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California Attack Has US Rethinking Strategy On Homegrown Terror (nytimes.com)
JoeyRox writes: The recent terror attack in California reflects "an evolution of the terrorist threat that Mr. Obama and federal officials have long dreaded: homegrown, self-radicalized individuals operating undetected before striking one of many soft targets that can never be fully protected in a country as sprawling as the United States." With this new type of terror risk, authorities may begin relying more heavily on citizens reporting suspicious behavior of others. The attack is also expected to renew the debate over privacy versus security for software encryption. President Obama will be addressing the nation tonight to discuss the attack.
It makes people in American look bad even though they were ISIS supporters. That makes me so happy.
This is just a rehash of the discussions that happened shortly after 9/11 (nevar forget), and the major events I recall from that was the collective assholes of the nation puckered up (really, the nation was nearly sane just prior), and the local Moroccan restaurant got firebombed (because they were obviously evil in trying to feed you).
So after the last wave of security theater, what will be different this time?
Certainly not our foreign policy. Certainly not adopting procedures from countries that do deal with terrorism successfully. Certainly not the need to throw even more money to departments that accomplish next to nothing.
But kiss even more of your civil rights goodbye.
If Obama attempts to label this as a "homegrown" terrorist, it truly conveys that he has NO grip on the situation at all, and is only looking to monopolize on the situation to further his agenda and gain political favors and to further "his legacy". Make no mistake this man was a American born citizen, however his wife was of Saudi Arabia and has just as much to do with the attack as anyone else and was done in collaboration with terrorist contacts he had external to this country. Yes there are domestic elements to it, but to go about it and treat it solely as a "domestic" incident would be stupid.
And don't forget, none of the terror incidents of late has involved strong encryption or even the hint of anybody knowing how to use it--so we have to ban strong encryption because reasons.
Or we could, you know, stop letting people into this country who have backgrounds that correspond to this kind of behavior.
This latest one was little more than a bad weekend in Chicago. Given that Chicago can't be controlled, the belief that a far more diffuse threat can be seriously challenged is the security state looking for a funding rise. Let's just be grateful that they've stayed low tech so far.
Dec 2nd, 2 baddies kill 14 people in CA = CNN says "assault weapons" for 12 straight hours.
Oct 3rd, An AC-130 gunship and crew of 13 rain 211 shells on a hospital in for nearly an hour killing 63 patients and international volunteer doctors = CNN barely mentioned it, and somehow failed to categorize the gunship loaded with 211 shells an "assault weapon"
Why didn't the pres address the nation over this one?
You want to know how to start combatting this? Stop all Islamic immigration, and begin the process of de-Islamizing the US. Yeah, I'm well aware that I will sound extreme to most of you but I've become convinced, looking at the history of Islam, that Islam can NEVER peacefully co-exist with other cultures. All it has ever done is attack its neighbours and it continues to do so today. It will never be tamed or reformed. It can only be stopped.
Wow, Robert Dear, Allen Lawrence Scarsella, Nathan Gustavsson, Daniel Macey, Joseph Backman, and Timothy McVeigh was all Muslim? The things one can learn on the Internet.
Here's a list of all the mass shootings in this country for this year, to date. Oh, and your understanding of history is about as uninformed as anything I have come across. By your standards, the United States must be the Great Satan given the amount of people we have killed during the wars we have been directly and indirectly involved in over the last century.
Please get back to us when you have figured out which other generalized groups to deport. Until that time most of the rest of us will continue to point out how you ARE the problem, not part of the solution.
It was Snowden who actually revealed the problem: the incestuous relationship between several successive US administrations and Saudi Arabia, which is the country that weaponized Islam and keeps the death-cult interpretation of the faith funded:
https://theintercept.com/2014/...
The KSA is the real enemy in the region. Time to get rid of it.
"California Attack Has Some Random Slashdot Poster Rethinking Strategy on Homegrown Terror". There, I fixed that for you.
Not just some random poster. The title is actually from the linked NY Times article, right down to the URL. So there's some serious discussion going on, whether we like what comes out of it or not.
NY Times is not a reputable news source anymore... They have not been anything but a opinion rag for the past 5 years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I see you missed the part about the Moroccan restaurant being firebombed. Somehow that wasn't labeled terrorism.
