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Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed
New submitter Lew Lorton notes a NY Times story about a thief in New York City who was tracked and located using a GPS device inside a decoy pill bottle he had stolen (along with other pill bottles) from a pharmacy. When police confronted the thief, he raised a gun to shoot at an officer, and was killed
"The decoy bottles were introduced last year by the police commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, who announced that the department would begin to stock pharmacy shelves with decoy bottles of painkillers containing GPS devices. The initiative was in response to a sharp increase of armed and often deadly pharmacy robberies across the state, frequently by people addicted to painkillers. ... The bottles are designed to be weighted and to rattle when shaken, so a thief does not initially realize they do not contain pills. Each of the decoy bottles sits atop a special base, and when the bottle is lifted from the base, it begins to emit a tracking signal."
The usual story burglary victims hear is that they'll likely never get their stuff back. I can install a GPS transmitter inside one of my computers or my guitar. As a ham radio operator, I can use APRS which is trackable almost anywhere. Very interesting.
Not all of us on the left have a problem with this.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The strange concept is that you would bring up gun control when the statistics don't back you up. Over the last decade, the percentage of officers killed on duty, by guns vs other causes, in Britain is slightly HIGHER than it was in the United States. The US is far more violent than Britain, but guns do not contribute to that nearly as much as you would have others believe.
Do you have a source for that? According to the site linked below (which includes citations), "In the US – population 311.5 million – there were an estimated 13,756 murders in 2009, a rate of about 5.0 per 100,000. Of these 9,203 were carried out with a firearm. In the UK – population 56.1 million – there were an estimated 550 murders in 2011-12, a rate of about 1.4 per 100,000. Of these 39 were carried out with a firearm." I couldn't find similar statistics for police officers, but you're obviously pretty sure of your facts so I thought I'd ask. http://fleshisgrass.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/us-and-uk-murder-rate-and-weapon-updated/
Unlike the U.S., the island states of Japan and Great Britain have had centuries of unilateral culturalism--only a century or so for Canada and the island continent of Australia; their populations being about 20 million caucasians each. Otoh, there are over 200 million homes of different cultures in the U.S containing firearms.
Of the gun deaths in the States, most (about 65%) were suicides; others were related to self defense; and then there darwinian accidents.
Here's an incomplete list (incomplete due to issues with authorities and the dissemination information) of an interactive breakdown of gun deaths for 75 of the 200 countries in 2014; interactive, because you can reorder a column by clicking on the column's header to see the countries with the most deaths by accident, suicide, murder or overall total.
Here's a reordering based on the ones with the highest homicide rate:
Honduras
El Salvador
Jamaica
Venezuela
Swaziland
Guatemala
Colombia
Brazil
South Africa
Panama
Mexico
Paraguay
Nicaragua
Costa Rica
and finally next: United States
Yes, I guess we could take the guns from the people in the U.S. (that everyone likes to illegally immigrate to) except for the police and their friends or family, but it'll probably mean that we will become more like the rest of "gunless" Latin America.
A lot of these deaths are planned executions, staged to look like self defense. Afterall isn't it alright to kill someone if the victim deserves it; think about human nature and how one would react if someone with a thug-like demeanor came at them in everyday wear. Maybe this one wasn't a setup, there's no way of knowing since employees of the police department don't respect the idea of humanity; instead a self-serving professionalism that lacks accountability to the community.
Enjoy the future of a living hell for the powerless unable to have anything that can be used for self defense. If you're randomly searched and found with a pair of scissors, screwdriver or pen knife, it'll be decreed you were going to use it as a weapon. (This happened to myself . This one was about having fun harassing someone they mistakenly thought was gay due a nearby event I was unaware of. It was okay, since they thought I was a victim that deserved it.)
The same thing can and will happen when firearm ownership are illegal and are conveniently found in a raid on politically problematic people and decreed that it was being used a weapon. Killing a deserving victim is insatiable feeling that becomes a hobby that will never end.