Their argument is that they were told that the DOJ wanted the files preserved specifically so that the copyright-infringers would not know an investigation was on-going.
The DOJ's argument is they never actually told Megaupload that because they never talked to Megaupload. The people the DOJ talked to were the people running Megaupload's servers (Carpathia, IIRC), those people are the ones who actually told Megaupload not to delete the files.
I suspect that legally the DOJ actually has a pretty strong case. It seems like if they didn't every drug-lord would just get a fall guy to write a letter to him saying "please continue to sell drugs so a DEA investigation into your customers can continue." I also suspect that if this evidence is presented at trial Megaupload will win. To convict you need 12 guys to all agree, and I don't doubt one guy will buy Megaupload's defense even if it technically wrong.
Everybody thinks their taxes are high, even when their taxes aren;t very high. MS, for example, is 37th in tax burden. Granted state tax burdens don't actually seem to vary very much, so you pay 7.8% as opposed yo an average of 9.9%, but 37th is still pretty damn low.
BTW, the lowest state is Alaska at 7% even. The highest is New York state which charges 12.8%.
Have you ever heard the phrase "low profile?" Because it's a pretty important concept for a criminal to understand, which means it's a very important concept for a person talking about criminals to understand. Carrying a weapon that will instantly be recognized as illegal is the opposite of a low profile. OTOH it's not that hard to disguise Cocaine as flour. All you have to do is find an empty flour box.
As for the Japanese, you do realize that a 1500 in a nation of 127 million is a rate of 0.0012%? Do you have any idea how much Mayor Bing would pay if he could reduce Detroit's gun-crime rate that low? Do you have any idea how much he'd pay to reduce the number of gun crimes to 1,500?
Hell your evidence reinforces my point. I'm arguing that if six-shooters were illegal they'd be used by criminals very rarely because the instant a cop saw you had a six-shooter he'd arrest you. You'd get no chance to claim a permit, or otherwise BS your way out of trouble, you'd just be arrested. The risk is not worth the extra trouble. In Japan long guns are the only legal guns, and 60% of gun crimes are committed with them.
"Rust belt" is not the same as "Midwest," Pennsylvania is Rust Belt, but not Midwest. Midwestern states that aren't Rust Belt actually do quite well on Life Expectancy rankings.
It's more closely related to government spending then you'd think. A lot of those southerners would eligible for Medicaid if their states had Connecticut's eligibility standards.
In their defense even if they wanted to expand their Medicaid programs they'd have trouble because they have much smaller tax base then Northern states, they have larger populations of impoverished people, and the Federal government will only put so much into a state's Medicaid program.
OTOH, even if Mississippi had the cash to insure everyone it would just pass a tax cut.
That's why I said "dominated by people who support using tax money to pay for universal health insurance," instead of saying they all do. Five of the Eight are deep blue states where the Governor, both Senators, the Congressional delegations, and both Houses of the Legislature are dominated by Democrats. And it's not West Virginia or Louisiana-style moderate Dems either. A sixth in New York State, which has a State Senate controlled by the GOP.
North Dakota and Utah are states #7 and 8. ND has a very strong Socialist tradition, and still elects Democrats who are left-wing on economic issues occasionally. Utah is probably on the list because the Mormon Church discourages eating to excess, drinking alcohol, or smoking. I suspect that the Mormon Church does not let it's members go without care they need, and when 63% of the state is on that list...
As for the South's problem, it's a combination of things.
1) Unhealthy behaviors. Southerners do not eat healthy, and they tolerate a lot more smoking. They need a lot of health care.
2) People are poor. They can't afford care.
3) They have incredibly cheap Medicaid programs, so people can't get care.
You do realize that "Greater [City] Area" includes an awful lot of farmland? The Greater [City] Area terminology applies to pretty much any place you could conceivably live and work in a job within [City] or it's immediate suburbs.
I'm not familiar enough with LA to tell you which bits of the Greater LA Area are rural, but in the Metro Detroit Area three of the six Counties are predominately rural. Livingston, Lapeer, and St Clair County have some settlements the locals would call Urban, but the vast majority of those Counties are rural or exurban. BTW, if you don't believe me on this check out wiki's Metro Detroit page. The urban population is under 3.8 million. Wayne plus Oakland plus Macomb County alone is 3.8-3.9 million, which means there are a 100k or so rural residents of those three counties, and anyone whose urban in the other three is offset by more rural folks in the big three.
Even if the Greater LA population density is the standard for Urban only the Germans, Italians, Dutch, Belgians, and Brits count. Everyone else in Europe is less dense then the famously non-dens Greater LA Area. Hell some European states in Scandinavia and the Baltic actually have a lower population density then the entire US, including Alaska.
I know it's a first-world problem, but when the actual article is comparing first world states to each-other. That means the fact that non-first-world states have bigger problems it does not render the conclusions invalid. It renders them somewhat petty, but not invalid.
Moreover if we're richer then the UK the question is why don't they live longer? If we're richer than them we should be able to afford better drugs than them, therefore we should live longer.
The US is top 10 per-capita GDP in the world. This of course includes the massive rural areas that our country has in the average. Whatever point you were trying to make, "we're not making much money" is baloney.
Incidentally, only 2 or 3 european countries beat us out: (Luxembourg and Norway consistently).
If you think a lot of Americans live in rural areas you're simply mistaken. Our urbanization rate is low 80s, which is comparable to France (mid 80s). Most of our fellow rich western countries are more rural then us. Germany and the UK for example. Maine isn't more important then Virginia Beach in political terms because more Americans live in Maine then the Virginia Beach metropolitan area, it's more important because Americans have chosen to make Maine a state while leaving Virginia Beach only a city.
As for income you're missing his point. He's not saying the per capita average (which includes Lebron) is worse in the US then Europe. He's saying that for a very significant proportion of the population getting to Lebron-including-average wages is not realistic. They're at $7-9 an hour this year, and without a strong social safety net they are as likely to end up on Welfare as get a job that pays as much as the Lebron-including average next year.
