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UCSD Lecturer Releases Geotagging Application For "Dangerous Guns and Owners"
NF6X writes "UCSD Lecturer Brett Stallbaum has released an Android app called Gun Geo Marker to allow people to 'Geolocate Dangerous Guns and Owners.' The app description states:
'The Gun Geo Marker operates very simply, letting parents and community members mark, or geolocate, sites associated with potentially unsafe guns and gun owners. These locations are typically the homes or businesses of suspected unsafe gun owners, but might also be public lands or other locations where guns are not handled safely, or situations where proper rights to own or use any particular type of firearm may not exist.' I question how the motivation behind developing this app differs from, say, developing an app to allow others to publicly geotag homes of people believed to belong to a particular religion or political party."
This article will have mature and reasonable discussion, let me tell you.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I question how the motivation behind developing this app differs from, say, developing an app to allow others to publicly geotag homes of people believed to belong to a particular religion or political party.
It differs because a list of people belonging to a religion or political party doesn't help you if you need to find a gun in a hurry.
"As a crowd sourced information tool, the information about dangerous gun sites comes from users." In other words, if I have a grudge against my neighbor, or just want to mess with somebody, can I just post that they are "dangerous" and their home/location appears in the app??
A long time ago, some people at UT Austin put signs in front of dorms listing "potential rapists" that had the names of all male residents. Indiscriminate and unsubstantiated accusations do not serve a useful purpose.
Criminals rejoice! No longer do you have to randomly break in to houses to see what there is to steal. There's now an app to tell you exactly which houses to rob.
aren't they?
Not as dangerous as lecturers at public universities. I think I will write an app that allows you to geotag your local professors, track their license plates, and give you hints and tips on how to heckle them and ruin their lives for doing things that you may or may not agree with.
Because its not like you couldn't call the police if people are doing unsafe things with guns. In a lot of places there are laws about the safe handling of weapons.
This is worse. At least the latter were proven to be sex offenders in court (flawed as the process may be) according to the summary, no actual proof is needed to end up on the map.
And I suppose this UCSD Lecturer would also support an app "to allow people to 'Geolocate Dangerous Liberal Socialists'" that threaten the Constitution?
I didn't think so.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Might want to read the constitution again. Your understanding of the second amendment is lacking...
Hadn't you heard? After a persistent astroturfing campaign, more Americans think Edward Snowden is a traitor than otherwise. They're obviously fine with a surveillance state, so this app is perfectly acceptable.
Right?
I'd like to see the results of a survey that correlates opinions of Snowden with opinions about this database. Wanna bet there's a substantial overlap of people who can simultaneously believe Snowden is a traitor while believing this database and app are wrong? While being blissfully unaware of the contradiction.
Such is the power of the modern propaganda machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States_2013
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Records show that Loughner was registered as an Independent and voted in 2006 and 2008, but not in 2010.[39][40] A YouTube channel under an account called "Classitup10" was linked to Loughner. (There have been numerous copies of 'impostor accounts' such as 'JaredLoughner' and 'Classitup1O'.)[41][42]
Loughner's high school friend Zach Osler said, "He did not watch TV; he disliked the news; he didn't listen to political radio; he didn't take sides; he wasn't on the Left; he wasn't on the Right."[17] But a former classmate, Caitie Parker, who attended high school and college with Loughner, described his political views prior to 2007 as "left wing, quite liberal,"[43] "radical."[44]
First Amendment > Second Amendment.
Constitutional amendments are not arranged in a hierarchy.
Yes, Guns are just as dangerous as matches, driving a car, running with scissors and swimming in a public pool.
All of these things kill people. In fact, (PDF link) fire, drowning and car accidents kill more people per year than anything else. Actually, that's not true. Matches, Cars and Swimming pools kill nobody if they are left just sitting there. It takes human interaction to actually make these objects dangerous.
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So - you DO have school shootings. All the propaganda that tells us that Europe is gun-free and safe is bullshit at the end of the day then. Rationalize it how you will, spin like crazy, you do hae school shootings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Europe
I will note that the death tolls are lower than the US - is that due to ineptitude on the part of the shooters, or better police response, or some other element at play?
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Lott-guns-Connecticut-shooting/2012/12/15/id/467903
Newsmax: The media typically spins these mass shootings as an American phenomenon. They suggest we ought to be more like Europe, with strong gun control, because then we would not have these problems. Is that true?
