I personally think in the longer run it will be something along the lines of WiMax that wins out because it isn't tied to a ground based distribution network (fibre, cable, phone lines). But that's the hopeful futurist in me talking.
Personally, I think that the limitations of bandwidth inherent in broadcast transmissions will be the downfall of the idea of doing everything wirelessly.
I mean, here we are talking about streaming HDTV to, say, 10% of households. If a particular wimax cell has 2k households in it, that's 200 people trying to stream HDTV content. Figure each stream takes 4MBit, that's 800MBits being taken up by the streaming media. That's counting on true surges like football games being broadcast more traditionally.
You end up either making the cells really tiny, or being limited on bandwidth. A fiber connection to the home solves all of this. Heck, a wire connection period solves most of this. We can ship something like 16mbit through cat-3 telephone lines for miles today. Coax has even more bandwidth.
I think that we should just give up and include a data connection with the power, water, and sewer connections that are already standard.
All of this doesn't mean that wireless solutions aren't a solution to many problems, or won't be widespread. I just think that infrastructure will remain important.
but the vast majority of HDTV owners do not possess either (a fact that will likely remain, as the magnitude of the HDTV sales figures indicates
Still, that could be fixed in well under a year.
Seriously, a gigabit ethernet chip costs how much to add onto a device? A buck or so? A DVD player can be had from walmart for $25. Get rid of the drive, use the cost savings to go to a more advanced decoding chip and HDTV output.
Discounting development costs, I could see it costing a 'mere' $50 for a device dedicated to taking streaming video and feeding it to a TV/sound system. $100 for a wireless capable version. At this cheap of a level, your main PC would act as a server, possibly even partially uncompressing the stream for final dispay on the box. Having a service installed on your PC would allow movies to be selected via the box(or the box's remote).
This is well within range for a company like netflix to send you a *free* box in exchange for a commitment contract to buy their download video service for a year or two.
Right now limited high speed internet access at homes is more of a limiting factor - though the success of Netflix shows that people are willing to wait for 2-3 days to watch a movie in exchange for the convienence of not having to go to a video store. With my 2meg DSL connection, I have a good shot(given good servers) at being able to stream at least 720p movies. With a moderately long caching period, this becomes easy. IE I trigger the download, go grab popcorn or make dinner, then watch the movie while it finishes caching in the background. No worries if I trigger it in the morning to watch when I get home from work.
The next step would be to put a HD in the box to store movies - but $200 gets you a 500gb HD today, retail. That's easily enough for 100(smartly compressed) HD movies. Maybe 50 not so smartly or longer movies. Still, how many people wouldn't find something to watch while they wait if they keep 40 or so 'favorite' movies on the HD?
Maybe in 10 years the tide will have turned and most people will be using online distribution. However, there's serious money to be made in the meantime, and that requires physical media.
This I agree with, if through inertia more than anything else.
- be played by a bunch of self-selected participants who are conscious of the testing and metrics, and thus will actively seek to 'game' them if possible.
Any more than people try to 'game' stuff in things like WoW? Make it fun and people will probably forget that the 'game' is actually a research device.
Otherwise, well, people gaming the system would kinda be the whole point of the system - figuring out secendary effects of rule/market changes.
besides, as a WoW player, I'd love to have an economist speak to them at length about how some of their decisions occasionally really fark up their economics.
Good point, and they might actually be able to suggest a method to puld gold farmers out of business without rewriting the game.
not randomly changing the rules is one aspect of that!
But doesn't this effectively happen often enough in the star wars MMORPG, even WoW and EVE?
I'm not convinced that the scientists wouldn't be less than current games. After all, it'd be deliberately introduced by the scientists to test a theory and make measurements. Scientists who're probably looking for more subtle results, and not some semi-mythical 'game balance'.
It could even be things as subtle as changing the federal discount rate by a tenth of a percent. Changing a drop frequency can have drastic effects on it's average value at auction.
Heh, the road I take to work every day isn't even on the map. I've looked. There's gravel roads on the map, but not the paved road that's been there for years.;)
If I was driving to new locations all the time I'd consider a GPS - but I know how to use a map just fine, and a $2.99 map* has all the functionality I need.
*Seriously, this is what I paid for my latest US road map book. It has a seperate map for each state, plus sections of Canada&Mexico.
The better the SNR is on analogue, the better the sound, the easier it is to understand somebody. The old analogue phones freqently transmitted on maximum power all the time, for best quality(and cheaper construction cost).
On digital, the SNR only has to be sufficient to be able to reconstruct the signal*, so you have much more in the way of reducing transmission power when the SNR is good. Most modern digital phones, for example, transmit at a quarter or less of what the old analogue ones did.
*Most digital transmissions have lots of recovery possibilities.
Is WMA even a codec, as opposed to a media package format?
What I mean is that MP3 is a codec, just like Vorbis, Divx, h.264, etc... For example, AVI is a container format; it can contain streams of any of the codecs listed..OGG is also a container.
