Re:Smoking bans: reducing freedom, or increasing i
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2006's Bill of Wrongs
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How is the industry going the wrong way, when non smoking bars are on the rise, and not in places that are banning it? Until all other actions have been exhausted, one should never look to the state, because once you surrender a freedom to the state, you are very likely to never get it back.
Re:Smoking bans: reducing freedom, or increasing i
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2006's Bill of Wrongs
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· Score: 1
The asthmatic is no more able to go into a bar here now than if there were a legal ban or armed guards on the door. Any "freedom" here is a mere illusion.
He most certainly is able to, it just may be hazardous to his health. But people do hazardous things all the time. The fact of the matter is, in the current state of affairs, both smokers and non smokers alike can chose to go to bars that both allow and do not allow smoking. By contrast, with a ban, there is no such choice possible. Therefore there is a net loss of freedoms. You can not (I should say should not, as we do it all the time) reduce the freedoms of the whole of society for the convenience of a subset of society.
If you really think that allowing large groups of people to go to large groups of places they previously couldn't -- even if it wasn't officially called a ban -- reduces their freedom, then I'm afraid you're missing this very important point. Freedoms are only worth anything if you can meaningfully exercise them.
How have you increased their freedom? Could they not go to bars before? Maybe they couldn't go to that specific bar (by choice I might add) but they could certainly petition the owner of the bar to establish a non smoking policy, and before you say that can't be done, let me inform you that I live in tobacco country USA and I've seen it happen, but it takes meaningful exercise of your freedoms to do it.
Now, instead you have forced the choice and taken away the freedoms of both the bar owners and the smokers and non smokers who prefere a smokey bar to smoke free accross the table and no option to even make their own. That is a loss of freedoms.
I don't like to do this on open forums, but on this occasion I'm going to make a guess about you: from your perspective, I'd guess that you're not asthmatic, an ex-smoker, the child of chain-smoking parents, a health worker, or anyone else who deals with the very real consequences of smoking to the unlucky non-smokers. The reason I give this list is that I know people who are in each of those categories. Funnily enough, after the recent announcement of a smoking ban in the UK, none of them has expressed the view that non-smokers' freedoms are being restricted by the ban. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Ad hominem arguments, appeals to emotion and anecdotal evidence are not legitimate arguments here. If you must know, my experiences with smoking involve watching several very close family members develop lung cancer and watching as it slowly kills them over the next few years as they throw their money at treatments which do little but prolong the disease and make them sick. In the end, they spend their last few months coughing up blood every few minutes until they finaly die, and not always peacefully in their sleep. It's a reason why I never have and never will be tempted to smoke in my life, and has left enough of an impression on me that I work very hard to get my friends and family to stop smoking, those that still do anyway. That by the way, was the short and PG rated version of the events. But I assure you, I know full well what the effects of smoking are.
But all of that is irellevant, as people still have a right to chose what they do to their bodies, and bar owners still have a right to chose whether they want to accept the risks to themselves, and employees have a choice of whether they want to work such a job, and non smokers (asthmetic or not) have a choice of which bars they will attend. At least they do for now. Your ban (and a rose by any other name is still a rose) would eliminate that choice for all. A net loss of freedom.
Entirely irrellevant to the discussion of whether the government has the right to ban it though.
Re:Smoking bans: reducing freedom, or increasing i
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2006's Bill of Wrongs
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Less free. In hints 1 2 and 3 each person has the freedom to choose to place themselves in such an environment or not to. By banning smoking, they no longer have that choice. There is only one choice. Never mind the freedoms you take away from the smokers. No, bans of any type are an overall loss of freedom. That's why they're called bans.