You can go from earning 200k a year to living on welfare in under 2 years. I have seen many it has happened to.
Also is it systemic throughout the whole US or just regions (such as say new york which has a high population which messes with the results?). Compairing say the whole US to say Norway is not exactly a apples apples comparison...
If you look at European life expectancies most of the former Western block states are above 80. All are above 79 except Portugal, Denmark, and Cyprus. None are below 78.1. If you look at US states only 22 are above 79. 8 are above 80. Maryland is tied with Portugal. 17 other states and DC are worse.
The 8 are dominated by people who support using tax money to pay for universal health insurance, which means that they have much a much larger social safety net then the rest of the country, especially in terms of medical care.
The bottom is dominated by Southern states where local pols are hostile to the very concept of spending tax money on health care.
About 17 of them do. Your link shows a life expectancy of 80 for women and 76 for men. It doesn't give decimal places, or overall numbers, but 78ish is probably pretty close. According to wikis list of US States life expectance 17 (and DC) below 78. The US as a whole is 78.6, so Scotland's life expectancy is only a half-year or so below the US Average.
It should be noted those 17 are a) Southern states utterly dominated by the Conservative movement, b) the bit of the Rust Belt currently controlled by the GOP, or c) the District of Columbia. You can find a lot of narratives from the data to link these states, but the common denominator seems to be a) currently governed by people skeptical of government spending on health care, and b) large minority populations.
BTW, the list of top US States by life expectancy also supports their thesis. The top 6 are dominated by Democrats, with 6 Democratic Governors and 11 of 12 State Legislative Chambers being Democratic. Number 7 (North Dakota) is reliably Republican at the state level, but also likes to send Democrats, some quite left-wing on economic issues like universal health care, to the US Congress. You don't get a strong consensus that government should stay out of health care until you hit numbers 8 and 10.
The list of bottom ones supports their theory even better then I've implied. The bottom 12 or 13 states are Southern states, Oklahoma, and Appalachia. They don't have anything near universal health care in those states partly because they're poor, but mostly because the voters there refuse to vote for anyone who wants to spend tax money on anything. DC is smack-dab in the middle of that pack of mediocrity, but a) it's not technically a state, and b) it isn't really self-governing. Congress meddles in DC's internal affairs quite frequently, and except for a brief period (2009-2011) Congress has been remarkably hostile to universal healthcare.
[sarcasm] Clearly every time a drug dealer sees a another person (even a police officer), he immediately decks that guy. Decking guys is illegal and drug dealers are by definition illegal. [/sarcasm]
Note that my argument's major weakness is not the dictionary. It's that it's a testable hypothesis. If you could provide evidence that cops routinely arrest drug dealers with weapons that are actually illegal then you'd be able to prove me wrong.
Honestly I doubt you'll even be google for evidence. You've really got this little non sequitar stuck in your head. You'll either refrain from responding, or repeat it.
Any bets that he googles it, finds a single example, and is then surprised by a) the phrase "anecdotal evidence," and b) the point that if it was common it wouldn't be news. You gonna need crime stats bucko.
Is there any country in the world that actually has underground gunsmiths?
Yes. The USA.
Who do you think makes the illegal silencers and illegally converts guns to fully automatic?
Do you have a reference for this, or have you just watched too many Tarintino movies?
Because I am actually from the City of Detroit, and I have actually met criminals, who actually tried to steal from me (occasionally they were even successful), and I have never heard of anyone making a business of converting firearms to fire on full auto, or building silencers.
Heck, off the top of my head I can't think of a time when a criminal did a full-auto conversion on his own, or used a silencer. I;m sure somebody's done it, probably a Mexican cartel, but it just is not common.
Colt's latest bid was $1,221. This is a significant increase on it's '99 bid of $521, and indicates either a) Colt understands supply/demand really well, b) M-4 cost more to make then Colt thought, or c) a and b. I suspect Colt's accountants have really really good evidence for b), but I don't believe them.
The M4 isn't the standard infantry weapon. The M16-A2
LK
Depends on how you define standard. The M16 is being phased out and replaced with the M-4.
If they can't convert an AR-15 to fire full-auto, how are they gonna make an entire M-16?
They won't be making them, they'll be buying them from underground gunsmiths.
Is there any country in the world that actually has underground gunsmiths? In particular I'm looking for countries that have enforced gun control because you're arguing enforcing stricter gun control in the US would create a market for black-market firearms.
If the answer is nobody does that's very good evidence for my side.
They wanna restrict weapons like the AR-15 because they have been used in a lot of very bad shootings recently. But AFAIK nobody's even proposed an Australia-style buy-back.
Three to five is not a lot. Several have been proposed, but I do not believe that any have gotten out of legislative committees yet.
Whose done the proposing?
I've seen press releases announcing a couple pols want to ban new sales, but banning new sales is much different then proposing the government spend Billion$ buying back existing weapons. They didn't do a mandatory buyback of actual machine guns.
I'm sure that before the dust has settled somebody's gonna file a bill before committee that does exactly that. But it hasn't happened yet, and when it does the pro-rural bias in the House GOP and the entire Senate will mean it won;t come up for a committee vote.
Not as easy as a Soviet weapon.
In any industrialized nation, like ours, the difference is negligible. Khyber pass manufacturing technology favors the AK, that's not much of an issue here.
The USSR designed everything to be easy to produce because their doctrine required large numbers of troops, and their economy couldn't support spending $1,000 on a rifle.
The US isn't spending $1,000 per rifle. At least not for the main battle rifle. Spec-ops types and sniper rifles notwithstanding.