The problem I have with WMA is that MS has gone after companies for making free utilities capable of extracting streams from it, and DRM capability is very much built into the format.
A generalization, I admit. I would wager that far more humans are killed by handguns than animals are each year. Besides, it would seem, that handguns used for hunting are of a different class than say semi-automatic 9mm or.45 weapons. I wouldn't think a handgun would be a very sensible hunting weapon, especially something that's likely to break your wrist, but hey... to each their own huh.
Well, most people don't go hunting with the.500 straight off. A.357 or.44 works for most purposes. Personally, I'd be more tempted to get one for hiking in areas with large animals. In case the bear spray doesn't work.
Importing ought to drive up the cost, especially if they have to be imported illegally, as customs will still catch quite a few. Guns have a significant bulk/cost ratio difference from drugs, that I should think would make them an unattractive import candidate.
Guns aren't detectable by drug dogs either. They might be a sideline, but they'd still come in.
Thanks for bringing up Britain, who in 2002 had.41 gun deaths per 100,000 people, versus the U.S.'s 14.24... more than 30 times as many per capita source.
I'll fully admit that the USA has issues. For one thing, our murder rate without firearms is higher than the UK's total rate. So it's not just firearms. It's not politically correct, but if you were to remove murders committed by african americans the US crime rate would drop drastically. Of course, I think that this is caused more by the drug war combined with entitlement politics, combined with the earlier discrimination. However, today it's inner city culture that's causing much of the problem. How to fix that, I can't entirely be sure of.
On the other hand, the Swiss actually have a higher firearm ownership rate than the USA and even lower amounts of crime. Not to mention oddities like if you look at legal gun ownership, areas with high ownership rates generally have lower crime rates.
how do they typically deal with the waiting period? Do they mail you the gun later?
Mailing is generally illegal(a few exceptions exist for servicing/mailing to self). The purchaser has to take possession in person. Still, that's part of the problem with waiting periods. Generally you end up going to the dealer's physical store, if the show doesn't extend beyond the waiting period. It's not a big deal in states without waiting periods.
I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but guns are not good. They are dangerous, deadly weapons. Gun control and Border control are a really really bad analogy for any number of reasons.
Ah yes, the gun household 'safety' study. You are aware that they included illegal gun possession as well? That they didn't include self defense that didn't result in a fatality? That studies have shown that, while a popular choice for suicide, the substitution rate is high enough that suicide rates are pretty much static despite firearm possession rates?
I don't know where the border control thing came from.
Anyways, I think we'd do better to try to fix poverty than spend all this effort trying to ban guns, generally by going after guns not used in crimes. For example, the brady bunch was founded on the basis of a CIA agent killed by a handgun, yet when in power pushed the AWB(Assault Weapon Ban), which regulated rifles, not handguns of the type used in the assassination attempt. Then there's California's inclusion of.50BMG rifles as 'assault weapons', despite them only having been used in a crime in the USA like once in 20 years(wasn't even an fatalities in it, and BTW, the dude who used it also converted a bulldozer into a tank). We're talking about a rifle that starts out around five feet long, needs a support to be effectively used, weights something like 17 pounds for a single shot, and costs $3k before you look into buying a scope. Not exactl
Because that's how long it takes to verify that you're legally eligible to own a firearm. Why should you wait 5 minutes while a liquor store clerk or DMV employee checks your identification? Same reason.
With the NICS online, that arguement doesn't hold for most people. I'm talking about a waiting period where you're already approved, you simply have to wait X time to pick it up.
While NICS has a lot of problems that need fixing, even I'll admit that it's better than nothing.
This is absurd reasoning. By this reasoning, no laws should be in place, because if there's a law in place, a "guilty" person somewhere will break it, putting the "innocent" at a disadvantage.
Sigh... Nice strawman. Ever heard of 'consensual crime'? You know, where the only parties harmed, if any, are informed consenting adults? Murder, rape, arson, theft, etc... All harm somebody innocent. These should remain illegal for good reason. Who does my purchase of a firearm immediately instead of in 5 days harm?
For stuff like gun laws, I'm arguing that laws should be effective, or they should be removed from the books. All studies indicate that these laws, on average, have jack crap to do with reducing crime, much less violent crime. Not doing any good, why keep them on the books and distract law enforcement resources from tracking down real crime?
They'll go to legal gun stores instead of the black market.
And hopefully get scooped up by the NICS check and law enforcement actually interested in enforcing existing crimes. A felon attempting to buy a gun is in itself a felony, but not one that's regularly prosecuted. Also, a legally bought firearm is far easier to track, if the police scoop it up it's possible to track it down to the store that sold it and find out who bought it.
Also, I would suggest that if you're in a race against a person to get a gun, you should probably get in touch with the police instead.