And so does your victim-blaming narrative fit there too?
Let's not forget that ISIL is a very, very recent development. I wonder if anyone can point to any recent events in that part of the world?
Or do you really want me to believe that for over 200 years Islamic people have had little beef with the US, but over the course of the last 30 have developed a hard-on of epic proportions.
And it was just out of nowhere, and not reactionary to US foreign policy.
Really?
As I said, just a rehash of discussions after 9/11. Thank you for playing your part.
I give up, why would American officials import "millions" of those terrorists? Wait, wait, I know....it is because then Obama could declare martial law and be the Muslim President for Life!!! Yep, that must be it. The only thing preventing this must be the Republicans armed to the teeth. What could possibly make us safer then a bunch of Republican gun nuts running around: Are you a terrorist? Are you a terrorist? You are, eh...BLAM...sorry I had to shoot your kid, Madam, he should be in kindergarten with the rest of the 5 year-olds...goddamn terrorist spawn of Satan.
If we just put all the Muslims in Planned Parenthood clinics, then our homegrown terrorists will become the homegrown solution.
http://time.com/3934980/right-...
You are welcome on my lawn.
"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
- George S. McGovern
In this very relevant prank, some jokers put a Koran cover on a bible, then read out various passages and asked random passers-by to comment on them.
As I'm sure you can imagine, hilarity ensues
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
After 9/11 the government created DHS to supposedly prevent terror attacks from happening again. As others have discussed, this is nothing more than political theater. Billions of dollars and thousands of bumbling bureaucrats later, we are no safer now than we were then. All it has done is create delays for millions of air passengers every year.
So Obama will predictably call for more of the same. More invasion of privacy, more bureaucrats, more wasted effort. This is what government always does - when an idea doesn't work throw more money at it.
Meanwhile he will double down on more gun control. The problem is that law enforcement is almost always in a reactive role. A crime gets committed and they show up, clean up the mess, and try to find out who is responsible. In the interim, lots of people die. What he doesn't want to admit to is that is citizens are armed then these types of terror attacks would have minimal or no damage. Instead of everyone standing around watching people get shot someone will pull out a piece and shoot the shooter.
Once again, political correctness and party politics get in the way of common sense.
"Robert Dear, Allen Lawrence Scarsella, Nathan Gustavsson, Daniel Macey, Joseph Backman, and Timothy McVeigh"
What organized group did they all belong to other than Crackpot?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Quotation marks = "I'm quoting someone else".
URLs = "Here's where I got this info".
Submission != "Plagiarism".
You're welcome.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
From TFA:
"With this new type of terror risk, authorities may begin relying more heavily on citizens reporting suspicious behavior of others."
And now you can report on your neighbor from your iPhone and Android phone!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
It was said back in the 80's that the United States would become more like the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union would become more like the United States. Well that is coming to pass. Just do a web search on "United States to become more like Soviet Union".
From TFA:
"First, there was CIA director John Brennan, last seen deceiving the public about the CIA spying on Senate staffers, lamenting that privacy laws were to blame."
"Then thereâ(TM)s the question of why journalists always frame the encryption debate as a perilous balance between privacy and security. "
Franklin said it best!
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Because the light is better under the "encryption" and "Syrian refugee" streetlamps.
What organized groups have carried out numerous attacks on US soil?
The San Bernardino folks weren't even members of anything.
Indonesia (the largest Islamic nation in the world)
Also Malaysia
I reject the notion "gun nuts" are a significant problem, other groups are doing the shootings and they are not firearms hobbyists.
The results of our sociological experiment in the inner cities speaks for itself. Paying women to breed like maggots, with "fathers" who are mere sperm donors who do not raise the child, this is the problem. Adult babies with no responsibility, morals, or respect for life and property are the problem. Leave the gun rights of us civilized people out of it.
The per capita gun ownership rate of my neighborhood is far,far above that of any inner city, but we have zero crime.
When you can't trust your neighbour not to go on a shooting rampage society has already failed. What we need to do is spend money on building up social structure. Street parties, neighbourhood parties, things that bring people together and strengthen the social structure.