You might be surprised about that. I was guessing it was $800-$900ish from what little I know of civilian weapons prices, but according to this: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Colt-M4-Data-Rights-The-Individual-Carbine-Competition-06942/ Colt's latest bid was $1,221. This is a significant increase on it's '99 bid of $521, and indicates either a) Colt understands supply/demand really well, b) M-4 cost more to make then Colt thought, or c) a and b. I suspect Colt's accountants have really really good evidence for b), but I don't believe them.
Last I heard the Russians were paying their supplier $150 or so. The Taliban seem to be getting them $400, and in many places in Africa the price is closer to $100.
"The U.S. Department of Justice had investigated allegations of electoral fraud in 1940, 1942, and 1944, but had not taken action."
Did they sue? In actual Court, or did they just assume that if the DoJ said no they'd lose?
The legal system let them down. They used one of their constitutionally granted rights for the purpose it was intended -- to protect their other rights from government corruption. While you may not agree with their approach, it is a valid counter-example to your argument that freedom has never been secured via rights granted by the 2nd amendment.
We've had 236 years for the Right to Bear Arms to prove itself.
In that time it has oppressed an entire race, that consisted an eighth of Americans. Twice. For periods of multiple decades each time. And the only counter-example is a bunch of guys who burned their own town down because they thought filing a lawsuit was a waste of time.
I'm not saying it's a bad story, or I wouldn't have done what they did under the same circumstances. What I am saying is that actual terrorism, leading to the actual ethnic cleansing of multiple states; is a pretty big price to pay for getting rid of corruption in a single county once.
Criminals will actually be the last people to hold on to these weapons.
Only if you engage in circular logic. Because anyone who refuses to give up their firearm would then be a criminal. There are millions of people who are otherwise law abiding who will never willingly disarm.
Re-read what I wrote. I'm saying the opposite of what you think.
I'm saying criminals would actually tend to follow this law more then non-criminals. Why?
Because as a law-abiding citizen with a hobby that involves firearms the worst that happens to you when the local sheriff notices your gun isn't transmitting to his network is you lose the gun. As a first offense you get off fairly easily.
OTOH if you are a meth dealer, then when the Sheriff takes you in there's a fairly good chance he notices something else and yo'll be lucky to end up in Club Fed.
That's why none of the criminals involved in any massacre using an AR-15 bothered pushing out the one pin that stops it from firing full auto.
You have just outed yourself. There is no such pin. The AR-15 bolt carrier is different than the M-16 bolt carrier so that if one were to alter or remove the sear, it will still not fire full-auto. A more likely reason is because these gunmen haven't possessed the skills to convert their rifles to full auto.
If they can't convert an AR-15 to fire full-auto, how are they gonna make an entire M-16?
That's like saying "Bill can't upgrade his Hard Drive, but she's about to build his own PC from the motherboard up."
If there was a buyback program, and the Feds got a warrant for the records of companies that sell these things; a lot of refuseniks would be tracked down.
And that^ is the real reason why they want to "close the gunshow loophole" because as of now, it's possible to legally purchase a firearm that the feds can't track down.
What you're talking about is government applied gun violence in search of an end to gun violence.
To an extent you're right. They want to be able to track every weapon down. But you're assuming they have some concrete plan in place re: guns for the near future. This plan does not exist. There is no plan. They wanna restrict weapons like the AR-15 because they have been used in a lot of very bad shootings recently. But AFAIK nobody's even proposed an Australia-style buy-back.
They also want to be able to enforce existing gun laws. Since gun-show purchases get around background checks and proven sanity they think it's a look-hole.
Why would they bother doing it with AR-15s or high-capacity clips?
Because AR-15s are easy for machinists to make. And standard capacity magazines are cheap and plentiful enough that no one needs to make them underground.
LK
Not as easy as a Soviet weapon. The USSR designed everything to be easy to produce because their doctrine required large numbers of troops, and their economy couldn't support spending $1,000 on a rifle. As you've pointed out ammo is trivial if you can make firearms, so if criminals had any desire to set up their own illegal gun factories they already would have done so.
They'd have better guns, cheaper, and they'd be untraceable. They wouldn't have to risk losing any couriers to suspicious gun-store owners. They could completely re-arm themselves in a matter of weeks if the cops started wearing some armor their old weapons couldn't penetrate. They'd make a mint selling to their competitor/colleagues. But they don't.
Ahh my old nemesis Mr. Dictionary. He understands what individual words mean, but has not quite mastered the difficult art of putting them together into sentences. I thought I left him behind in High School, but he comes back.
Yes criminals do illegal things by definition. But since they are doing illegal things they generally try not to draw police attention. If you're a drug dealer and six-shooters are illegal you won't carry one for two reasons. 1) They will be very difficult to find, and a significant proportion of the people selling them will be narcs. 2) If anyone notices you have one, and reports it to the police, your entire career as a drug-dealer is over.
OTOH if you steal a three-shooter you have a weapon, and even if the cops see it you can make a case that it's legal and they should let you go.
You might keep the six-shooter with your other clearly illegal equipment, because if the cops find that you're screwed anyway, but you ain't gonna be carrying it with you when you're walking around town. And if you read the sentence again you'll note I was careful to use the word "carry."
The buyback would have to be mandatory, which means it would be a de facto ban on weapons that aren't on a government-controlled computer network. Since most gun-guys swear the Major Reason Gun Rights are Sacred and not simply a fairly expensive hobby is that they allow you to challenge the government, and the Second Amendment is premised on a state's right to have a militia independent of the Feds, forcing everyone to have a weapon the Homeland Security department can disable with the touch of a button is probably not gonna fly.
The politics would never work. Republicans won't bring anything up for a vote because the NRA is one of their core constituencies. Democrats won't all vote for it because a lot of them are from rural areas where single-issue gun voters are very important,
As for a position on the issue, I try to stay neutral. But gun-guys make it really, really hard. They're convinced Freedom is on their side (and nobody-else's), and they don't seem to think about the fact that gun rights rare pretty much the only reason we a) needed a Civil War to end the most anti-freedom thing the US has ever done (slavery), and b) needed a Civil Rights movement to end Jim Crow. They've got their silly little hobby, which is not a silly little hobby because Second Amendment, they are pro-freedom because things that happen to non-gun-guys (and there are very few black gun guys) just don't seem to count. I'm not actually black, but at some point you just have tell these guys they're being incredibly arrogant or your head explodes.