The limitations on the sync back to the computer make sense from the standpoint that you want to keep the RIAA happy so they don't pull out completely. You need to keep RIAA fears of hundreds of iPods creating a physical world napster at bay. So you only allow transfer of purchased songs, as they require to identify you as the owner to play. Now the RIAA is happy because you assure that the person recieving the songs is authorized to play them. And, it's a reasonable policy because as far as Apple or the RIAA would be concerned (officially any way), you can only get your legal music from iTunes or a CD. If your HDD crashes or you move to a new computer, your transfered songs can come from your iPod and you have the original CDs for the rest. Sure it would be nice if you could transfer everything, but it took what, 3 years to get the RIAA to allow purchsed transfers? Give it some time. Baby steps.
For that to be true, you would have to demonstrate that the bloggers who have recieved these gifts tend to write favorable reviews of Microsoft products, and further demonstrate that said reviews are more favorable than the average review of the same product. Otherwise, keeping up the "good work" would be encouraging them to write more negative reviews.
Never. The only difference between now and The Good Old Days(TM) is the distance that information about you can be obtained from. Where as in TGOD(TM) you actually had to get off your butt and travel to the town a person lived in to have a chat with the local town gossips, now you just need to check google. But it's all the same. Small towns meant everyone knew everyone and all about them. Larger towns and cities gave us anonymity but people don't want that, so large cities breed loud and bold types to stand out so that people see them. The internet and social networking just makes it easier for us to stake our claim in the public square and let people know about us. In the end though, it's all the same, anyone interested can find out anything they want about you, they just have to search for it.
The part where you said that learning about mac methods will not help you professionally or personally. In such a case, why bother?
The Mac has a reasonable UNIX command line, plus it runs a number of standard graphical applications reasonably well.
All of which you could accomplish with a windows computer and a linux computer. Heck they could even be the same computer, and you're obviously much more comfortable in those environments and since you have no desire to invest in learning a different environment, again I ask why buy a mac?
Remember: this is the company that managed to run its own operating system into the ground and had to start over with a third party OS they bought.
Both of which with directed by the same person, but also largely irrellevant, unless you believe that a company should never change it's course from it's initial direction nor use better technologies when they become available.
It's also worth noting that your blind adherance to "standards" without consideration for advances in technology and computer use are just as bad if not more so than differing from the standard.
Apple's corporate history is not a shining example of success; they have been close to disaster several times. If they keep going the way they are with OS X, they'll be up for another crisis in a few years.
Yes yes we know. And if you do a search you can find a news article from each since probably 1988 declaring that Apple is dying and without doing X Y or Z will surely perrish in the next few years.
Their failures in the early 90's had less to do with standards and lack of adherance thereto and more to do with lousy business management and direction.
By the way, what was the connection standard in 1998 for most periphrial devices? And what company chose to differ from the standard? And what is that standard today?
Not all standards are good just because they've always been.
Given that OS X is much less widespread than UNIX/Linux and has no significance outside the home market, there is little reason to invest much time in it; any time invested in learning Mac-specific stuff is neither going to be useful professionally, nor is it going to help me down the road personally.
Then why buy a mac? Serious question. If there's no benefit to you at all, why spend the money on a product you don't want?
Microsoft can afford to do things their own way; they have enough market share. Apple can't. When Apple doesn't work like Windows or UNIX/Linux, it ends up counting against the platform.
Apple Computer: Proudly Going out of Business for Over 20 Years.
Seems to me they're affording being different just fine.
Then set it once. The maximize button toggles between two window settings, user defined (although sometimes this means last size on last close) and fit-to-content. So, for example, by default, my terminal window opens as a little window rather than full size. The first time I opened it, I made it full sized. Now every time I open terminal, when I click maximize, it returns it to my previously defined full size.