As others have noted, the police have no duty to protect you, at least in the USA. If somebody has a credible threat against them, yet not urgent enough to meet the standards for police protection in that area, and leaving the area isn't an option, then they should be able to obtain the means to defend themselves.
Eventually, as weapons are permanently lost, damaged or confiscated, fewer weapons will find it to the black market. note i did not say "none" but fewer, since the premise is *reduction* of violence, not elimination.
Eventually they either start importing them from elsewhere right along with the drugs, or they start making them.
As Britain's finding out, not even banning handguns can keep them off the streets, nor even deter violent crime that much. Little problem, for about $100 in parts and a machine shop you can churn out a full auto gun. For ~$20, a single shot zip gun.
They've been reduced to attempting to ban knives, starter pistols, paintball and BB guns. If you didn't know, convicts even manage to make knives in prison, so I don't ever see that working.
At any rate, some people who might wish to commit a firearm crime don't have access to the black market and so some deterrence will take place. Purchasing from an illegal market has it's drawbacks. If you don't have a gun, and you go to buy one from the black market, what's to stop the fellow with the gun from pointing it at you, taking your money, and leaving?
That nobody will go to that black marketeer again?
So really, the bigger problem is the "gray market" such as gun shows, where legal weapons are sold without restriction and without a proper paper trail. These remaining loopholes in the system need to be closed.
Ah, the ever so quoted non-existent 'gun show loophole'. FACT: Gun Dealers have to follow all the same rules and regulations at a gun show as they do elsewhere.
honestly, though, handguns, which are usually the subject of these federal laws, ought to be outright banned since their only legitimate use is hurting people. You don't hunt with a handgun, and you only practice shooting them to get better at hurting people.
I loved it when the brady bunch had a conniption about the.500 S&W when it came out. Line police weren't too worried - it's so big that it's easier to hide a small rifle, and fast follow up shots aren't exactly going to happen. Not to mention that you risk breaking your wrist if you don't know how to shoot(and most thugs don't).
Besides, handgun usage against people is perfectly legitimate in self defense. Fact is, a handgun is about the only way people of lesser physical nature can reasonably defend themselves against people of greater physical nature. To be extreme, something like a 300 pound prison convict versus an 80 pound 80 year old grandmother*
*Happened, though he beat her half to death before bleeding out. She got him every time center of mass, and he never got the gun away from her. A classic, if half-tragic(she lived, he died), case of 'not enough gun'.
I'm not sure that I'd want to be diagnosed with something terminal, but with early treatment today it's quite possible to delay the worst of Altheimer's until I croak of something else.
Considering the amount of stuff that doesn't crop up until late in life, I'd sure as heck say that it's still useful for me. Alzheimer's for example.
Is it worth $1k at the moment? Maybe not. Still, as the price drops and the number of 'pre-existing' conditions it detects increases it becomes more and more worth it.
That's fine and well for you, but there's plenty of drugs to delay Alzheimer's, they're better the earlier they're taken, and I have family history for it.
I'd much rather find out if I'm also predisposed, and if so get on them at an age before significant impairement. DNA tests would be a good indicator of the need to take further action.
While $1k is expensive, it's actually fairly cheap in the realm of diagnostic tests.
So why exactly should I not expect my DNA information to be archived, cataloged and given to the government at-whim?
You're not paying for this, this is already done for free.
What the $999 gets you is a genome scan, which is a different set of tests altogether than the sort of tests done for paternity and forensic analysis that the government is (normally) interested in.
One is sort of a DNA 'fingerprint', a MD5 checksum. The other is capable of telling you that you happen to have a defective gene involved in the production of insulin(or a number of other things).
Because making you wait 5 days *might* stop a Va Tech type massacre from happening. I would suggest that anyone who asks this sort of question is putting their own selfish self-gratification before the safety of others.
Did you totally miss my pointing out that I already own enough weapons to pull a VA Tech type massacre in addition to a texas tower sniper massacre? That I've undergone security checks that Seung-Hui Cho would not have been able to pass. Heck, with my arsenal I'd have SWAT sweating - their standard body armor isn't effective against some of the calibers I have(part of the battle rifle vs assault rifle thing). Add in the military training and a gas mask and many of their standard tactics would be reduced in effectiveness.
Even considering this, a 5 or 10 day waiting period would have done nothing - Cho obtained at least one of his weapons more than a month before commiting the massacre. And promptly committed a felony by filing the serial numbers off.
2) A woman's death - could've happened with a gun as well.
Maybe, maybe not. While not a domestic disturbance, Luby's massacre in Texas had a woman who was a competition pistol shooter - she lost both of her parents in it because her weapon was in the truck(no legal CCW or open carry at the time). I'm willing to say that the odds of her stopping it would have been high. Still, at least one of the women I'm thinking about had a restraining order, the police were on their way, and the man still strangled her to death.
The key to this problem might not lie in guns but other means, such as speeding up the restraining orders,
Worthless pieces of paper. The incidents I'm talking about the women already had restraining orders. No speedup necessary.
better police protection, increased funding for safe houses, etc...