One of them actually had the balls to say that gun rights have been useful for freedom because they allowed a Jim Crow-era TN County to get rid of a corrupt Sheriff.
Making homemade bullets is extremely simple -- there are lots of people into reloading and the tools required to cast bullets are few and (relatively) inexpensive.
If you are referring to making an entire cartridge (bullet,casing,primer,etc) yourself, that is harder but still quite doable -- google "expedient homemade ammo"
Charles Whitman was both an engineering student and a former marine, I would be very surprised if he (for instance) had not been exposed to reloading at the very least.
Lamza may have, too, as his mom was apparently really into guns.
But the VA Tech killer, the Aurora killer, etc. would not have. Most of the criminals who kill each-other in places like Detroit don't have those skills either. If they were committed enough to learn things they probably would have figured out how to make an AR-15 fully automatic. Apparently it's not hard, and the ATF really has to look at your weapon to know you've illegally modified it.
I'm not saying it's hard to learn. I'm saying that it's the kind of thing most murderers don't bother learning. Maybe if you made bullets hella expensive they'd bother, but most murderers just don't seem to want to put that much actual work into their killing.
That's weak. Really, incredibly, mind-blowingly weak. They didn't need to riot. They just needed a Court Order. It would have taken longed, but it wouldn't have required them to dynamite the jail, so it probably would have been cheaper.
Basically you're telling me that the Second Amendment is good because, in a state where said Amendment created Jim Crow, it allowed a County to dump a corrupt Sheriff without talking to lawyers.
You gun-guys are great. You quote ridiculously biased sources without actually reading the damn things. The hammers factoid is that more are killed with hammers then rifles. Twisting that to say more are killed with hammers then firearms, right after you've quoted the same source giving a number 7 times the hammer death rate for firearms is just silly.
As for using kids as human shields, where you think they're gonna get kids? In Afghanistan they can get volunteers because they have an anti-American ideology that they find quite compelling, and their government is so weak that even if you like Americans it's hard to tell the Taliban-man he cant take your 10-year-old. It's not like the provincial governor will actually be able to get the little rugrat back. Neither is the case here.
The second a bad guy grabbed the kid the cops would be told. Even the Stop Snitching people would get on that cell phone and call 911. And if there's an Amber Alert about your ass it's gonna be pretty tricky to carry out a slick bank robbery.
So you're saying guys who didn't bother to google "AR-15 Full Auto," can do GPS spoofing?
The two guns idea could work, but it would be silly for a system like this to not include a line of code where any weapon that's fired calls the cops. Instead of waiting for your victims to sneak off someplace safe they can use a cell-phone, you instantly tell the cops where you, that your shooting, and how many weapons you have. Instead of having 30 minutes for the cops to arrive, you have 10.
I don't think the idea is practical simply because a) the government'd have to do a massive multi-billion buyback of all non-conforming weapons, b) the right and rural Congressman would never go for a), and c) getting everything working seamlessly would cost Billion$ more. A) is a lot more practical then you think. Financial records will reveal a lot of refuseniks, and the point of the buyback isn't to get 100% of weapons immediately, smart criminals will give up their weapons voluntarily to avoid unwanted police attention, or hide them where they can't hurt anyone.
And what's everyone else gonna do with their hidden weapons? Can;t take 'em to the range, or set up target practice where anyone can see.
But if Jesus came down from Heaven, granted Obama designs for these chips, and forced the issue through both Houses of Congress it would actually work pretty well.
"Mexican guns" are actually generally bought in the US due our relatively lax gun laws. There is no chance the Mexicans would not require this system if it was physically possible. There is no country south of us that would not require these chips if they existed. Canada might. So your smuggled in real-gns are Canadian, not American.
As for 100% success, the government doesn't need it. It will have 100% success among smart criminals because smart criminals don;t want something lying around that will get them arrested two seconds after somebody notices it. Dumb criminals get caught pretty quickly. As for everyone else, what are they gonna do with an illegal weapon?
Can't take it to the range. Can't put on your roof-rack. Gotta hide it in the basement, maybe set some cans up on a fence if your property is big enough.
Then dont the FUCK sell automatic/semiautomatic weapons. Best would be: sell no weapons to people which are not police Second best option: sell weapons which are able to shoot once or twice. Make a mechanism which requires approximately 15sec reloading time. Make the ammunition in a way which pollutes the weapon so strongly that after 10 shots the weapon needs to be cleaned.
Shooting once or twice is still enough to make being a burglar or robber a quite unhealthy business in average (if you believe in the self-defense shit).
Yes, you will neither be able to fend of zombie-herds nor the chinese army, should they be interested in you.
If you believe that bearing weapon is you constitutional right, fine. But please show me the paragraph where it says "any weapon of your choice, including weapons which were designed for warfare between military". Why don't you stack chemical weapons or nuclear weapons at home? Could be useful if you are overrun by atheists.
It doesn't need to say what we can choose to defend ourselves with... It was written in the spirit of defending ourselves from any potential repressive regime, up to and including the military. If it specified the firearms of the time, would citizens armed with flintlock muskets be able to defend themselves or their rights?
If you knew anything about the military you wouldn't be talking about defending yourself with firearms. They're as relevant to modern military operations as swords were during the Civil War.
IEDs are the man-killing weapon that an insurgent can use against the modern US Military.
Slashdot Mirror
Their argument is that they were told that the DOJ wanted the files preserved specifically so that the copyright-infringers would not know an investigation was on-going.