Yeah I know. Lots of bad reviews, everyone says stay away blah blah blah. I looked into it though. Almost every bad review of suncom is from a former ATT customer who got handed off to suncom in what was arguably one of the most fucked up merger moves in history. Because cingular was not allowed to have all of ATT, some of their customers were transfered to suncom. The problem was, at the time, suncom had no national plans to speak of. They were entirely regional plans. So you had customers go from 1000 minute a month nationwide plans to 200 minute / month regional plans, of course it was going to suck for them. By contrast, anyone I know who has joined suncom voluntarily and knowing what they were getting has been nothing but pleased. Personaly, I rarely lose calls, and usualy only when I'm going somewhere without signal anyway. It costs me $65 a month even (no taxes no fees, yay for "Truth in Wireless" or whatever suncom calls it now) for 2 lines, 600 minutes, nights and weekends, mobile to mobile, and nationwide calling. No other provider in the area could come close at the time (and I even got a discount with cingular). My one and only incident with having to call customer service was right after I first signed up. I had used a mall kiosk to sign up, and the clerk messed up the order and had not included the second line in the extra features, so the second line was only registered to the 600 minutes. Needless to say I was in for quite a shock when I recieved a $600+ phone bill. One call to customer service and about 5 minutes later, all the charges were reversed no fuss, no argument. Oh and did I mention they don't disable their phones like verizon. I can actualy use the bluetooth as it was meant to be used.
I don't think it's uncommon to hear about such misunderstandings, not because they are uncommon occurances, but because they are what catches the interest of the news. No one really cares about a completely legal and justified shooting when an 80 year old guy takes out some punk with a knife in his home, it's justified, no story, so the news doesn't report.
Consider, what are all the possible senarios you can think of, that would lead to a true misunderstanding? And how many of those are because the victim was comitting a crime they shouldn't have been?
Look at it this way. According to the Fall 1995 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, guns are used by people ~2.5 million times per year to defend themselves. That's almost once every 13 seconds. How often do you hear about misunderstandings in comparison?
While I agree that ending a situation without loss of life is preferable, in the end, it can almost always be prevented if our victim wasn't comitting a serious crime in the first place. The solution therefore is not to keep people from arming themselves as they feel appropriate (and certainly if you feel that comfortable arming yourself with a taser and then disabling your attacker, more power to you) but to stop people from comitting these crimes in the first place, and letting it be well known that the penalty for comitting such a crime can be more drastic than they imagine.
Let's try a better metaphore. Let's say you wake up one night and think that because your house is made of wood, that it might catch fire if some burning embers from a lit cigarette fall on it, after all, that's how smokey the bear says forest fires get started.
So you institute an imediate policy againsts lit cigarettes of all types within 100 yards of your house and comission some studies on house fires.
Over the years, your studies begin to reveal that while cigarettes can cause a fire, it's not the most likely cause.
Do you continue your capaign against cigarettes or do you revise your protection models.
The point is, your house isn't on fire, it's at risk, but effective safety is knowing which risks are most important to minimize.
Also the point is that analogies are shitty, why don't you just say what you mean, which is, despite the fact that the study shows human impact is lesser AND shows that newer understandings demonstrate a reduced risk, you would rather blindly continue with current policies as is, much like the few crackpots who completely deny global warming want to continue with their current policies as is.
given that we're discussing a home invasion here we're talking about pretty close quarters. it's pretty easy to hit some one in the face with mace under such conditions. as for your statement about a "high" probability of hitting ones self all i can say is that based on how i have seen mace work i can only disagree and ask for some sort of evidence (some sort of study giving a probability would be nice).
You are talking about home invasion. I am speaking of defense in the general sense. That said, I have not been able to locate a study on the chances of self inflicted injury, however, most training programs for using mace as a weapon include very strong and stern warnings that it is likely you will get some on you, and that you should expose yourself to it in doses to build up some tolerance and know what to expect. An example of one such program can be found here:
Also, if you get the chance, I suggest talking with some cops who have had to deploy mace in a defensive environment, most of the one's that I personally have spoken with will attest to the downside of mace being that it's easy to get hit yourself. Not a full dose mind you, but enough to potentialy harm your defensive position.
baseball bats also work very well inside houses.
Only in an open room where you can swing. Also note assault with a bat will be an assault with a deadly weapon charge, the same as if you used a gun to defend yourself. Personally I would rather avoid getting within melee range of an attacker.
fifteen feet is more than enough room to work with in most houses.