Costs money, unfortuantly. In many cases the killer simply waited for the police to go away.
I would argue the solution shouldn't lie in the "let's populate our town with huge wolves to fight the man-eating bats we used to solve an earlier small problem" approach. What's next? Battered wives getting permits to carry M-16s around?
How about we get some sheep-dogs instead? Capable of violence but not going to reach for it until necessary, to protect the herd from the wolves that naturally exist?
Besides, a 12 gauge would probably work better than an AR.;)
The black market doesn't enforce wait periods, but going to the black market means you're putting yourself at a risk of sting operations and such.
My arguement is to keep legal easy enough to keep the black market down enough that sting operations are actually likely to do more than skim the surface. I'm not asking for no limitations - merely go after accuracy and most 'bang for the buck'. IE use the measures that impact criminals the most and legal purchasers the least. Waiting periods ain't it.
why don't we just legalize all the drugs?
hehehehehe... Happens to be one of my other political beliefs that we'd be better off legalizing all that stuff. There's better drugs than Meth on all points. Going by prohibition as a model, drug use and violence would drop.
Why don't YOU buy your guns on the black market if it's so quick and cheap and easy?
Because I'm one of those people who try to obey the law? Besides, I live in a state without most of the annoying hassles so it isn't worth it.
Cars and guns are not the same thing. Objects that have one purpose, and one purpose only, to kill living things, should not be mentioned in the same breath as modes of transportation, or kitchen utensiles, etc.
More people still die from cars and kitchen utensiles each year than guns.
And no, target practice isn't "another purpose," it's just practice for the killing of living things.
The question you need to ask is "Why is a drivers license treated as an ID document in my country ?".
Because it eliminates another card in your wallet? Because it eliminates duplication of effort?
I have no problems having the driver's license also generally being used as an ID, as long as it contains caveats for non-us citizens. Maybe a special background, or disclaimer somewhere. After all, credit cards are considered suitable supporting IDs in some situations.
Though if we're going to use it as an ID it needs to meet a higher trust factor than 'filled out application with this name/address and passed a driver's test'.
It still messes up their recruiting a bit. It's already a bit of effort to find terrorists willing to commit suicidal attacks.
If they now have to find recruits that don't meet the profile the USA is using, or at least train them enough to conceal it, it's a bit more difficult.
First, why should I be made to wait 5 days? I already own a dozen guns, including a number of handguns and 3 battle rifles(1). Heck, I own three hunting rifles that would quite reasonably operate as sniper rifles. In one case, except for it's furniture(wood instead of black polymer), it's a fairly common SWAT sniper weapon. Despite all this, I AM NOT A THREAT. I've been highly investigated, trained, and passed a test. Yes, I am a holder of a CCW permit. Second, there have been documented cases of women(2) being killed while on the waiting list by their formor significant other with a restraining order against him. Third, as pointed out - the black market doesn't enforce waiting periods. Only the white market does. It's yet one more 'security measure' that harms the innocent, not the guilty. The guilty goes and buys a black market weapon with no background check, no waiting period, no registration. The innocent have to wait, fill out a form that the ATF loves nitpicking over(3). Hope that the NICS check comes back good, that the computers haven't confused him or her with some criminal type three states over(4) with a semi-similar name. Fourth, what if you find just the right weapon half a state away? Do you really want to go for another eight hour drive to pick it up 5-10 days later? For poorer people, it can mean taking more time off work.
I know, let's subsitute 'car' for 'gun'. Let's have a 5 day cooling period before you can pick up your new vehicle, so we can make sure that you're not a DUI convict not eligible to purchase a car, are mentally unstable, or looking to run down your significant other/children in a school crossing in a heated rage.
Meanwhile you can go to the criminal element and buy a stolen car for cash, instantly.
(1)An entirely different beast than a assault rifle/weapon. (2)In at least one case, her kids as well. (3) Don't abbreviate anything, use two letter state code, no use full state name, etc... (4)It's happened. Takes ~6 months to straighten out, in addition to delays whenever they go to purchase a gun.
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Well, there's also CH-DVD, though finding content might be a problem if you're in the USA. ;)
Of course, I'm waiting for my current SDTV to die before I replace it with a HDTV.
I personally think in the longer run it will be something along the lines of WiMax that wins out because it isn't tied to a ground based distribution network (fibre, cable, phone lines). But that's the hopeful futurist in me talking.
Personally, I think that the limitations of bandwidth inherent in broadcast transmissions will be the downfall of the idea of doing everything wirelessly.
I mean, here we are talking about streaming HDTV to, say, 10% of households. If a particular wimax cell has 2k households in it, that's 200 people trying to stream HDTV content. Figure each stream takes 4MBit, that's 800MBits being taken up by the streaming media. That's counting on true surges like football games being broadcast more traditionally.