The DOJ's argument is they never actually told Megaupload that because they never talked to Megaupload. The people the DOJ talked to were the people running Megaupload's servers (Carpathia, IIRC), those people are the ones who actually told Megaupload not to delete the files.
I suspect that legally the DOJ actually has a pretty strong case. It seems like if they didn't every drug-lord would just get a fall guy to write a letter to him saying "please continue to sell drugs so a DEA investigation into your customers can continue." I also suspect that if this evidence is presented at trial Megaupload will win. To convict you need 12 guys to all agree, and I don't doubt one guy will buy Megaupload's defense even if it technically wrong.
Everybody thinks their taxes are high, even when their taxes aren;t very high. MS, for example, is 37th in tax burden. Granted state tax burdens don't actually seem to vary very much, so you pay 7.8% as opposed yo an average of 9.9%, but 37th is still pretty damn low.
BTW, the lowest state is Alaska at 7% even. The highest is New York state which charges 12.8%.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/annual-state-local-tax-burden-ranking-2010-new-york-citizens-pay-most-alaska-least
Have you ever heard the phrase "low profile?" Because it's a pretty important concept for a criminal to understand, which means it's a very important concept for a person talking about criminals to understand. Carrying a weapon that will instantly be recognized as illegal is the opposite of a low profile. OTOH it's not that hard to disguise Cocaine as flour. All you have to do is find an empty flour box.
As for the Japanese, you do realize that a 1500 in a nation of 127 million is a rate of 0.0012%? Do you have any idea how much Mayor Bing would pay if he could reduce Detroit's gun-crime rate that low? Do you have any idea how much he'd pay to reduce the number of gun crimes to 1,500?
Hell your evidence reinforces my point. I'm arguing that if six-shooters were illegal they'd be used by criminals very rarely because the instant a cop saw you had a six-shooter he'd arrest you. You'd get no chance to claim a permit, or otherwise BS your way out of trouble, you'd just be arrested. The risk is not worth the extra trouble. In Japan long guns are the only legal guns, and 60% of gun crimes are committed with them.
"Rust belt" is not the same as "Midwest," Pennsylvania is Rust Belt, but not Midwest. Midwestern states that aren't Rust Belt actually do quite well on Life Expectancy rankings.
It's more closely related to government spending then you'd think. A lot of those southerners would eligible for Medicaid if their states had Connecticut's eligibility standards.
In their defense even if they wanted to expand their Medicaid programs they'd have trouble because they have much smaller tax base then Northern states, they have larger populations of impoverished people, and the Federal government will only put so much into a state's Medicaid program.
OTOH, even if Mississippi had the cash to insure everyone it would just pass a tax cut.
That's why I said "dominated by people who support using tax money to pay for universal health insurance," instead of saying they all do. Five of the Eight are deep blue states where the Governor, both Senators, the Congressional delegations, and both Houses of the Legislature are dominated by Democrats. And it's not West Virginia or Louisiana-style moderate Dems either. A sixth in New York State, which has a State Senate controlled by the GOP.
North Dakota and Utah are states #7 and 8. ND has a very strong Socialist tradition, and still elects Democrats who are left-wing on economic issues occasionally. Utah is probably on the list because the Mormon Church discourages eating to excess, drinking alcohol, or smoking. I suspect that the Mormon Church does not let it's members go without care they need, and when 63% of the state is on that list...
As for the South's problem, it's a combination of things.
1) Unhealthy behaviors. Southerners do not eat healthy, and they tolerate a lot more smoking. They need a lot of health care.
2) People are poor. They can't afford care.
3) They have incredibly cheap Medicaid programs, so people can't get care.
You do realize that "Greater [City] Area" includes an awful lot of farmland? The Greater [City] Area terminology applies to pretty much any place you could conceivably live and work in a job within [City] or it's immediate suburbs.
I'm not familiar enough with LA to tell you which bits of the Greater LA Area are rural, but in the Metro Detroit Area three of the six Counties are predominately rural. Livingston, Lapeer, and St Clair County have some settlements the locals would call Urban, but the vast majority of those Counties are rural or exurban. BTW, if you don't believe me on this check out wiki's Metro Detroit page. The urban population is under 3.8 million. Wayne plus Oakland plus Macomb County alone is 3.8-3.9 million, which means there are a 100k or so rural residents of those three counties, and anyone whose urban in the other three is offset by more rural folks in the big three.
Even if the Greater LA population density is the standard for Urban only the Germans, Italians, Dutch, Belgians, and Brits count. Everyone else in Europe is less dense then the famously non-dens Greater LA Area. Hell some European states in Scandinavia and the Baltic actually have a lower population density then the entire US, including Alaska.
I know it's a first-world problem, but when the actual article is comparing first world states to each-other. That means the fact that non-first-world states have bigger problems it does not render the conclusions invalid. It renders them somewhat petty, but not invalid.
Moreover if we're richer then the UK the question is why don't they live longer? If we're richer than them we should be able to afford better drugs than them, therefore we should live longer.
The US is top 10 per-capita GDP in the world. This of course includes the massive rural areas that our country has in the average. Whatever point you were trying to make, "we're not making much money" is baloney.
Incidentally, only 2 or 3 european countries beat us out: (Luxembourg and Norway consistently).
If you think a lot of Americans live in rural areas you're simply mistaken. Our urbanization rate is low 80s, which is comparable to France (mid 80s). Most of our fellow rich western countries are more rural then us. Germany and the UK for example. Maine isn't more important then Virginia Beach in political terms because more Americans live in Maine then the Virginia Beach metropolitan area, it's more important because Americans have chosen to make Maine a state while leaving Virginia Beach only a city.
As for income you're missing his point. He's not saying the per capita average (which includes Lebron) is worse in the US then Europe. He's saying that for a very significant proportion of the population getting to Lebron-including-average wages is not realistic. They're at $7-9 an hour this year, and without a strong social safety net they are as likely to end up on Welfare as get a job that pays as much as the Lebron-including average next year.
