Yawn. That argument has been total bullshit since the day it first oozed out of someone's ass. Shootings happen in all kinds of places, and good guys with guns never, ever stop bad guys with guns. It's a fantasy, and we should stop basing policy on fantasies.
I don't think so. We "social engineered" the end of slavery, the end of child labor, universal education. Most people consider those to be net positives; I do. The goodness of the engineering is the sum of the goodness it produces, which might be positive or negative.
"What do you mean by 'early programmers'? Do you mean the people who operated the early computing machines, which was considered menial work and suitable for women?"
Yes that's what I mean: Lovelace, then the women who programmed ENIAC, and so on. It seemed to switch by the time NASA was trying to program spaceships. My historical perspective is just what you said: the work was considered menial thus was offered to women, who had only a few options to choose from.
"Personally, I think that most women just aren't interested."
Yeah, this is most of why I think fewer women program, with a sizable minority reason also being that once a field is dominated by one sex then the other sex has somewhat of a barrier to it (consider nursing). So I think it's both of those things, but more of the former.
"Plus it's a bit of a crappy job and I think most women are smart enough to see that."
Ha ha, me too, I feel that way -- it's a terrible job which my brain enjoys. How wonderful, right, to have a job that is both easy and pays well, all because everybody else finds it scary and boring.
I have a question for you, why do you think there are so few female programmers now versus all of the world's early programmers being women? I figure it's because "those were the limited opportunities women had back then, so they took it", not "because women back then super duper wanted to be programmers, while men didn't". Do you agree with that? Do you think The System is squeezing out women now, or do you think women just less frequently want to program?
I support an increase in gas prices to reduce carbon in the air, not because I want gas to be expensive. If it were no impact, I'd want the cheapest gas possible.
If we are choosing between "let women decide what they want" and "try to manipulate women into doing what you think they should do", then I guess I would have to say that only the first option is consistent with human dignity.
I'm a programmer on a team of about ten, all men. We were at lunch one day talking about it and my boss said he went way out of his way to try to hire women. He said he proactively sent invitations to CS programs soliciting women, sent invitations to women on LinkedIn, and as a rule he would interview any woman who applied, regardless of the resume (is that gender equality? whatever).
He got zero female applicants. Zero. We have women at the company, we have women doing programming, but none doing the kind of programming that my team does. My best guess, informed by personal experience, is that women are just a lot less likely to want to do this work. There might be more than zero, but the rate is less than 1/10th of the rate for men, which on a team this size means there are zero women.
If you want to help sequester carbon, buy two Christmas trees. 100% of the carbon in the trees comes from the air (is it actually 100%? well, close to 100% anyway) and when the tree goes into the landfill, you have successfully sequestered the carbon. Make sure not to burn your Christmas tree.
Mmm hmm. Agenda. We all totally WANT gas to be expensive. That's why we created this international conspiracy of millions of scientists and politicians and activists, the largest and most successful conspiracy in history, all to make you pay more at the pump. Good thinking.
All of science is a model. Every single thing in science is a model.
Atomic theory? That's a model. Ecosystem balance? Models. Why is the sky blue? We have a model for that. How do eyes and brains turn light into vision? We have an answer, and the answer is a model. How do the planets move? That's a model.
Models are the way we know about the world. We put in the evidence, and out come predictions. We judge the model by the accuracy of the predictions.
We had the woman captain, and the black captain, so I'm thinking the new captain should be transgendered. They could make the captain both transgendered and transvestite if they want to save money on costume costs.
"He didn't blow it up because they are hard to make very expensive to buy"
No. He didn't blow it up because he didn't have handy explosives. He had a handy arsenal of guns, and he used that. If that arsenal hadn't been there, he would have used whatever is the deadliest tool at his disposal to do the most dastardly possible act. And if the deadliest tool were a knife, then the headline would have read "Crazed Man Stabs Child Before Being Apprehended".
Likewise, all criminals. If you want to rob a store, and you have a gun handy, then you use that. If you don't have a gun handy, then you use a knife. And you know what? There are fewer people who would commit knife-robberies than would commit gun-robberies. There are fewer people who would slit another person's throat, than would shoot them with a gun. That's why I think there would be less crime.
"You do not seem to understand the cat is out of the bag, you're not going to be able to collect up all the guns from the "bad" people without resorting to draconian measures that our constitution was meant to prevent (this is exactly what they did pre revolutionary war)."