You end up either making the cells really tiny, or being limited on bandwidth. A fiber connection to the home solves all of this. Heck, a wire connection period solves most of this. We can ship something like 16mbit through cat-3 telephone lines for miles today. Coax has even more bandwidth.
I think that we should just give up and include a data connection with the power, water, and sewer connections that are already standard.
All of this doesn't mean that wireless solutions aren't a solution to many problems, or won't be widespread. I just think that infrastructure will remain important.
but the vast majority of HDTV owners do not possess either (a fact that will likely remain, as the magnitude of the HDTV sales figures indicates
Still, that could be fixed in well under a year.
Seriously, a gigabit ethernet chip costs how much to add onto a device? A buck or so? A DVD player can be had from walmart for $25. Get rid of the drive, use the cost savings to go to a more advanced decoding chip and HDTV output.
Discounting development costs, I could see it costing a 'mere' $50 for a device dedicated to taking streaming video and feeding it to a TV/sound system. $100 for a wireless capable version. At this cheap of a level, your main PC would act as a server, possibly even partially uncompressing the stream for final dispay on the box. Having a service installed on your PC would allow movies to be selected via the box(or the box's remote).
This is well within range for a company like netflix to send you a *free* box in exchange for a commitment contract to buy their download video service for a year or two.
Right now limited high speed internet access at homes is more of a limiting factor - though the success of Netflix shows that people are willing to wait for 2-3 days to watch a movie in exchange for the convienence of not having to go to a video store. With my 2meg DSL connection, I have a good shot(given good servers) at being able to stream at least 720p movies. With a moderately long caching period, this becomes easy. IE I trigger the download, go grab popcorn or make dinner, then watch the movie while it finishes caching in the background. No worries if I trigger it in the morning to watch when I get home from work.
The next step would be to put a HD in the box to store movies - but $200 gets you a 500gb HD today, retail. That's easily enough for 100(smartly compressed) HD movies. Maybe 50 not so smartly or longer movies. Still, how many people wouldn't find something to watch while they wait if they keep 40 or so 'favorite' movies on the HD?
Maybe in 10 years the tide will have turned and most people will be using online distribution. However, there's serious money to be made in the meantime, and that requires physical media.
This I agree with, if through inertia more than anything else.
- be played by a bunch of self-selected participants who are conscious of the testing and metrics, and thus will actively seek to 'game' them if possible.
Any more than people try to 'game' stuff in things like WoW? Make it fun and people will probably forget that the 'game' is actually a research device.
Otherwise, well, people gaming the system would kinda be the whole point of the system - figuring out secendary effects of rule/market changes.
besides, as a WoW player, I'd love to have an economist speak to them at length about how some of their decisions occasionally really fark up their economics.
Good point, and they might actually be able to suggest a method to puld gold farmers out of business without rewriting the game.
not randomly changing the rules is one aspect of that!
But doesn't this effectively happen often enough in the star wars MMORPG, even WoW and EVE?
I'm not convinced that the scientists wouldn't be less than current games. After all, it'd be deliberately introduced by the scientists to test a theory and make measurements. Scientists who're probably looking for more subtle results, and not some semi-mythical 'game balance'.
It could even be things as subtle as changing the federal discount rate by a tenth of a percent. Changing a drop frequency can have drastic effects on it's average value at auction.
I remember that game...
Honestly, I'm surprised my settlers didn't get scurvy from all the meat they were eating.
It may be that in the USA, maps have more errors.
;)
Heh, the road I take to work every day isn't even on the map. I've looked. There's gravel roads on the map, but not the paved road that's been there for years.
If I was driving to new locations all the time I'd consider a GPS - but I know how to use a map just fine, and a $2.99 map* has all the functionality I need.
*Seriously, this is what I paid for my latest US road map book. It has a seperate map for each state, plus sections of Canada&Mexico.
Maybe so, but any GPS mapping system should know about the 30 limit and consider it in it's route optimization calculations.
If the speed limit is 30 in the area, but a route bypassing it is 60, it doesn't take much to make the longer but higher speed route faster.
I'm surprised they can't post a 'No thru-traffic for trucks' sign though.
If it's so tiny and small, it's probably got a low speed limit, so why would it be passing through traffic for cars through it anyways?
OTOH, I think it's somewhat funny that I keep hearing about GPS driving fiascoes in Europe, not the USA.
You're looking for 'Blaster Bomb'.
And yes, it was indeed quite sweet.
Signal to Noise Ratio.
The better the SNR is on analogue, the better the sound, the easier it is to understand somebody. The old analogue phones freqently transmitted on maximum power all the time, for best quality(and cheaper construction cost).
On digital, the SNR only has to be sufficient to be able to reconstruct the signal*, so you have much more in the way of reducing transmission power when the SNR is good. Most modern digital phones, for example, transmit at a quarter or less of what the old analogue ones did.
*Most digital transmissions have lots of recovery possibilities.