You can go from earning 200k a year to living on welfare in under 2 years. I have seen many it has happened to.
Also is it systemic throughout the whole US or just regions (such as say new york which has a high population which messes with the results?). Compairing say the whole US to say Norway is not exactly a apples apples comparison...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_life_expectancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_life_expectancy
If you look at European life expectancies most of the former Western block states are above 80. All are above 79 except Portugal, Denmark, and Cyprus. None are below 78.1. If you look at US states only 22 are above 79. 8 are above 80. Maryland is tied with Portugal. 17 other states and DC are worse.
The 8 are dominated by people who support using tax money to pay for universal health insurance, which means that they have much a much larger social safety net then the rest of the country, especially in terms of medical care.
The bottom is dominated by Southern states where local pols are hostile to the very concept of spending tax money on health care.
About 17 of them do. Your link shows a life expectancy of 80 for women and 76 for men. It doesn't give decimal places, or overall numbers, but 78ish is probably pretty close. According to wikis list of US States life expectance 17 (and DC) below 78. The US as a whole is 78.6, so Scotland's life expectancy is only a half-year or so below the US Average.
It should be noted those 17 are a) Southern states utterly dominated by the Conservative movement, b) the bit of the Rust Belt currently controlled by the GOP, or c) the District of Columbia. You can find a lot of narratives from the data to link these states, but the common denominator seems to be a) currently governed by people skeptical of government spending on health care, and b) large minority populations.
BTW, the list of top US States by life expectancy also supports their thesis. The top 6 are dominated by Democrats, with 6 Democratic Governors and 11 of 12 State Legislative Chambers being Democratic. Number 7 (North Dakota) is reliably Republican at the state level, but also likes to send Democrats, some quite left-wing on economic issues like universal health care, to the US Congress. You don't get a strong consensus that government should stay out of health care until you hit numbers 8 and 10.
The list of bottom ones supports their theory even better then I've implied. The bottom 12 or 13 states are Southern states, Oklahoma, and Appalachia. They don't have anything near universal health care in those states partly because they're poor, but mostly because the voters there refuse to vote for anyone who wants to spend tax money on anything. DC is smack-dab in the middle of that pack of mediocrity, but a) it's not technically a state, and b) it isn't really self-governing. Congress meddles in DC's internal affairs quite frequently, and except for a brief period (2009-2011) Congress has been remarkably hostile to universal healthcare.
And again Mr. Dictionary strikes.
[sarcasm]
Clearly every time a drug dealer sees a another person (even a police officer), he immediately decks that guy. Decking guys is illegal and drug dealers are by definition illegal.
[/sarcasm]
Note that my argument's major weakness is not the dictionary. It's that it's a testable hypothesis. If you could provide evidence that cops routinely arrest drug dealers with weapons that are actually illegal then you'd be able to prove me wrong.
Honestly I doubt you'll even be google for evidence. You've really got this little non sequitar stuck in your head. You'll either refrain from responding, or repeat it.
Any bets that he googles it, finds a single example, and is then surprised by a) the phrase "anecdotal evidence," and b) the point that if it was common it wouldn't be news. You gonna need crime stats bucko.
Is there any country in the world that actually has underground gunsmiths?
Yes. The USA.
Who do you think makes the illegal silencers and illegally converts guns to fully automatic?
Do you have a reference for this, or have you just watched too many Tarintino movies?
Because I am actually from the City of Detroit, and I have actually met criminals, who actually tried to steal from me (occasionally they were even successful), and I have never heard of anyone making a business of converting firearms to fire on full auto, or building silencers.
Heck, off the top of my head I can't think of a time when a criminal did a full-auto conversion on his own, or used a silencer. I;m sure somebody's done it, probably a Mexican cartel, but it just is not common.
Colt's latest bid was $1,221. This is a significant increase on it's '99 bid of $521, and indicates either a) Colt understands supply/demand really well, b) M-4 cost more to make then Colt thought, or c) a and b. I suspect Colt's accountants have really really good evidence for b), but I don't believe them.
The M4 isn't the standard infantry weapon. The M16-A2
LK
Depends on how you define standard. The M16 is being phased out and replaced with the M-4.
If they can't convert an AR-15 to fire full-auto, how are they gonna make an entire M-16?
They won't be making them, they'll be buying them from underground gunsmiths.
Is there any country in the world that actually has underground gunsmiths? In particular I'm looking for countries that have enforced gun control because you're arguing enforcing stricter gun control in the US would create a market for black-market firearms.
If the answer is nobody does that's very good evidence for my side.
They wanna restrict weapons like the AR-15 because they have been used in a lot of very bad shootings recently. But AFAIK nobody's even proposed an Australia-style buy-back.
Three to five is not a lot. Several have been proposed, but I do not believe that any have gotten out of legislative committees yet.
Whose done the proposing?
I've seen press releases announcing a couple pols want to ban new sales, but banning new sales is much different then proposing the government spend Billion$ buying back existing weapons. They didn't do a mandatory buyback of actual machine guns.
I'm sure that before the dust has settled somebody's gonna file a bill before committee that does exactly that. But it hasn't happened yet, and when it does the pro-rural bias in the House GOP and the entire Senate will mean it won;t come up for a committee vote.
Not as easy as a Soviet weapon.
In any industrialized nation, like ours, the difference is negligible. Khyber pass manufacturing technology favors the AK, that's not much of an issue here.
The USSR designed everything to be easy to produce because their doctrine required large numbers of troops, and their economy couldn't support spending $1,000 on a rifle.
The US isn't spending $1,000 per rifle. At least not for the main battle rifle. Spec-ops types and sniper rifles notwithstanding.