A home is not the only place one might be attacked. Furthermore, the major downside to a taser is that in order for it to be effective, both prongs must hit. Moving targets and furniture can both cause a miss, and then you must reload. Also note that in between shocks (and perhaps while being shocked) an attacker can remove the probes rendering the taser useless.
i am completely confident in my own abilities to disarm and pin and intruder after stunning them.
I am glad that you are, but not everyone is. Your wife for example, may not be. Your daughter or son may not be. Certainly the old millers down the street aren't likely to pin anyone down with their walkers. The right to self defense should not be limited to one's physical prowess.
i will say, however, that mace or a bat would be the preferred solution here.
I would prefer to not have to use either. In my house, I would hope that a burglar would have left after being confronted with a shotgun. Ideally I don't want to attack my burglar, I want him to leave.
at the age you're talking about simply putting either mace or a taser in my top dresser drawer should easily keep it out of any child so young as to be able to be killed by mace or taser. a gun will kill a child of any age, however.
The age at which your child is old enough to reach the gun and break the locks or security mechanisms you have in place on said gun is the age your child should be old enough and smart enough to know a gun is serious business, that it should not be pointed at anything that you don't intend to kill and that he should not be handling it without supervision. And both mace and tasers can kill or severely wound any child of any age. Your child may have asthma and OC or real mace (which is a tear gas) can certainly pose a severe threat. Tasers can start fires, take out eyes and depending on what happens cause your child to severely injure themselves. That said, certainly of all the weapons that would be mostly unsecured, my taser will be as opposed to the gun. But ideally, none of the weapons will be so unsecure and my children know safety.
i might also add that you're dodging my point that most home intruders are simply after your property. dishing out death for something as petty as theft doesnt seem terribly ethical (and lets face it,
The "bad guys" get the guns regardless of the law. Unreasonable legal hurdles do nothing other than prevent the "good guys" from being able to properly exercise the rights granted by the constitution.
Mace requires you to hit the face, be well within striking distance of your attacker and has a high probability of hitting you as well as your attacker. A taser gives you one shot before you have to reload or be within melee range of your attacker. Civilian tasers have a maximum fire distance of 15 feet, and are only effective while the taser is on. Once the taser is no longer discharging your attacker will regain concsiousness quick, and have the added bennefit of all the adrenaline his body just dumped into his system. While a taser makes an effective street weapon (providing you can hit your target and then run away), in your own home it is fairly useless as you still have to contend with the attacker being in your home when he recovers in 10 seconds.
On the other hand, most people including burglers have a rather strong self preservation instinct. When faced with a gun, most will tuck tail and run without a shot having to be fired. Most others will very clearly get the message and start leaving once the shots start flying, regardless of whether you hit cleanly (as is required for both mace and tasers). And with a minimum of 5 chances to hit, I'll take a gun over your taser any day.
By the way, both mace and a taser could kill a child just as dead as a gun. Perhaps if you were a proper parent, and actualy taught your child safety, including gun safety, and taught them that a gun was not something to mess around with, perhaps they wouldn't have been so stupid as to shoot themselves. Furthermore, if you were anywhere close to a good parent, you would have taken appropriate measures to secure your firearm against your child.
Given the evidence, it would seem to me you would be no more effective defending your house with gun, taser or mace as you clearly have no interest in actual safety and safe guarding your home and family. Your projection of your own failings and inadiquacies to the rest of the population is disheartening and yet so typical of those that hold your view points. Perhaps if your side of the debate was not so full of people who couldn't handle their own insecurities, we could perhaps have a reasonable debate over gun laws and gun control. As it stands it's clear you are incapable of such a debate.
Conveniently, just the other day, my handgun made it easier and more convenient for my 100 and nothing lb sister to prevent herself from being raped by a 300 lb waste of life.
Now that we're both done appealing to emotions, would you like to try for a reall argument or are you just trolling?
we've already had the long arguement that having licensing/a ban in place will lower crime rates of weapons, theres no arguement there.