Is WMA even a codec, as opposed to a media package format?
.OGG is also a container.
What I mean is that MP3 is a codec, just like Vorbis, Divx, h.264, etc... For example, AVI is a container format; it can contain streams of any of the codecs listed.
The problem I have with WMA is that MS has gone after companies for making free utilities capable of extracting streams from it, and DRM capability is very much built into the format.
A generalization, I admit. I would wager that far more humans are killed by handguns than animals are each year. Besides, it would seem, that handguns used for hunting are of a different class than say semi-automatic 9mm or .45 weapons. I wouldn't think a handgun would be a very sensible hunting weapon, especially something that's likely to break your wrist, but hey... to each their own huh.
.500 straight off. A .357 or .44 works for most purposes. Personally, I'd be more tempted to get one for hiking in areas with large animals. In case the bear spray doesn't work.
.41 gun deaths per 100,000 people, versus the U.S.'s 14.24... more than 30 times as many per capita source.
.50BMG rifles as 'assault weapons', despite them only having been used in a crime in the USA like once in 20 years(wasn't even an fatalities in it, and BTW, the dude who used it also converted a bulldozer into a tank). We're talking about a rifle that starts out around five feet long, needs a support to be effectively used, weights something like 17 pounds for a single shot, and costs $3k before you look into buying a scope. Not exactl
Well, most people don't go hunting with the
Importing ought to drive up the cost, especially if they have to be imported illegally, as customs will still catch quite a few. Guns have a significant bulk/cost ratio difference from drugs, that I should think would make them an unattractive import candidate.
Guns aren't detectable by drug dogs either. They might be a sideline, but they'd still come in.
Thanks for bringing up Britain, who in 2002 had
I'll fully admit that the USA has issues. For one thing, our murder rate without firearms is higher than the UK's total rate. So it's not just firearms. It's not politically correct, but if you were to remove murders committed by african americans the US crime rate would drop drastically. Of course, I think that this is caused more by the drug war combined with entitlement politics, combined with the earlier discrimination. However, today it's inner city culture that's causing much of the problem. How to fix that, I can't entirely be sure of.
On the other hand, the Swiss actually have a higher firearm ownership rate than the USA and even lower amounts of crime. Not to mention oddities like if you look at legal gun ownership, areas with high ownership rates generally have lower crime rates.
how do they typically deal with the waiting period? Do they mail you the gun later?
Mailing is generally illegal(a few exceptions exist for servicing/mailing to self). The purchaser has to take possession in person. Still, that's part of the problem with waiting periods. Generally you end up going to the dealer's physical store, if the show doesn't extend beyond the waiting period. It's not a big deal in states without waiting periods.
I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but guns are not good. They are dangerous, deadly weapons. Gun control and Border control are a really really bad analogy for any number of reasons.
Ah yes, the gun household 'safety' study. You are aware that they included illegal gun possession as well? That they didn't include self defense that didn't result in a fatality? That studies have shown that, while a popular choice for suicide, the substitution rate is high enough that suicide rates are pretty much static despite firearm possession rates?
I don't know where the border control thing came from.
Anyways, I think we'd do better to try to fix poverty than spend all this effort trying to ban guns, generally by going after guns not used in crimes. For example, the brady bunch was founded on the basis of a CIA agent killed by a handgun, yet when in power pushed the AWB(Assault Weapon Ban), which regulated rifles, not handguns of the type used in the assassination attempt. Then there's California's inclusion of
Because that's how long it takes to verify that you're legally eligible to own a firearm. Why should you wait 5 minutes while a liquor store clerk or DMV employee checks your identification? Same reason.
With the NICS online, that arguement doesn't hold for most people. I'm talking about a waiting period where you're already approved, you simply have to wait X time to pick it up.
While NICS has a lot of problems that need fixing, even I'll admit that it's better than nothing.
This is absurd reasoning. By this reasoning, no laws should be in place, because if there's a law in place, a "guilty" person somewhere will break it, putting the "innocent" at a disadvantage.
Sigh... Nice strawman. Ever heard of 'consensual crime'? You know, where the only parties harmed, if any, are informed consenting adults? Murder, rape, arson, theft, etc... All harm somebody innocent. These should remain illegal for good reason. Who does my purchase of a firearm immediately instead of in 5 days harm?
For stuff like gun laws, I'm arguing that laws should be effective, or they should be removed from the books. All studies indicate that these laws, on average, have jack crap to do with reducing crime, much less violent crime. Not doing any good, why keep them on the books and distract law enforcement resources from tracking down real crime?
They'll go to legal gun stores instead of the black market.
And hopefully get scooped up by the NICS check and law enforcement actually interested in enforcing existing crimes. A felon attempting to buy a gun is in itself a felony, but not one that's regularly prosecuted. Also, a legally bought firearm is far easier to track, if the police scoop it up it's possible to track it down to the store that sold it and find out who bought it.