Dr. Lott: No. Europe has a lot of multiple victim shootings. If you look at a per capita rate, the rate of multiple-victim public shootings in Europe and the United States over the last 10 years have been fairly similar to each other. A couple of years ago you had a couple of big shootings in Finland. About two-and-a-half years ago you had a big shooting in the U.K., 12 people were killed.
You had Norway last year [where 77 died]. Two years ago, you had the shooting in Austria at a Sikh Temple. There have been several multiple-victim public shootings in France over the last couple of years. Over the last decade, you’ve had a couple of big school shootings in Germany. Germany in terms of modern incidents has two of the four worst public-school shootings, and they have very strict gun-control laws. The one common feature of all of those shootings in Europe is that they all take place in gun-free zones, in places where guns are supposed to be banned.
Newsmax: So can you give us a correlation between crime rates in jurisdictions that try to ban concealed guns and the crime rate in those that do not?
If you look over past data, before everyone that was adopting [concealed carry laws], you find that for each additional state that adopted a right-to-carry law . . . you’d see about a 1.5 percent drop in murder rates, and about 2 percent drop in rape and robbery . . . Just because states are right-to-carry doesn’t mean they’ve issued the same number of fees. You have big differences in states’ training requirements.
Newsmax: Would it be a good idea to have teachers who have concealed carry permits in the schools, to better protect kids?
I’m all for that. I’ve been a teacher most of my life. I’ve been an academic. I have kids in college still, and kids below that. It’s not something that I take lightly. But it’s hard to see what the argument would be against it.
People may not realize this, but we allowed permit-concealed handguns in schools prior to the ironically named Safe School Zone Act. And no one that I know has been able to point to a single bad thing that occurred, not one.
We changed the law, and we started having these public-school shootings. So I don’t think they got the intended result that they were hoping for with that type of ban. Right now, [some jurisdictions] allow you to carry concealed-permit guns in the schools. There are not a lot of them. But there are no problems that have occurred with any of those states, either.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. In my area, we have waited for thirty minutes and more for emergency personnel to arrive where they are needed. I sat with three badly burned boys for half an hour, before a first responder arrived, followed soon after by a policeman.
Had someone not already called for police and ambulance services, I would have loaded those boys into my car, and driven to the hospital. Ignoring posted speed limit signs, I could have had those boys at the regional medical center in about 25 minutes, where they would have received trauma unit care immediately upon arrival.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
And I'm sure the police and those laws were a great comfort to all of those victims of gun violence and rampage shootings, and 100% effectively prevented any deaths.
Gun laws don't prevent gun violence as criminals are already breaking the law. However if one of the victims had been allowed to carry his weapon legally there might have been far fewer casualties.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
And I'm sure the police and those laws were a great comfort to all of those victims of gun violence and rampage shootings, and 100% effectively prevented any deaths.
Oh I didn't realize this app was to help me avoid public shootings. Here I was thinking the point of this app was to demonize, harass, and annoy people who own guns. Right. Ok I will be sure to pull this app out next time I am worried about a school shooting.
There's one obvious difference: This kind of paranoia and bigotry is popular among left-leaning types, so it's all good.
Liberty in your lifetime
Can the mods please bury this. It's full of unapproved opinion and inconvenient facts.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I did the same calculations after Sandy Hook, because I would see so many people screaming ridiculous things like "ban all guns!" or "arm school teachers!" And I looked up the stats from the department of education, and you're right, there are 100,000 schools. With an average of 180 days in a school year, and an average of two acts of gun violence at American K-12 schools per year since 2000, that basically means that 17,999,998 out of 18,000,000 school days each year, nothing bad happens.
Americans have a control fetish, where they think they can FIX AND CONTROL ALL PROBLEMS without incurring any other ill effects. If you "ban all guns," you will never find them all, and there will be law abiding citizens who would have used a weapon in self defense, who will instead be dead. So maybe you stopped a school shooting, but some shopkeeper died because he couldn't defend himself against a robber with a baseball bat. If you arm the teachers, fine, maybe those schoolmarms will instantly morph into SEAL Team 6 when some nut shows up at the school with a gun and take him out. But there will be another 1 in a million day when a teacher flies off the handle and shoots somebody, or fails to lock up the weapon safely and a kid gets a hold of it and kills himself or some kid on the playground.
The law of intended consequences always bites you in the ass. When the statistic is down to 2 in 18,000,000, you can't really do anything to fix those last two without causing something else awful to happen, instead. The answer isn't to turn schools into fortresses or to snatch every gun in America. The correct response to a school shooting is to weep, hugs your kids tighter, ask everyone to keep an eye out for friends or family who might be having mental problems and try to help them, mourn the dead, never forget them, and move on with life.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.