There's plenty of arguments there. Don't pretend just because some studies coincide with your belief that the argument is over.
this is really getting into a pathetic arguement, which is easily proven through statistics. the UK doesnt have anything like the problem that the US does.
Neither does canada, which has a per capita rate of gun ownership on par to the US. As alwasy, guns are not the problem, the people are. Furthermore, it's worth noting that despite the ban, the UK still has gun crime and violent crime is on the rise.
The problem of gun bans / gun control is the same problem as the war on drugs. Only those planning on following the law in the first place are affected. Everyone else still gets their guns and drugs, they just don't get them at the corner store.
What do you need most modern technology for? A car? A microwave? A swimming pool? A golf club? A compound bow? A knife? A chain saw? You don't NEED any of these things. You want them because they make a certain task easier and more convenient, but then, so does a gun. Just because a few people don't know how to obey the law is no reason to make my life more difficult.
It only fails for the same reason protests do. Most of the people involved arent' educated about the issue, and don't really know what's going on. In protests this leads to mishmashes (why do environmental protests have anti israel and free [political prisoner du jour] activists?) and in politics it leads to apathy. In both forms it's dangerous to the cause and yet both protest organizers and politicians use the same tactics, encourage mob mentality.
But political amplification is better than mob amplification. Consider it the difference between putting an equalizer on the sound from your stereo and just cranking the volume up to 11.
Slashdot Mirror
You will notice that below the box requesting your AppleID there's a link for if you've forgotten your AppleID.
iforgot.apple.com
How is the industry going the wrong way, when non smoking bars are on the rise, and not in places that are banning it? Until all other actions have been exhausted, one should never look to the state, because once you surrender a freedom to the state, you are very likely to never get it back.
The asthmatic is no more able to go into a bar here now than if there were a legal ban or armed guards on the door. Any "freedom" here is a mere illusion.
He most certainly is able to, it just may be hazardous to his health. But people do hazardous things all the time. The fact of the matter is, in the current state of affairs, both smokers and non smokers alike can chose to go to bars that both allow and do not allow smoking. By contrast, with a ban, there is no such choice possible. Therefore there is a net loss of freedoms. You can not (I should say should not, as we do it all the time) reduce the freedoms of the whole of society for the convenience of a subset of society.
If you really think that allowing large groups of people to go to large groups of places they previously couldn't -- even if it wasn't officially called a ban -- reduces their freedom, then I'm afraid you're missing this very important point. Freedoms are only worth anything if you can meaningfully exercise them.
How have you increased their freedom? Could they not go to bars before? Maybe they couldn't go to that specific bar (by choice I might add) but they could certainly petition the owner of the bar to establish a non smoking policy, and before you say that can't be done, let me inform you that I live in tobacco country USA and I've seen it happen, but it takes meaningful exercise of your freedoms to do it.
Now, instead you have forced the choice and taken away the freedoms of both the bar owners and the smokers and non smokers who prefere a smokey bar to smoke free accross the table and no option to even make their own. That is a loss of freedoms.
I don't like to do this on open forums, but on this occasion I'm going to make a guess about you: from your perspective, I'd guess that you're not asthmatic, an ex-smoker, the child of chain-smoking parents, a health worker, or anyone else who deals with the very real consequences of smoking to the unlucky non-smokers. The reason I give this list is that I know people who are in each of those categories. Funnily enough, after the recent announcement of a smoking ban in the UK, none of them has expressed the view that non-smokers' freedoms are being restricted by the ban. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Ad hominem arguments, appeals to emotion and anecdotal evidence are not legitimate arguments here. If you must know, my experiences with smoking involve watching several very close family members develop lung cancer and watching as it slowly kills them over the next few years as they throw their money at treatments which do little but prolong the disease and make them sick. In the end, they spend their last few months coughing up blood every few minutes until they finaly die, and not always peacefully in their sleep. It's a reason why I never have and never will be tempted to smoke in my life, and has left enough of an impression on me that I work very hard to get my friends and family to stop smoking, those that still do anyway. That by the way, was the short and PG rated version of the events. But I assure you, I know full well what the effects of smoking are.