Also, I would suggest that if you're in a race against a person to get a gun, you should probably get in touch with the police instead.
As others have noted, the police have no duty to protect you, at least in the USA. If somebody has a credible threat against them, yet not urgent enough to meet the standards for police protection in that area, and leaving the area isn't an option, then they should be able to obtain the means to defend themselves.
Eventually, as weapons are permanently lost, damaged or confiscated, fewer weapons will find it to the black market. note i did not say "none" but fewer, since the premise is *reduction* of violence, not elimination.
.500 S&W when it came out. Line police weren't too worried - it's so big that it's easier to hide a small rifle, and fast follow up shots aren't exactly going to happen. Not to mention that you risk breaking your wrist if you don't know how to shoot(and most thugs don't).
Eventually they either start importing them from elsewhere right along with the drugs, or they start making them.
As Britain's finding out, not even banning handguns can keep them off the streets, nor even deter violent crime that much. Little problem, for about $100 in parts and a machine shop you can churn out a full auto gun. For ~$20, a single shot zip gun.
They've been reduced to attempting to ban knives, starter pistols, paintball and BB guns. If you didn't know, convicts even manage to make knives in prison, so I don't ever see that working.
At any rate, some people who might wish to commit a firearm crime don't have access to the black market and so some deterrence will take place. Purchasing from an illegal market has it's drawbacks. If you don't have a gun, and you go to buy one from the black market, what's to stop the fellow with the gun from pointing it at you, taking your money, and leaving?
That nobody will go to that black marketeer again?
So really, the bigger problem is the "gray market" such as gun shows, where legal weapons are sold without restriction and without a proper paper trail. These remaining loopholes in the system need to be closed.
Ah, the ever so quoted non-existent 'gun show loophole'. FACT: Gun Dealers have to follow all the same rules and regulations at a gun show as they do elsewhere.
honestly, though, handguns, which are usually the subject of these federal laws, ought to be outright banned since their only legitimate use is hurting people. You don't hunt with a handgun, and you only practice shooting them to get better at hurting people.
Not used for hunting, huh?
I loved it when the brady bunch had a conniption about the
Besides, handgun usage against people is perfectly legitimate in self defense. Fact is, a handgun is about the only way people of lesser physical nature can reasonably defend themselves against people of greater physical nature. To be extreme, something like a 300 pound prison convict versus an 80 pound 80 year old grandmother*
*Happened, though he beat her half to death before bleeding out. She got him every time center of mass, and he never got the gun away from her. A classic, if half-tragic(she lived, he died), case of 'not enough gun'.
I'm not sure that I'd want to be diagnosed with something terminal, but with early treatment today it's quite possible to delay the worst of Altheimer's until I croak of something else.
That's why I'd want to know about it.
Considering the amount of stuff that doesn't crop up until late in life, I'd sure as heck say that it's still useful for me. Alzheimer's for example.
Is it worth $1k at the moment? Maybe not. Still, as the price drops and the number of 'pre-existing' conditions it detects increases it becomes more and more worth it.
That's fine and well for you, but there's plenty of drugs to delay Alzheimer's, they're better the earlier they're taken, and I have family history for it.
I'd much rather find out if I'm also predisposed, and if so get on them at an age before significant impairement. DNA tests would be a good indicator of the need to take further action.
While $1k is expensive, it's actually fairly cheap in the realm of diagnostic tests.
At least in some states it is already illegal to discriminate on the basis of genetic profile.
If nothing else; with Altheimer's you're more likely to have medicare paying for it than a private health plan company*
*They aren't insurance companies anymore. Insurance isn't for stuff that's almost to be expected like medical care.
So why exactly should I not expect my DNA information to be archived, cataloged and given to the government at-whim?
You're not paying for this, this is already done for free.
What the $999 gets you is a genome scan, which is a different set of tests altogether than the sort of tests done for paternity and forensic analysis that the government is (normally) interested in.
One is sort of a DNA 'fingerprint', a MD5 checksum. The other is capable of telling you that you happen to have a defective gene involved in the production of insulin(or a number of other things).
Because making you wait 5 days *might* stop a Va Tech type massacre from happening. I would suggest that anyone who asks this sort of question is putting their own selfish self-gratification before the safety of others.
;)
Did you totally miss my pointing out that I already own enough weapons to pull a VA Tech type massacre in addition to a texas tower sniper massacre? That I've undergone security checks that Seung-Hui Cho would not have been able to pass. Heck, with my arsenal I'd have SWAT sweating - their standard body armor isn't effective against some of the calibers I have(part of the battle rifle vs assault rifle thing). Add in the military training and a gas mask and many of their standard tactics would be reduced in effectiveness.
Even considering this, a 5 or 10 day waiting period would have done nothing - Cho obtained at least one of his weapons more than a month before commiting the massacre. And promptly committed a felony by filing the serial numbers off.
2) A woman's death - could've happened with a gun as well.