You might be surprised about that. I was guessing it was $800-$900ish from what little I know of civilian weapons prices, but according to this:
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Colt-M4-Data-Rights-The-Individual-Carbine-Competition-06942/
Colt's latest bid was $1,221. This is a significant increase on it's '99 bid of $521, and indicates either a) Colt understands supply/demand really well, b) M-4 cost more to make then Colt thought, or c) a and b. I suspect Colt's accountants have really really good evidence for b), but I don't believe them.
Last I heard the Russians were paying their supplier $150 or so. The Taliban seem to be getting them $400, and in many places in Africa the price is closer to $100.
"The U.S. Department of Justice had investigated allegations of electoral fraud in 1940, 1942, and 1944, but had not taken action."
Did they sue? In actual Court, or did they just assume that if the DoJ said no they'd lose?
The legal system let them down. They used one of their constitutionally granted rights for the purpose it was intended -- to protect their other rights from government corruption. While you may not agree with their approach, it is a valid counter-example to your argument that freedom has never been secured via rights granted by the 2nd amendment.
We've had 236 years for the Right to Bear Arms to prove itself.
In that time it has oppressed an entire race, that consisted an eighth of Americans. Twice. For periods of multiple decades each time. And the only counter-example is a bunch of guys who burned their own town down because they thought filing a lawsuit was a waste of time.
I'm not saying it's a bad story, or I wouldn't have done what they did under the same circumstances. What I am saying is that actual terrorism, leading to the actual ethnic cleansing of multiple states; is a pretty big price to pay for getting rid of corruption in a single county once.
Criminals will actually be the last people to hold on to these weapons.
Only if you engage in circular logic. Because anyone who refuses to give up their firearm would then be a criminal. There are millions of people who are otherwise law abiding who will never willingly disarm.
Re-read what I wrote. I'm saying the opposite of what you think.
I'm saying criminals would actually tend to follow this law more then non-criminals. Why?
Because as a law-abiding citizen with a hobby that involves firearms the worst that happens to you when the local sheriff notices your gun isn't transmitting to his network is you lose the gun. As a first offense you get off fairly easily.
OTOH if you are a meth dealer, then when the Sheriff takes you in there's a fairly good chance he notices something else and yo'll be lucky to end up in Club Fed.
That's why none of the criminals involved in any massacre using an AR-15 bothered pushing out the one pin that stops it from firing full auto.
You have just outed yourself. There is no such pin. The AR-15 bolt carrier is different than the M-16 bolt carrier so that if one were to alter or remove the sear, it will still not fire full-auto. A more likely reason is because these gunmen haven't possessed the skills to convert their rifles to full auto.
If they can't convert an AR-15 to fire full-auto, how are they gonna make an entire M-16?
That's like saying "Bill can't upgrade his Hard Drive, but she's about to build his own PC from the motherboard up."
If there was a buyback program, and the Feds got a warrant for the records of companies that sell these things; a lot of refuseniks would be tracked down.
And that^ is the real reason why they want to "close the gunshow loophole" because as of now, it's possible to legally purchase a firearm that the feds can't track down.
What you're talking about is government applied gun violence in search of an end to gun violence.
To an extent you're right. They want to be able to track every weapon down. But you're assuming they have some concrete plan in place re: guns for the near future. This plan does not exist. There is no plan. They wanna restrict weapons like the AR-15 because they have been used in a lot of very bad shootings recently. But AFAIK nobody's even proposed an Australia-style buy-back.
They also want to be able to enforce existing gun laws. Since gun-show purchases get around background checks and proven sanity they think it's a look-hole.
Why would they bother doing it with AR-15s or high-capacity clips?
Because AR-15s are easy for machinists to make. And standard capacity magazines are cheap and plentiful enough that no one needs to make them underground.
LK
Not as easy as a Soviet weapon. The USSR designed everything to be easy to produce because their doctrine required large numbers of troops, and their economy couldn't support spending $1,000 on a rifle. As you've pointed out ammo is trivial if you can make firearms, so if criminals had any desire to set up their own illegal gun factories they already would have done so.
They'd have better guns, cheaper, and they'd be untraceable. They wouldn't have to risk losing any couriers to suspicious gun-store owners. They could completely re-arm themselves in a matter of weeks if the cops started wearing some armor their old weapons couldn't penetrate. They'd make a mint selling to their competitor/colleagues. But they don't.
Ahh my old nemesis Mr. Dictionary. He understands what individual words mean, but has not quite mastered the difficult art of putting them together into sentences. I thought I left him behind in High School, but he comes back.
Yes criminals do illegal things by definition. But since they are doing illegal things they generally try not to draw police attention. If you're a drug dealer and six-shooters are illegal you won't carry one for two reasons.
1) They will be very difficult to find, and a significant proportion of the people selling them will be narcs.
2) If anyone notices you have one, and reports it to the police, your entire career as a drug-dealer is over.
OTOH if you steal a three-shooter you have a weapon, and even if the cops see it you can make a case that it's legal and they should let you go.
You might keep the six-shooter with your other clearly illegal equipment, because if the cops find that you're screwed anyway, but you ain't gonna be carrying it with you when you're walking around town. And if you read the sentence again you'll note I was careful to use the word "carry."
That just means instead of reducing the number of killings to zero you reduce it by 5-10%.
Black market shit costs extra. Extra price = reduced demand = reduced use.
At a minimum that means less accuracy from gang-bangers due to less practice.
The buyback would have to be mandatory, which means it would be a de facto ban on weapons that aren't on a government-controlled computer network. Since most gun-guys swear the Major Reason Gun Rights are Sacred and not simply a fairly expensive hobby is that they allow you to challenge the government, and the Second Amendment is premised on a state's right to have a militia independent of the Feds, forcing everyone to have a weapon the Homeland Security department can disable with the touch of a button is probably not gonna fly.