But all of that is irellevant, as people still have a right to chose what they do to their bodies, and bar owners still have a right to chose whether they want to accept the risks to themselves, and employees have a choice of whether they want to work such a job, and non smokers (asthmetic or not) have a choice of which bars they will attend. At least they do for now. Your ban (and a rose by any other name is still a rose) would eliminate that choice for all. A net loss of freedom.
Entirely irrellevant to the discussion of whether the government has the right to ban it though.
Less free. In hints 1 2 and 3 each person has the freedom to choose to place themselves in such an environment or not to. By banning smoking, they no longer have that choice. There is only one choice. Never mind the freedoms you take away from the smokers. No, bans of any type are an overall loss of freedom. That's why they're called bans.
The limitations on the sync back to the computer make sense from the standpoint that you want to keep the RIAA happy so they don't pull out completely. You need to keep RIAA fears of hundreds of iPods creating a physical world napster at bay. So you only allow transfer of purchased songs, as they require to identify you as the owner to play. Now the RIAA is happy because you assure that the person recieving the songs is authorized to play them. And, it's a reasonable policy because as far as Apple or the RIAA would be concerned (officially any way), you can only get your legal music from iTunes or a CD. If your HDD crashes or you move to a new computer, your transfered songs can come from your iPod and you have the original CDs for the rest. Sure it would be nice if you could transfer everything, but it took what, 3 years to get the RIAA to allow purchsed transfers? Give it some time. Baby steps.
For that to be true, you would have to demonstrate that the bloggers who have recieved these gifts tend to write favorable reviews of Microsoft products, and further demonstrate that said reviews are more favorable than the average review of the same product. Otherwise, keeping up the "good work" would be encouraging them to write more negative reviews.
Never. The only difference between now and The Good Old Days(TM) is the distance that information about you can be obtained from. Where as in TGOD(TM) you actually had to get off your butt and travel to the town a person lived in to have a chat with the local town gossips, now you just need to check google. But it's all the same. Small towns meant everyone knew everyone and all about them. Larger towns and cities gave us anonymity but people don't want that, so large cities breed loud and bold types to stand out so that people see them. The internet and social networking just makes it easier for us to stake our claim in the public square and let people know about us. In the end though, it's all the same, anyone interested can find out anything they want about you, they just have to search for it.
Where did I say "no benefit at all"?
The part where you said that learning about mac methods will not help you professionally or personally. In such a case, why bother?
The Mac has a reasonable UNIX command line, plus it runs a number of standard graphical applications reasonably well.
All of which you could accomplish with a windows computer and a linux computer. Heck they could even be the same computer, and you're obviously much more comfortable in those environments and since you have no desire to invest in learning a different environment, again I ask why buy a mac?
Remember: this is the company that managed to run its own operating system into the ground and had to start over with a third party OS they bought.
Both of which with directed by the same person, but also largely irrellevant, unless you believe that a company should never change it's course from it's initial direction nor use better technologies when they become available.
It's also worth noting that your blind adherance to "standards" without consideration for advances in technology and computer use are just as bad if not more so than differing from the standard.
Apple's corporate history is not a shining example of success; they have been close to disaster several times. If they keep going the way they are with OS X, they'll be up for another crisis in a few years.
Yes yes we know. And if you do a search you can find a news article from each since probably 1988 declaring that Apple is dying and without doing X Y or Z will surely perrish in the next few years.
Their failures in the early 90's had less to do with standards and lack of adherance thereto and more to do with lousy business management and direction.
By the way, what was the connection standard in 1998 for most periphrial devices? And what company chose to differ from the standard? And what is that standard today?
Not all standards are good just because they've always been.
Given that OS X is much less widespread than UNIX/Linux and has no significance outside the home market, there is little reason to invest much time in it; any time invested in learning Mac-specific stuff is neither going to be useful professionally, nor is it going to help me down the road personally.