Oh, I totally do understand that, and I don't know what I said that might have led you to think otherwise. I consider the issue quite lost. And not just practically (because, as you say, there's already too many guns, it's too late to prevent the travesty we all live under today) but also legally. I don't like it, but to me the 2nd Amendment clearly gives every person an absolute right to carry any weapon anywhere with no infringements. Not even reasonable infringements, because it doesn't say 'shall not be unreasonably infringed'. So I concede every 2nd Amendment claim made by gun nutters, in fact I usually go much farther than anyone else: from a legal perspective only, I believe all weaponry regulation to be categorically un-Constitutional.
Anyway my parting message is don't think there are only two positions on guns. I'm a gun moderate. I would not at all want to remove guns from widespread access, but I'd have different guns in different amounts with different regulations, with a sliding scale for any weaponry based on deadly potential.
What are the additional "terrible effects" of the toddler mother shooting beyond the death of a human being?
Okay, I am seriously willing to answer this question for you, but only if you absolutely swear that after I do, you will change your position based on it.
So tell me, yes, if a toddler shooting a mother is worse than a mother dying falling off of a ladder, then you will change your position. Say yes, then I'll answer the question. Otherwise, admit that this question is irrelevant which is what I originally claimed.
I reiterate that your argument is true and irrelevant. Yes, everything is a tool that can be used for good or ill. And yet, everybody (except, in your comment, by implication, you) is against personal ownership of death stars.
Somewhere we draw a line. Where do you draw it? Above death stars? Seriously? No, not seriously. Gun nutters usually draw the line between "guns" and "bombs". Gun grabbers draw the line between "knifes" and "guns". I draw the line at "revolvers/rifles/shotguns".
Yes, of course, that's why Adam Lanza didn't blow up Sandy Hook with his nuclear bomb. People use the tools available to try to carry out their plans.
The reason Adam didn't use a nuclear bomb isn't "because he decided not to". It's "because there weren't any available to him". This is why the argument "criminals don't follow the law" is stupid, because it's not about them following the law, it's about just making the tools unavailable.
You're equating guns with violence yet the state with the most guns per person has the lowest murder rate. France has a very low murder rate yet is second in gun ownership. The highest murder rate countries generally have strict gun laws.
First, I didn't equate guns with violence. Very few guns (relatively) are used for violence. I think it would be fairly easy to separate the wheat (majority of unproblematic gun use) from the chaff (gun crime) with, oh, maybe 80% effectiveness if I were to speculate.
Second, yes. Outliers exist. Thank you, Captain Statistics. If you look at the rest of the dataset, your argument doesn't go very deep.
world wise statistics do not show that to be the case
I'm sure you know that is false. The correlation is between effective gun control and gun crime -- not between gun laws and gun crime. Laws don't do anything if you don't enforce them, like today America doesn't.
Your implication is the prevalence of guns must be the underlying reason for that,
Eh, not so much prevalence as availability. Similar but not the same.
Yes, guns are tools, tools commonly used for killing, just like lots of other tools which we regulate on a sliding scale of deadliness.
Everything is a "tool". It's a meaningless argument.
What's your position on death stars? or if you like to use non-fantastic examples, what's your position on personal nukes? Death stars are tools, dangerous tools for sure, but tools none the less.
At some point we draw a line, everybody does, so fess up with what the line is and then defend it. "Guns are tools" is specious.
BS you dont see people using IED's in the US to often either yet they fairly easy to make.
Yes. They are fairly easy to make, and "fairly easy to make" is a lot more work than "go to the store and buy a deadly weapon". Thus the grenade-crime-cost is higher when we have grenade control. If we increase the cost of gun-crime, it would go down too. Imagine if people had to physically manufacture their own guns, even if it was "fairly easy", it would be harder.
Then you changed the subject, and I'm not interested. Gun control would work, just like grenade control does, just like plastic-gun control works, just like nuclear control works -- and of course it would, because if it didn't then gun nutters wouldn't care. Duh.
Yes, the terrible effects of a toddler-mother shooting are larger than the accidental death, thus it is more tragic.
I didn't speculate on your gun position (nice try though! go re-read), I speculated that whatever the position is, this "what's more tragic" canard isn't the basis of it. So for whatever reason you raise it, you do so dishonestly.
It's gotten us a product far less destructive than it used to be. We added regulation to the alcohol industry, and now we have more of the benefits and fewer of the problems. I'd like to have the same for weaponry, but unfortunately in my opinion all weapon restrictions are categorically un-Constitutional.