Going all "report your neighbour" is going to build up the walls of distrust and lead to more problems.
The relevance is not whether ancient religious texts contain violent and xenophobic edicts, all cultures derived from barbaric times. The relevance is whether current religious people follow those edicts - not some minuscule portion, a significant percentage. This indicates whether a culture has started maturing or not.
To save others the time, the universal reaction to that little experiment was shock and rejection of the barbaric edicts, not nodding and acceptance, whether they were fooled as to the source or not. You forgot that part.
So the proposed solution is: (1) more government supervision, (2) more gun control, and (3) more encryption? This guy was being observed by the government every day because he was working for the government, the shooting took place in one of the most strictly gun controlled states in the nation, and there is no evidence he needed encryption. In addition, the shooter wasn't a "homegrown, self-radicalized individual", he was radicalized abroad by a belief system many people share and spread.
What this reflects is the utter impotence of the current administration to do anything meaningful. Obama promised a restoration of privacy, constitutionality, and a radically different foreign policy, and he has turned out as bad as Bush, if not worse.
Addressing the terror threat will require massive changes in US foreign policy, plus many years of patience for things to calm down. Getting in bed with Middle Eastern despots for oil and cleaning up the messes that European colonialism left across the globe have always been questionable to begin with, but at least there was some economic justification for it. In the 21st century, these policies are just imbecilic.
They claimed allegiance to ISIL, so what are you on about?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
The Islamic practice of slavery has been whitewashed out of history, not just the white slave trade.
Thanks to letting the left run our schools for decades, now we have at least one generation of people that think that white Christians from Europe were running around Africa with nets capturing peaceful blacks to ship to the new world.
The generation before them is aware that most of the capturing and selling was done by other blacks, but they think it was entrepreneurship, rather than something the Muslims organized and industrialized as they spread across Africa.
Virtually no one under 50 years of age knows that the crusades were a response to 400 years of Muslim war, piracy, slavery and harassment of Christendom and Christian pilgrims in the holy lands. Hell, most of the people reading this are going to need to google "Christendom".
See that "Preview" button?
bosnia, turkey, malaysia, egypt... i'm not that well travelled, but those are the first that come to my mind.
They claimed allegiance to ISIL, so what are you on about?
Today I learned that a crackpot can claim anything and someone will take them at their word.
Funny thing is, all those evil Christians who were involved in the founding of this country voted for a Constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion. It's that document all those evil Christians supported that guarantees the freedoms of Muslims and Hindus and Atheists in this country. And it's that very guarantee of religious freedom that so infuriates the radical Muslims that dream of a world ruled under Sharia law. I'll grant that most of the Muslims in this country do not want Sharia law here because they fled the bat shit crazy motherfuckers back in their homelands that delighted in making their lives hell using that same fucked up Sharia law. The problem is that now we have a lot of the younger ones here that have no knowledge of how truly fucked Sharia law is having never lived under it that suddenly are becoming radicalized. Sadly, it seems the only solution is to kill them.
fought dictators and extremists
Um, excuse me? America is busy installing and funding dictators and extremists... Even the famous Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was used as an asset to keep the communists out of Iran after the Shah (remember him, right?) got sick and died. And our former friends Qaddafi and Hussein kept a pretty tight lid on things for us also. And Saudi Arabia? Ooof! Paradise! American intentions in the middle east are hardly what anybody could call "honorable". It's just business.. And business is booming (so to speak), better than it ever was.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's right idiot. The only way to save the country is to destroy it. Take one of the basic tenets of the founding of American culture and rip it out. Maybe we could implant RFID tags in everyone as well since you like pissing all over the Constitution. As if the fucking "Patriot" Act wasn't bad enough.
From it's inception, Islam has constantly been attacking other cultures.
Sometimes violence is necessary to overthrow oppression or to defend one's life and liberty. In this case, we must defend ourselves against the Satanic cult, Islam.
Before I point out the problem let me point out what happened the day of the San Bernardino shooting. Within 30 seconds of the shooting, there was reporting on _every_ major new station that this was a 2nd amendment problem. Within 5 minutes, they had blamed conservatives (especially those dirty Libertarians who are despised by the Government and Media) for the shooting, and claimed that encryption needed back doors for Government snooping. The lie about the Paris terrorist attack being planned over encrypted channels was repeated several dozen times.