Then why buy a mac? Serious question. If there's no benefit to you at all, why spend the money on a product you don't want?
Microsoft can afford to do things their own way; they have enough market share. Apple can't. When Apple doesn't work like Windows or UNIX/Linux, it ends up counting against the platform.
Apple Computer: Proudly Going out of Business for Over 20 Years.
Seems to me they're affording being different just fine.
Then set it once. The maximize button toggles between two window settings, user defined (although sometimes this means last size on last close) and fit-to-content. So, for example, by default, my terminal window opens as a little window rather than full size. The first time I opened it, I made it full sized. Now every time I open terminal, when I click maximize, it returns it to my previously defined full size.
Yeah I know. Lots of bad reviews, everyone says stay away blah blah blah. I looked into it though. Almost every bad review of suncom is from a former ATT customer who got handed off to suncom in what was arguably one of the most fucked up merger moves in history. Because cingular was not allowed to have all of ATT, some of their customers were transfered to suncom. The problem was, at the time, suncom had no national plans to speak of. They were entirely regional plans. So you had customers go from 1000 minute a month nationwide plans to 200 minute / month regional plans, of course it was going to suck for them. By contrast, anyone I know who has joined suncom voluntarily and knowing what they were getting has been nothing but pleased. Personaly, I rarely lose calls, and usualy only when I'm going somewhere without signal anyway. It costs me $65 a month even (no taxes no fees, yay for "Truth in Wireless" or whatever suncom calls it now) for 2 lines, 600 minutes, nights and weekends, mobile to mobile, and nationwide calling. No other provider in the area could come close at the time (and I even got a discount with cingular). My one and only incident with having to call customer service was right after I first signed up. I had used a mall kiosk to sign up, and the clerk messed up the order and had not included the second line in the extra features, so the second line was only registered to the 600 minutes. Needless to say I was in for quite a shock when I recieved a $600+ phone bill. One call to customer service and about 5 minutes later, all the charges were reversed no fuss, no argument. Oh and did I mention they don't disable their phones like verizon. I can actualy use the bluetooth as it was meant to be used.
I don't think it's uncommon to hear about such misunderstandings, not because they are uncommon occurances, but because they are what catches the interest of the news. No one really cares about a completely legal and justified shooting when an 80 year old guy takes out some punk with a knife in his home, it's justified, no story, so the news doesn't report.
Consider, what are all the possible senarios you can think of, that would lead to a true misunderstanding? And how many of those are because the victim was comitting a crime they shouldn't have been?
Look at it this way. According to the Fall 1995 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, guns are used by people ~2.5 million times per year to defend themselves. That's almost once every 13 seconds. How often do you hear about misunderstandings in comparison?
While I agree that ending a situation without loss of life is preferable, in the end, it can almost always be prevented if our victim wasn't comitting a serious crime in the first place. The solution therefore is not to keep people from arming themselves as they feel appropriate (and certainly if you feel that comfortable arming yourself with a taser and then disabling your attacker, more power to you) but to stop people from comitting these crimes in the first place, and letting it be well known that the penalty for comitting such a crime can be more drastic than they imagine.
Let's try a better metaphore. Let's say you wake up one night and think that because your house is made of wood, that it might catch fire if some burning embers from a lit cigarette fall on it, after all, that's how smokey the bear says forest fires get started.
So you institute an imediate policy againsts lit cigarettes of all types within 100 yards of your house and comission some studies on house fires.
Over the years, your studies begin to reveal that while cigarettes can cause a fire, it's not the most likely cause.
Do you continue your capaign against cigarettes or do you revise your protection models.
The point is, your house isn't on fire, it's at risk, but effective safety is knowing which risks are most important to minimize.