(We also decided that we'd gone too far with alcohol, and then stepped back because that's how democracy works. The same could work for weapons.)
"The NRA merely wants a privately operated instructional system."
This is bull and you know it. They want no system. If they wanted a privately operated instructional system, then they would lobby for a mandatory privately operated instructional system. We have lots of those you know, places like dental schools and licensing regimens for falconers.
But no, the NRA opposes all gun control, because they want zero gun control. And I don't mean that as an attack, that's just their position: no infringements, none, zero. I think it's a fair political position when stated honestly, and they state it honestly (usually), so I think that's all fair, even though I disagree with them.
People like you, however, are not being fair. You are claiming things that you know are false, such as that "The NRA wants a privately operated instructional system".
That's a very stupid comment. Of course it's more tragic when a toddler shoots its mother, rather than when a mother falls off a ladder and dies. It's hard to even imagine how you could think otherwise.
I suspect that you, personally, find your own argument meaningless. I mean, if I convinced you that a toddler killing his mother is more tragic, that wouldn't actually change your mind about guns. So it's not only wrong, it's dishonest, because it's an irrelevant non-sequitur to your true motivations, whatever they are.
I see this excuse all the time: "Oh, well that was just a mass shooting but not a mass murder because nobody was killed."
And I just want to be super duper clear about this: I don't want to be shot to death; I don't want to be shot at all; I don't want to be shot at at all. You don't get to say "well, you didn't die after the gunman/toddler shot you, so it doesn't count". It does count.
"So the problem is two-fold: 1) Don't keep a round chambered unless you feel the need to discharge the weapon is imminent."
'The problem' isn't really "don't keep a round chambered", rather 'the problem' is "people do keep rounds chambered". So I ask you, what is the solution to 'the problem'? Before you answer, know that "personal responsibility" means the same as "no solution", which might be defensible ("the solution is worse than the problem, so no solution is preferable"), but doesn't count as a solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad guys can be prevented from having guns. Let's do that.
Neither does [whatever group I want to troll about]
Yawn. That argument has been total bullshit since the day it first oozed out of someone's ass. Shootings happen in all kinds of places, and good guys with guns never, ever stop bad guys with guns. It's a fantasy, and we should stop basing policy on fantasies.
I don't think so. We "social engineered" the end of slavery, the end of child labor, universal education. Most people consider those to be net positives; I do. The goodness of the engineering is the sum of the goodness it produces, which might be positive or negative.
"What do you mean by 'early programmers'? Do you mean the people who operated the early computing machines, which was considered menial work and suitable for women?"
Yes that's what I mean: Lovelace, then the women who programmed ENIAC, and so on. It seemed to switch by the time NASA was trying to program spaceships. My historical perspective is just what you said: the work was considered menial thus was offered to women, who had only a few options to choose from.
"Personally, I think that most women just aren't interested."
Yeah, this is most of why I think fewer women program, with a sizable minority reason also being that once a field is dominated by one sex then the other sex has somewhat of a barrier to it (consider nursing). So I think it's both of those things, but more of the former.
"Plus it's a bit of a crappy job and I think most women are smart enough to see that."
Ha ha, me too, I feel that way -- it's a terrible job which my brain enjoys. How wonderful, right, to have a job that is both easy and pays well, all because everybody else finds it scary and boring.
Thanks for your opinion. Good luck.
I have a question for you, why do you think there are so few female programmers now versus all of the world's early programmers being women? I figure it's because "those were the limited opportunities women had back then, so they took it", not "because women back then super duper wanted to be programmers, while men didn't". Do you agree with that? Do you think The System is squeezing out women now, or do you think women just less frequently want to program?
I support an increase in gas prices to reduce carbon in the air, not because I want gas to be expensive. If it were no impact, I'd want the cheapest gas possible.
If we are choosing between "let women decide what they want" and "try to manipulate women into doing what you think they should do", then I guess I would have to say that only the first option is consistent with human dignity.
I'm a programmer on a team of about ten, all men. We were at lunch one day talking about it and my boss said he went way out of his way to try to hire women. He said he proactively sent invitations to CS programs soliciting women, sent invitations to women on LinkedIn, and as a rule he would interview any woman who applied, regardless of the resume (is that gender equality? whatever).