For 4 hours I listened to the puppet media claim that Guns were the problem and that _more_ gun control was necessary, and those libertarians and conservatives were a danger to the world.
Not one time in the 4 hours was it mentioned that California has THE strongest gun regulations in the country. Chicago was not mentioned either, which is a "gun free" city and county but has an incredibly high rate of gun violence sporting over 10 shootings a day (and over 1 dead per day) in a place where guns have been banned. At least for the citizens that abide by the law.
Within an hour of the Police finding and killing the 2 shooters we had their names. We also knew that his wife was Pakistani and the interesting circumstances for them meeting. We knew that she dropped their 6month off at a relative's house, an a few hours later knew that they had homemade weapons, links to at least one Jihadist terrorist group from Facebook posts, and attempted to wipe their hard drives.
For TWO MORE DAYS Politicians and Puppet media (*NBC*, *FOX*, *ABC*, NPR, *CNN*) claimed that the problem was home grown libertarians who owned guns, and facts were ignored to support that narrative. If the word "Muslim" was mentioned it was followed up immediately with Libertarians and/or how we lack gun laws.
So you post a number as if it has special meaning, and ignore the wise words of Mark Twain. "There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies, and statistics." You also ignore that the source of that number is a Reddit group! Do you also believe every post on Slashdot and Facebook, if it looks official? Why can we not find that same information from the FBI?
Well, that would be due to the fact that the number is bullshit. According to the FBI there have been 21 mass shootings this year, not 355. A longer term study performed by that same Law enforcement agency shows that the trend has been declining, not rising. The Narrative you post works because "shooting" is intentionally conflated to appeal to the emotions and make it appear that these are all San Bernardino like events.
Damage of any kind to _innocent_ people is wrong, but remember that crime is not a one way street. Crime does not stop magically when guns are banned, and if you somehow hold such a delusion you can look at the UK and Australia for both long term and short term crime trends with unarmed citizens. Banning guns does one thing. It removes people's ability to defend themselves, making them completely dependent on the Government for defense.
For the citizens to be able to defend themselves we accept a certain level of risk. The Rights of the people to defend themselves is in the Constitution very intentionally. Nobody stops _you_ from defending yourself or throwing your life to the Government. You currently can not legally demand that others do the same, and hopefully you never will.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Because the number of people dying a violent death in the US is declining . Constitution-shredding anti-gun zealots try to "not let a good crisis go to waste", but the sentiment does not last long.
Because this is a new motivation. One which, considering, what other Western countries are experiencing, could dramatically reverse the blissful trend. This terror-couple were living the life, millions of people world-wide can only dream about — American citizens with steady income, a nice house in a beautiful part of the country, blessed with a newborn daughter and supportive extended family.
If they can be radicalised into a murder-suicide mission by an organization as revolting as ISIS, who can not?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"They have COMPLETELY forgotten that the Muslims have _ALWAYS_ hated us. They hate us because we're white and Christian. They hate us because they think they should rule the world, and because by merely existing, we stand in their way and we are holding them away from their birthright (i.e. our stuff and our territory)."
Its only a very small section of muslims, blaming all muslims is a generalisation of the worst order. Extremist Christians also want to rule everything so its 50 of one and 50 of the other for all religious megalomaniacs. Its just lucky that there are more sensible christians, different religions and those with no religion to keep the stupid ones in check, but unfortunately the sensible muslims aren't able to control their nut jobs because they'll be killed. Unfortunately because of the religious based rulers/laws in these places, people of different religions and no religion are not allowed to exist because they disrupt the closed thinking and its stops progress to a civil and equal society.
Its not surprising that virtually all the most dangerous countries are strongly religious, christian and muslim.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
true, but as you've said that all muslims want to kill every white christian (what about black christians?), you are guilty of the same paranoid ideas
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Did you know U.S. inteventionist foreign policy began as a reaction to Muslim acts against the U.S.? You've probably heard the opening line of the Marine Corps hymn:
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli...
