would deprive you of them, it is still your charge to protect them. No one else will do it for you. If you are resolved not to care enough to try, then there are those in this world that will appreciate your complacency. That's all I'm saying.perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Yes, I have thought this through. For instance, women get preferential parking in garages--near the door and near the security station, so they don't have to walk late at night through a dark garage alone. So, women no longer have to go through the more dangerous parts of the garage. This means that people that aren't women do have to go through the more dangerous parts, and have to more than they would if women didn't get preferential treatment.
Net result: Less danger for women. More danger for men.
Yep. Imagine that "danger" is a quantifiable variable.
Before women got preferential parking, they had 100 units of "danger" associated with finding their car late at night.
Men had 10 units of danger.
Now women have 50 units of danger, and men also have 50 units of danger.
You don't acknowledge the fact that women are more vulnerable to begin with; the playing field is not level from the start.
This is what the feminists call "unacknowledged privilege." It infuriates them. Me, I just understand you HAVEN'T given this any serious thought.
My very fucking point is that men are more vulnerable than women. I even linked a fucking US Department of Justice website demonstrating the fact.
Women had 100 units of "danger". Men had 200 units of "danger".
Now women have 50 units and men have 250 units.
This is why feminists are full of shit and you haven't been fucking reading what I'm typing. Which part of "Men are more likely to be assaulted than women" is proving so fucking complicated here?
Go back and re-read what I've been writing. Try and absorb and understand it. Try and step away from your blinkered assumption that women are more vulnerable than men because the fucking facts are pretty fucking clear that they are not.
My very fucking point is that men are more vulnerable than women.
Lolocopter, etc. This is how the thread ends...not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The stats you have posted do not bear this out when you break it out into categories.
Simply put, guys get in fights and you call it "assault."
Women get raped in a parking garage, and you call it "assault."
I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt up until this point but you have just lost it. You, sir, are an idiot.
Speaking of that... I have a canuck friend who is under the impression that Canada's gun control is "great work" since now "all canucks have to worry about is that crimes are still being commited by only with screw drivers or knives." You know... I wonder if the socialists that praise "gun control" have ever seen how painful and traumatic a stabbing death or just a stabbing wounding can be? Even a hollowpoint that stops in its target, will do a ton of damage but the pain sets in a bit later... knives, on the other hand, can be used even by the uninitiated to inflict FAR more grievous wounds, yet most people are more scared of guns.
Hell, I will make this bet. I take a 1911 (Colt, standard 1991 A1) that I will have tinkered with prior to letting the slashdotter "take it away from me". I will then proceed to see if they can then, with the gun they just "took" from me, hit a man sized target at 21 feet (most driveways in suburbia distances.)
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of anti gun slashdotters will not even know if the safety is on or off, will not know how to line up the sights properly, will not have steady hands, will overcompensate for recoil, and if they get so far as to make the gun able to shoot and take a shot, some may even drop it upon receiving the shock of recoil. I'd be curious to run such a trial...
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Great points, especially about fire preparedness and the VERY good aspects of having an alarm. I'll keep these points in mind.
;)
BTW, I was not at all suggesting that a shotgun would be in any way viable for hostage situations. I'd ask "how dumb do you think I am?", but this *is* the internet. The truth is, if I go out and buy a handgun, I would spend the time and money to take courses in pistol combat, which include things like couples training, room clearing, and other drills. I wouldn't consider myself, with my current lack of training, to be at all prepared for using a gun otherwise.
I'd forgotten about the alarm aspect; there's a reason calling 911 was early on my list.
Haha. :) I meant that (as someone else pointed out), making a threat is actually an invitation for the other to take you up on it.