He got zero female applicants. Zero. We have women at the company, we have women doing programming, but none doing the kind of programming that my team does. My best guess, informed by personal experience, is that women are just a lot less likely to want to do this work. There might be more than zero, but the rate is less than 1/10th of the rate for men, which on a team this size means there are zero women.
If you want to help sequester carbon, buy two Christmas trees. 100% of the carbon in the trees comes from the air (is it actually 100%? well, close to 100% anyway) and when the tree goes into the landfill, you have successfully sequestered the carbon. Make sure not to burn your Christmas tree.
Mmm hmm. Agenda. We all totally WANT gas to be expensive. That's why we created this international conspiracy of millions of scientists and politicians and activists, the largest and most successful conspiracy in history, all to make you pay more at the pump. Good thinking.
All of science is a model. Every single thing in science is a model.
Atomic theory? That's a model. Ecosystem balance? Models. Why is the sky blue? We have a model for that. How do eyes and brains turn light into vision? We have an answer, and the answer is a model. How do the planets move? That's a model.
Models are the way we know about the world. We put in the evidence, and out come predictions. We judge the model by the accuracy of the predictions.
We had the woman captain, and the black captain, so I'm thinking the new captain should be transgendered. They could make the captain both transgendered and transvestite if they want to save money on costume costs.
"He didn't blow it up because they are hard to make very expensive to buy"
No. He didn't blow it up because he didn't have handy explosives. He had a handy arsenal of guns, and he used that. If that arsenal hadn't been there, he would have used whatever is the deadliest tool at his disposal to do the most dastardly possible act. And if the deadliest tool were a knife, then the headline would have read "Crazed Man Stabs Child Before Being Apprehended".
Likewise, all criminals. If you want to rob a store, and you have a gun handy, then you use that. If you don't have a gun handy, then you use a knife. And you know what? There are fewer people who would commit knife-robberies than would commit gun-robberies. There are fewer people who would slit another person's throat, than would shoot them with a gun. That's why I think there would be less crime.
"You do not seem to understand the cat is out of the bag, you're not going to be able to collect up all the guns from the "bad" people without resorting to draconian measures that our constitution was meant to prevent (this is exactly what they did pre revolutionary war)."
Oh, I totally do understand that, and I don't know what I said that might have led you to think otherwise. I consider the issue quite lost. And not just practically (because, as you say, there's already too many guns, it's too late to prevent the travesty we all live under today) but also legally. I don't like it, but to me the 2nd Amendment clearly gives every person an absolute right to carry any weapon anywhere with no infringements. Not even reasonable infringements, because it doesn't say 'shall not be unreasonably infringed'. So I concede every 2nd Amendment claim made by gun nutters, in fact I usually go much farther than anyone else: from a legal perspective only, I believe all weaponry regulation to be categorically un-Constitutional.
Anyway my parting message is don't think there are only two positions on guns. I'm a gun moderate. I would not at all want to remove guns from widespread access, but I'd have different guns in different amounts with different regulations, with a sliding scale for any weaponry based on deadly potential.
What are the additional "terrible effects" of the toddler mother shooting beyond the death of a human being?
Okay, I am seriously willing to answer this question for you, but only if you absolutely swear that after I do, you will change your position based on it.
So tell me, yes, if a toddler shooting a mother is worse than a mother dying falling off of a ladder, then you will change your position. Say yes, then I'll answer the question. Otherwise, admit that this question is irrelevant which is what I originally claimed.
I reiterate that your argument is true and irrelevant. Yes, everything is a tool that can be used for good or ill. And yet, everybody (except, in your comment, by implication, you) is against personal ownership of death stars.
Somewhere we draw a line. Where do you draw it? Above death stars? Seriously? No, not seriously. Gun nutters usually draw the line between "guns" and "bombs". Gun grabbers draw the line between "knifes" and "guns". I draw the line at "revolvers/rifles/shotguns".
Nuclear control works?
Yes, of course, that's why Adam Lanza didn't blow up Sandy Hook with his nuclear bomb. People use the tools available to try to carry out their plans.
The reason Adam didn't use a nuclear bomb isn't "because he decided not to". It's "because there weren't any available to him". This is why the argument "criminals don't follow the law" is stupid, because it's not about them following the law, it's about just making the tools unavailable.
You're equating guns with violence yet the state with the most guns per person has the lowest murder rate.
France has a very low murder rate yet is second in gun ownership. The highest murder rate countries generally have strict gun laws.