The Montezuma part makes sense. The U.S. fought several wars with Mexico, so of course the Marines would be involved. But Tripoli? That's way over in Africa. What the hell were U.S. Marines doing there?
Funny you should ask. Way back around 1800 when the U.S. was a freshly minted nation, it ran into a problem. Prior to the revolution, the U.S. was a British colony, and thus fell under the protection of the British navy. When the U.S. gained independence, it lost that protection. The Muslim Barbary States decided to take advantage of the situation and began capturing U.S. merchant ships and holding the crews for ransom. Their thinking was that since these people weren't Muslim, there was no moral problem with kidnapping them and extorting a ransom.
The fledgling U.S. was deeply in debt and had its own domestic problems. The last thing it wanted to do was to meddle with things going on in other countries. But it didn't have a navy which could deal with the situation (it had been decommissioned after the Revolutionary War to save money), and attempts to negotiate a treaty with France to protect U.S. vessels fell through. So for the first few years, the U.S. just paid the ransom. Of course paying kidnappers just encourages them, and it became open season on U.S. flagged vessels. Eventually the payments became exorbitant (over 1/6th of the Federal government's total budget), and the U.S. recommissioned a navy (the USS Constitution on display in Boston was one of these first ships). President Thomas Jefferson (y'know, the guy who wrote famous things like, "We hold these truths to be self evident - that all men are created equal") launched a military operation to Africa to end the kidnappings and free the hostages.
And that is how the U.S. Marines ended up in Tripoli. That is how the permanent U.S. Navy was born. That is how U.S. meddling with foreign nations began. Because a bunch of Muslims decided to take advantage of a fledgling non-Muslim nation which wanted little to nothing to do with what was going on in the Eastern hemisphere, by kidnapping its citizens and extorting a ransom for their safe return. So if you want to play the blame game, the first incident, the precipitating act which began over two centuries of animosity and set the U.S. on a course for meddling with countries halfway around the world, was actually committed by Muslims against the U.S.
This is a situation where Isaac's Asimov's ideas about psychohistory are worth considering. Mass murder is an aberrant, rare behavior and predicting it in an individual or even a modest population is a very questionable thing. But it's quite predictable when you're talking about very large populations.
Obama has proposed letting in 10,000 Syrian refugees -- not "millions". How will that effect your chance of being killed in a mass murder? Will that effect be significant?
Well, let's start with the base rate of mass attacks in the US. For purposes of discussion, lets call a "mass attack" as an attack on at least four people. Just in shootings, there have been 353 mass shooting in the US in 2015, and we're on day 340 of 2015. So it's fair to say that mass attacks are a daily occurrence in America. However spread across the large pool of potential victims, any individual's chance of being killed in a mass attack is very low -- so low that in practice we treat the situation as not urgent enough to do anything about.
Three hundred million is a population large enough to predict with certainty that it contains a substantial number of mass murderers. 10,000 is not. So any fear of letting in ten thousand refugees is based on an implicit belief that there is an extraordinarily high proportion of mass murderers in that population, or that the base rate of mass murders in the US is lower than it is, or both.
Let's examine the belief that a high proportion of Syrian refugees are mass murderers. Now what we know about most terrorists, at least the kind that operate across international lines, tend to be from comfortable or privileged backgrounds -- not refugees. This was the case for Santa Barbara shooter Tashfeen Malik, who like many of the 9/11 hijackers had an comfortable, uneventful upbringing and a university degree in a technical field. Refugees who commit terrorism tend to operate in-country (e.g. Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades) against the immediate source of their displacement. So the idea that a Syrian refugees will commit acts of terror on behalf of ISIS is pretty far-fetched -- if we're talking only 10,000 of them. If we were talking a million of them it's not something we could discount, and if we were talking a hundred million it'd be a virtual certainty, as vanishingly unlikely as any individual taking this path would be.