Maybe, maybe not. While not a domestic disturbance, Luby's massacre in Texas had a woman who was a competition pistol shooter - she lost both of her parents in it because her weapon was in the truck(no legal CCW or open carry at the time). I'm willing to say that the odds of her stopping it would have been high. Still, at least one of the women I'm thinking about had a restraining order, the police were on their way, and the man still strangled her to death.
The key to this problem might not lie in guns but other means, such as speeding up the restraining orders,
Worthless pieces of paper. The incidents I'm talking about the women already had restraining orders. No speedup necessary.
better police protection, increased funding for safe houses, etc...
Costs money, unfortuantly. In many cases the killer simply waited for the police to go away.
I would argue the solution shouldn't lie in the "let's populate our town with huge wolves to fight the man-eating bats we used to solve an earlier small problem" approach. What's next? Battered wives getting permits to carry M-16s around?
How about we get some sheep-dogs instead? Capable of violence but not going to reach for it until necessary, to protect the herd from the wolves that naturally exist?
Besides, a 12 gauge would probably work better than an AR.
The black market doesn't enforce wait periods, but going to the black market means you're putting yourself at a risk of sting operations and such.
My arguement is to keep legal easy enough to keep the black market down enough that sting operations are actually likely to do more than skim the surface. I'm not asking for no limitations - merely go after accuracy and most 'bang for the buck'. IE use the measures that impact criminals the most and legal purchasers the least. Waiting periods ain't it.
why don't we just legalize all the drugs?
hehehehehe... Happens to be one of my other political beliefs that we'd be better off legalizing all that stuff. There's better drugs than Meth on all points. Going by prohibition as a model, drug use and violence would drop.
Why don't YOU buy your guns on the black market if it's so quick and cheap and easy?
Because I'm one of those people who try to obey the law? Besides, I live in a state without most of the annoying hassles so it isn't worth it.
Cars and guns are not the same thing. Objects that have one purpose, and one purpose only, to kill living things, should not be mentioned in the same breath as modes of transportation, or kitchen utensiles, etc.
More people still die from cars and kitchen utensiles each year than guns.
And no, target practice isn't "another purpose," it's just practice for the killing of living things.
I've still killed more living thing
The question you need to ask is "Why is a drivers license treated as an ID document in my country ?".
Because it eliminates another card in your wallet? Because it eliminates duplication of effort?
I have no problems having the driver's license also generally being used as an ID, as long as it contains caveats for non-us citizens. Maybe a special background, or disclaimer somewhere. After all, credit cards are considered suitable supporting IDs in some situations.
Though if we're going to use it as an ID it needs to meet a higher trust factor than 'filled out application with this name/address and passed a driver's test'.
Also there are plenty of parts of both borders which might be a fence in the middle of nowhere.
Not to mention plenty of parts that you'd need GPS or surveying equipment(at least a sextant) to figure out where the border is.
It still messes up their recruiting a bit. It's already a bit of effort to find terrorists willing to commit suicidal attacks.
If they now have to find recruits that don't meet the profile the USA is using, or at least train them enough to conceal it, it's a bit more difficult.
Making people wait 5 days is onerous?
First, why should I be made to wait 5 days? I already own a dozen guns, including a number of handguns and 3 battle rifles(1). Heck, I own three hunting rifles that would quite reasonably operate as sniper rifles. In one case, except for it's furniture(wood instead of black polymer), it's a fairly common SWAT sniper weapon. Despite all this, I AM NOT A THREAT. I've been highly investigated, trained, and passed a test. Yes, I am a holder of a CCW permit.
Second, there have been documented cases of women(2) being killed while on the waiting list by their formor significant other with a restraining order against him.
Third, as pointed out - the black market doesn't enforce waiting periods. Only the white market does. It's yet one more 'security measure' that harms the innocent, not the guilty. The guilty goes and buys a black market weapon with no background check, no waiting period, no registration. The innocent have to wait, fill out a form that the ATF loves nitpicking over(3). Hope that the NICS check comes back good, that the computers haven't confused him or her with some criminal type three states over(4) with a semi-similar name.
Fourth, what if you find just the right weapon half a state away? Do you really want to go for another eight hour drive to pick it up 5-10 days later? For poorer people, it can mean taking more time off work.
I know, let's subsitute 'car' for 'gun'. Let's have a 5 day cooling period before you can pick up your new vehicle, so we can make sure that you're not a DUI convict not eligible to purchase a car, are mentally unstable, or looking to run down your significant other/children in a school crossing in a heated rage.
Meanwhile you can go to the criminal element and buy a stolen car for cash, instantly.
(1)An entirely different beast than a assault rifle/weapon.
(2)In at least one case, her kids as well.
(3) Don't abbreviate anything, use two letter state code, no use full state name, etc...
(4)It's happened. Takes ~6 months to straighten out, in addition to delays whenever they go to purchase a gun.