The politics would never work. Republicans won't bring anything up for a vote because the NRA is one of their core constituencies. Democrats won't all vote for it because a lot of them are from rural areas where single-issue gun voters are very important,
As for a position on the issue, I try to stay neutral. But gun-guys make it really, really hard. They're convinced Freedom is on their side (and nobody-else's), and they don't seem to think about the fact that gun rights rare pretty much the only reason we a) needed a Civil War to end the most anti-freedom thing the US has ever done (slavery), and b) needed a Civil Rights movement to end Jim Crow. They've got their silly little hobby, which is not a silly little hobby because Second Amendment, they are pro-freedom because things that happen to non-gun-guys (and there are very few black gun guys) just don't seem to count. I'm not actually black, but at some point you just have tell these guys they're being incredibly arrogant or your head explodes.
One of them actually had the balls to say that gun rights have been useful for freedom because they allowed a Jim Crow-era TN County to get rid of a corrupt Sheriff.
Making homemade bullets is extremely simple -- there are lots of people into reloading and the tools required to cast bullets are few and (relatively) inexpensive.
If you are referring to making an entire cartridge (bullet,casing,primer,etc) yourself, that is harder but still quite doable -- google "expedient homemade ammo"
Charles Whitman was both an engineering student and a former marine, I would be very surprised if he (for instance) had not been exposed to reloading at the very least.
Lamza may have, too, as his mom was apparently really into guns.
But the VA Tech killer, the Aurora killer, etc. would not have. Most of the criminals who kill each-other in places like Detroit don't have those skills either. If they were committed enough to learn things they probably would have figured out how to make an AR-15 fully automatic. Apparently it's not hard, and the ATF really has to look at your weapon to know you've illegally modified it.
I'm not saying it's hard to learn. I'm saying that it's the kind of thing most murderers don't bother learning. Maybe if you made bullets hella expensive they'd bother, but most murderers just don't seem to want to put that much actual work into their killing.
That's weak. Really, incredibly, mind-blowingly weak. They didn't need to riot. They just needed a Court Order. It would have taken longed, but it wouldn't have required them to dynamite the jail, so it probably would have been cheaper.
Basically you're telling me that the Second Amendment is good because, in a state where said Amendment created Jim Crow, it allowed a County to dump a corrupt Sheriff without talking to lawyers.
You gun-guys are great. You quote ridiculously biased sources without actually reading the damn things. The hammers factoid is that more are killed with hammers then rifles. Twisting that to say more are killed with hammers then firearms, right after you've quoted the same source giving a number 7 times the hammer death rate for firearms is just silly.
As for using kids as human shields, where you think they're gonna get kids? In Afghanistan they can get volunteers because they have an anti-American ideology that they find quite compelling, and their government is so weak that even if you like Americans it's hard to tell the Taliban-man he cant take your 10-year-old. It's not like the provincial governor will actually be able to get the little rugrat back. Neither is the case here.
The second a bad guy grabbed the kid the cops would be told. Even the Stop Snitching people would get on that cell phone and call 911. And if there's an Amber Alert about your ass it's gonna be pretty tricky to carry out a slick bank robbery.
So you're saying guys who didn't bother to google "AR-15 Full Auto," can do GPS spoofing?
The two guns idea could work, but it would be silly for a system like this to not include a line of code where any weapon that's fired calls the cops. Instead of waiting for your victims to sneak off someplace safe they can use a cell-phone, you instantly tell the cops where you, that your shooting, and how many weapons you have. Instead of having 30 minutes for the cops to arrive, you have 10.
I don't think the idea is practical simply because a) the government'd have to do a massive multi-billion buyback of all non-conforming weapons, b) the right and rural Congressman would never go for a), and c) getting everything working seamlessly would cost Billion$ more. A) is a lot more practical then you think. Financial records will reveal a lot of refuseniks, and the point of the buyback isn't to get 100% of weapons immediately, smart criminals will give up their weapons voluntarily to avoid unwanted police attention, or hide them where they can't hurt anyone.
And what's everyone else gonna do with their hidden weapons? Can;t take 'em to the range, or set up target practice where anyone can see.
But if Jesus came down from Heaven, granted Obama designs for these chips, and forced the issue through both Houses of Congress it would actually work pretty well.
"Mexican guns" are actually generally bought in the US due our relatively lax gun laws. There is no chance the Mexicans would not require this system if it was physically possible. There is no country south of us that would not require these chips if they existed. Canada might. So your smuggled in real-gns are Canadian, not American.
As for 100% success, the government doesn't need it. It will have 100% success among smart criminals because smart criminals don;t want something lying around that will get them arrested two seconds after somebody notices it. Dumb criminals get caught pretty quickly. As for everyone else, what are they gonna do with an illegal weapon?
Can't take it to the range. Can't put on your roof-rack. Gotta hide it in the basement, maybe set some cans up on a fence if your property is big enough.
Then dont the FUCK sell automatic/semiautomatic weapons. Best would be: sell no weapons to people which are not police Second best option: sell weapons which are able to shoot once or twice. Make a mechanism which requires approximately 15sec reloading time. Make the ammunition in a way which pollutes the weapon so strongly that after 10 shots the weapon needs to be cleaned.
Shooting once or twice is still enough to make being a burglar or robber a quite unhealthy business in average (if you believe in the self-defense shit).
Yes, you will neither be able to fend of zombie-herds nor the chinese army, should they be interested in you.
If you believe that bearing weapon is you constitutional right, fine. But please show me the paragraph where it says "any weapon of your choice, including weapons which were designed for warfare between military". Why don't you stack chemical weapons or nuclear weapons at home? Could be useful if you are overrun by atheists.
It doesn't need to say what we can choose to defend ourselves with... It was written in the spirit of defending ourselves from any potential repressive regime, up to and including the military. If it specified the firearms of the time, would citizens armed with flintlock muskets be able to defend themselves or their rights?
If you knew anything about the military you wouldn't be talking about defending yourself with firearms. They're as relevant to modern military operations as swords were during the Civil War.
IEDs are the man-killing weapon that an insurgent can use against the modern US Military.