So what this leaves us with in practical terms is the possibility that an ISIS operative may somehow sneak in amongst the refugees. This is something the Europeans definitely can't rule out. In fact two of the nine November 13 attackers were in the EU on faked Syrian refugee papers. However it's important to note three things: (1) had they not been in the EU their places would be certain to have been taken by indigenous participants; (2) Europe is dealing with far more refugees: 750,000 by some estimates; (3) the US program would only let in people who have been through a two-year long vetting process; in Europe they're just showing up and then have to be characterized after the fact. Even so let's assume one or two terrorists make it in through the program; killing the entire program won't stop ISIS from getting people in through other methods, or radicalizing people who are already here, so keeping those guys out will neither stop ISIS or make a dent in the base rate of mass attacks in the US.
What keeping refugees will do is put ISIS in a more advantageous position. ISIS actually supports the position of people who don't to let Syrian refugees into the US, because that works for them. Remember the famous picture of the dead toddler washed up on the European beach? That saturated the ISIS controlled media in the areas they control, because that's what ISIS wants people leaving their territory to face. Muslims fleeing from ISIS territory demolishes their claim of having established a legitimate new caliphate. It also undermines them in more practical ways -- they've had e
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Um, excuse me? America is busy installing and funding dictators and extremists... Even the famous Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was used as an asset to keep the communists out of Iran after the Shah (remember him, right?) got sick and died.
Um, excuse me? Are you seriously claiming that the US installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?
Last I heard he was the revolutionary who created the movement that overthrew the Shah, and the whole Pahlavi monarchy (who had been re-empowered by a US/UK coup after the democrartically-elected Prime Minister nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's assets). The Shah didn't die until five years later (although he DID die of a cancer where survival times with then-current treatments were about five years, so he might have been starting to show symmptoms when he was overthrown.)
Or are you just claiming that the US used him against the Soviet Union once he had established himself and his movement? Governments tend to use everybody and everything they can to promote their interests, regardless of how they got there. Sometimes you build it, sometimes you mine it. "You have to make the good from the bad, because the bad is all you have to work with."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is raving fantasy.
Are pipe bombs also in the umbrella stands of "conservatives"?
The rifles they used were illegally modified. The vast majority of "conservatives" aren't doing that, either.
The only thing strange is how people "go to town" only when the shooter is white OR Muslim. The large majority of cases are, for some reason, never seen in mass media.
No, they mostly came from "ordinary" criminal violence, largely gang-related. Shootingtracker.com is a source of noise: there have not been hundreds of mass shootings this year, unless you re-define the term.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Uh, no, actually. There were Muslim American soldiers in the Revolution, and the first country to recognize the United States was the Sultanate of Morocco.
Muslims have had "beef" with the US mostly since WWII, as our stupid and brutal foreign policy started to intrude more and more on the Muslim world: the CIA-backed coup in Iran, support for the rogue nation of Israel, suport for Saudi Arabia. The grievances are rooted in geopolitics, religion merely helps gives them some specifics of form.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I don't understand the hysteria of disarming your people to prevent terrorists attacks by people who will always be able to get weapons.
FTFY
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You have a very naive view of Syrian refugees and Muslims in general. True, most aren't running around committing mass murder, but that's a bit of a straw many, because scores of polls in many countries over many years prove that significant fractions (and depending on the question and sample, sometimes majorities) support imposition of Sharia law, discrimination against Christians and Jews and gays, death for apostasy, death for blasphemy, and support various Islamic terror groups. Read it and weep.
As for Syrian refugees specifically, a survey last year by an Arabic group found that 4% have a positive view of ISIS, another 9% have a mostly positive view, and another 10% have only a mostly negative view. So if we get the 10,000 refugees Obama wants, that's 400 who support ISIS, plus 900 who mostly support ISIS, plus 1000 who don't think ISIS is entirely bad. Add to that the fact that 2nd and 3rd generation Muslim immigrants are often more radical than the original immigrants, and what could possibly go wrong?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Mod up.
If gun control is a viable option, then let the facts speak for themselves. Constantly fudging numbers for shock value makes me doubt seriously the motives of the pro-gun-contol side.
So, the Shah wasn't exiled? That's what you're asserting?
If you think 1,000 muslim terrorists in this nation means "we're fucked" then you truly are a pussy. Just because 1 of the suspects in the French attack posed as a refugee doesn't mean you need to run around clutching your pearls and screaming like a bitch about every refugee.
Saudi Arabia is full of factions. Some of them are our friends, some are our enemies, and most are mostly neutral. The idea we'd try to "get rid of" a country because some of the people there are our enemies is daft.