First, I didn't equate guns with violence. Very few guns (relatively) are used for violence. I think it would be fairly easy to separate the wheat (majority of unproblematic gun use) from the chaff (gun crime) with, oh, maybe 80% effectiveness if I were to speculate.
Second, yes. Outliers exist. Thank you, Captain Statistics. If you look at the rest of the dataset, your argument doesn't go very deep.
world wise statistics do not show that to be the case
I'm sure you know that is false. The correlation is between effective gun control and gun crime -- not between gun laws and gun crime. Laws don't do anything if you don't enforce them, like today America doesn't.
Your implication is the prevalence of guns must be the underlying reason for that,
Eh, not so much prevalence as availability. Similar but not the same.
Yes, guns are tools, tools commonly used for killing, just like lots of other tools which we regulate on a sliding scale of deadliness.
Everything is a "tool". It's a meaningless argument.
What's your position on death stars? or if you like to use non-fantastic examples, what's your position on personal nukes? Death stars are tools, dangerous tools for sure, but tools none the less.
At some point we draw a line, everybody does, so fess up with what the line is and then defend it. "Guns are tools" is specious.
BS you dont see people using IED's in the US to often either yet they fairly easy to make.
Yes. They are fairly easy to make, and "fairly easy to make" is a lot more work than "go to the store and buy a deadly weapon". Thus the grenade-crime-cost is higher when we have grenade control. If we increase the cost of gun-crime, it would go down too. Imagine if people had to physically manufacture their own guns, even if it was "fairly easy", it would be harder.
Then you changed the subject, and I'm not interested. Gun control would work, just like grenade control does, just like plastic-gun control works, just like nuclear control works -- and of course it would, because if it didn't then gun nutters wouldn't care. Duh.
Yes, the terrible effects of a toddler-mother shooting are larger than the accidental death, thus it is more tragic.
I didn't speculate on your gun position (nice try though! go re-read), I speculated that whatever the position is, this "what's more tragic" canard isn't the basis of it. So for whatever reason you raise it, you do so dishonestly.
It's gotten us a product far less destructive than it used to be. We added regulation to the alcohol industry, and now we have more of the benefits and fewer of the problems. I'd like to have the same for weaponry, but unfortunately in my opinion all weapon restrictions are categorically un-Constitutional.
(We also decided that we'd gone too far with alcohol, and then stepped back because that's how democracy works. The same could work for weapons.)
"The NRA merely wants a privately operated instructional system."
This is bull and you know it. They want no system. If they wanted a privately operated instructional system, then they would lobby for a mandatory privately operated instructional system. We have lots of those you know, places like dental schools and licensing regimens for falconers.
But no, the NRA opposes all gun control, because they want zero gun control. And I don't mean that as an attack, that's just their position: no infringements, none, zero. I think it's a fair political position when stated honestly, and they state it honestly (usually), so I think that's all fair, even though I disagree with them.
People like you, however, are not being fair. You are claiming things that you know are false, such as that "The NRA wants a privately operated instructional system".
That's a very stupid comment. Of course it's more tragic when a toddler shoots its mother, rather than when a mother falls off a ladder and dies. It's hard to even imagine how you could think otherwise.
I suspect that you, personally, find your own argument meaningless. I mean, if I convinced you that a toddler killing his mother is more tragic, that wouldn't actually change your mind about guns. So it's not only wrong, it's dishonest, because it's an irrelevant non-sequitur to your true motivations, whatever they are.
"Involved" does not mean there is a fatality.
I see this excuse all the time: "Oh, well that was just a mass shooting but not a mass murder because nobody was killed."
And I just want to be super duper clear about this: I don't want to be shot to death; I don't want to be shot at all; I don't want to be shot at at all. You don't get to say "well, you didn't die after the gunman/toddler shot you, so it doesn't count". It does count.
"So the problem is two-fold: 1) Don't keep a round chambered unless you feel the need to discharge the weapon is imminent."
'The problem' isn't really "don't keep a round chambered", rather 'the problem' is "people do keep rounds chambered". So I ask you, what is the solution to 'the problem'? Before you answer, know that "personal responsibility" means the same as "no solution", which might be defensible ("the solution is worse than the problem, so no solution is preferable"), but doesn't count as a solution.
"Why there is no anti-pool agenda?"
Liar. You know there is an anti-pool agenda, but you have to pretend otherwise in order to protect your precious boomsticks.
"In order to avoid any criticism of my pet object, I have to pretend that nothing else ever gets criticized, even though it does."