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Police Swarm Bungie Office Over Halo Replica Rifle

Posted by Soulskill on from the armed-and-nerdy dept.

sv_libertarian writes 'A panicked person in Kirkland, WA called local police on Wednesday, claiming they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47. It was actually a Bungie employee carrying an overgrown model of a Halo sniper rifle, which resembles an AK-47 as much as a Volkswagen resembles a Formula 1 racer.' Halo 3: ODST is set to launch on September 22nd, and fans got some new details and early looks at the game during PAX.

2 of 746 comments (clear)

  1. Bungie dials 911...Free Publicity... by Jackie_Chan_Fan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Win!

  2. Re:Ah, paranoia by MartinSchou · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, try comparing the US with the EU and look at firearm related deaths per 100,000

    They aren't entirely comparable as they are very different culturally, and comprised of nations that have recently had wars fought on their own soil, come out from under the boot of military dictatorships or have had relative peace for a few hundred years. And you need to piece together the EU numbers yourself. Even better, that list doesn't contain all EU members either.

    It seems there are no available combined statistics for the EU, which I find rather sad and slightly disturbing, considering the amount of pressure for even tougher weapon laws. Denmark is currently in an uproar because a 19-year-old kid has been sentenced to the mandatory 7 days in prison for having two box cutters in the front door of his car, when he was picking up a friend from a club.

    Best I could come up with was simply averaging across the 14 available EU member countries and I came up with this:
    [Firearm homicide rate];[Non firearm homicide rate];[total] (all per 100,000) between 1998 and 2000.
    USA - [2.97];[1.58];[4.55]
    EU - [0.85];[3.73];[4.58]

    Austria, Belgium, The Czech Republic, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Romania, Sweden aren't listed. I'm also missing a country but I can't figure out which one.

    It should be noted that while none of the listed EU countries have a higher firearm rate than the US, five countries have higer homicide rates (highest was 12.3/100,000).

    And while Eurostat does have some info, it doesn't seem to allow you to separate whether or not firearms were involved.

    Generally speaking firearms doesn't stop people getting killed. It just means they'll be killed in a different way. At least that's what the '98 to '00 statistics seem to say.

    But finding usable data on non-homicide crimes that (doesn't) involve guns is going to be even trickier.