The vast majority of those shootings are drug dealers shooting at drug dealers. Which is why the proper number to compare against is the FBI's active shooter classification. Between 2000 and 2013 there were a total of 127 such shooters.
Explain to your friends that any competent programmer who attacks the problem can devise an uncrackable communications system
That's a really bad argument, because to most of the population programmers are wizards who understand the magic that goes on inside the magic boxes that they use. More importantly, you can go to a library, read a book about encryption, and use a pencil and paper to encrypt messages in a way that they can't be decrypted (it's a bit time consuming, but there's nothing involved beyond high-school maths) and, because it's offline and not subject to timing attacks or side channels, it's going to be far more secure and harder to intercept via trojans than anything that involves using a computer. Oh, and there are also a lot of simple steganographic tricks (linguistic steganography is particularly fun, permuting a copy-and-paste troll in such a way that it looks as if you're just trying to get around a forum's spam filter, but are actually encoding a hidden message) that can be done without using a computer to do anything other than post the result somewhere.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm Romanian, I see more muslims in a month than you see in a year, most likely.
They're all fine, I have no problem with them. I buy excellent food from a Syrian store and best sweets from a Lybian store.
On the other hand, my country isn't regarded as "must destroy" by extremists.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Try four. Even Anti-gun, extreme left wing Mother Jones only counts four. But then they actually have the intellectual honesty to keep to the original FBI definition of 4 Dead, not the three dead that the President ordered the FBI to change their criteria too, or the 4 or more shots fired that shootinglist uses.
Four, not 355, not 310. Four. Charlestown AME, Marine and Navy Recruiting station, College in Oregon and San Bernadino.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Right now, there are more firearms (and also, more weapons of other types, such as knives and bats) in the USA than there are people. The idea that the US would become a "gun free society" is completely without any hope of bearing fruit at our current level of technology.
It isn't in any way an abhorrent idea to me. But I no more worry about being a victim of a terrorist attack or gun violence in general than I do of being struck by lightning. However, I do worry about my fellow citizens becoming overly and immediately paranoid at the sight of a firearm due to the constant droning of the hysterics in their ears, so I don't carry, although I could, legally speaking.
No. Not to lightning strikes or car accidents or heart attacks, either. But if I'm there during the incident, yes, certainly I'd do what I could.
The appropriate responses are those made by the people at the scene, and the government's subsequent actions, presuming they are constitutionally authorized. I am all for immediate, extremely harsh and highly escalated direct response(s) by any injured or threatened party. Someone brandishes a weapon at me or my family and I manage to gain control of the situation, they will have completely obviated any inclination on my part to treat them as human beings.
If I was carrying a firearm (I don't, I'm simply not worried, because I can do math and recognize hysteria when I hear it), and if I was present at a terrorist attack (highly, highly unlikely), and I killed a bystander (also unlikely, highly unlikely in fact as I am an expert with a pistol, but...) I'd regret it, of course. It would certainly be accidental, as opposed to the (presumably) mass killing that inspired me to draw in the first place, so in terms of should I or should I not draw and fire if carrying and present at a terrorist attack, clearly, I should, and just as clearly, the responsibility for the accident lies with those who created the incident in the first place, so I'd be able to sleep all right. As it happens, I have some related experience, just not with firearms, so I know what my actual reactions are in such a matter.
No. The militia was the people. The government was the government. Two entirely separate entities. And there wasn't so much a fear of violent overthrow of government by the people (who were, and remain today, the militia), there was intent and legally sanctioned capability in the very paperwork that authorized the government to do so if it got out of hand. And, in fact, that is basically what happened to ol' king George III.
No, the military, which is to say, the government's standing armed forces, has those things. The militia (us, the citizens) variously have knives, small firearms, marital arts training, the ability to cobble up IEDs and so forth.
One on one, clearly not. However, that's not the issue and has never been the issue. People die in armed conflicts. Generally everyone who dies in a conflict of any nature on either side has been overwhelmed by either the opposition's firepower, strategy, tactics, or numbers, most often a combination of these.
The only issue actually related to your question is, can a
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.