Also the point is that analogies are shitty, why don't you just say what you mean, which is, despite the fact that the study shows human impact is lesser AND shows that newer understandings demonstrate a reduced risk, you would rather blindly continue with current policies as is, much like the few crackpots who completely deny global warming want to continue with their current policies as is.
given that we're discussing a home invasion here we're talking about pretty close quarters. it's pretty easy to hit some one in the face with mace under such conditions. as for your statement about a "high" probability of hitting ones self all i can say is that based on how i have seen mace work i can only disagree and ask for some sort of evidence (some sort of study giving a probability would be nice).
You are talking about home invasion. I am speaking of defense in the general sense. That said, I have not been able to locate a study on the chances of self inflicted injury, however, most training programs for using mace as a weapon include very strong and stern warnings that it is likely you will get some on you, and that you should expose yourself to it in doses to build up some tolerance and know what to expect. An example of one such program can be found here:
http://www.tscm.com/mace.html
Also, if you get the chance, I suggest talking with some cops who have had to deploy mace in a defensive environment, most of the one's that I personally have spoken with will attest to the downside of mace being that it's easy to get hit yourself. Not a full dose mind you, but enough to potentialy harm your defensive position.
baseball bats also work very well inside houses.
Only in an open room where you can swing. Also note assault with a bat will be an assault with a deadly weapon charge, the same as if you used a gun to defend yourself. Personally I would rather avoid getting within melee range of an attacker.
fifteen feet is more than enough room to work with in most houses.
A home is not the only place one might be attacked. Furthermore, the major downside to a taser is that in order for it to be effective, both prongs must hit. Moving targets and furniture can both cause a miss, and then you must reload. Also note that in between shocks (and perhaps while being shocked) an attacker can remove the probes rendering the taser useless.
i am completely confident in my own abilities to disarm and pin and intruder after stunning them.
I am glad that you are, but not everyone is. Your wife for example, may not be. Your daughter or son may not be. Certainly the old millers down the street aren't likely to pin anyone down with their walkers. The right to self defense should not be limited to one's physical prowess.
i will say, however, that mace or a bat would be the preferred solution here.
I would prefer to not have to use either. In my house, I would hope that a burglar would have left after being confronted with a shotgun. Ideally I don't want to attack my burglar, I want him to leave.
at the age you're talking about simply putting either mace or a taser in my top dresser drawer should easily keep it out of any child so young as to be able to be killed by mace or taser. a gun will kill a child of any age, however.
The age at which your child is old enough to reach the gun and break the locks or security mechanisms you have in place on said gun is the age your child should be old enough and smart enough to know a gun is serious business, that it should not be pointed at anything that you don't intend to kill and that he should not be handling it without supervision. And both mace and tasers can kill or severely wound any child of any age. Your child may have asthma and OC or real mace (which is a tear gas) can certainly pose a severe threat. Tasers can start fires, take out eyes and depending on what happens cause your child to severely injure themselves. That said, certainly of all the weapons that would be mostly unsecured, my taser will be as opposed to the gun. But ideally, none of the weapons will be so unsecure and my children know safety.
i might also add that you're dodging my point that most home intruders are simply after your property. dishing out death for something as petty as theft doesnt seem terribly ethical (and lets face it,
The "bad guys" get the guns regardless of the law. Unreasonable legal hurdles do nothing other than prevent the "good guys" from being able to properly exercise the rights granted by the constitution.
Mace requires you to hit the face, be well within striking distance of your attacker and has a high probability of hitting you as well as your attacker. A taser gives you one shot before you have to reload or be within melee range of your attacker. Civilian tasers have a maximum fire distance of 15 feet, and are only effective while the taser is on. Once the taser is no longer discharging your attacker will regain concsiousness quick, and have the added bennefit of all the adrenaline his body just dumped into his system. While a taser makes an effective street weapon (providing you can hit your target and then run away), in your own home it is fairly useless as you still have to contend with the attacker being in your home when he recovers in 10 seconds.
On the other hand, most people including burglers have a rather strong self preservation instinct. When faced with a gun, most will tuck tail and run without a shot having to be fired. Most others will very clearly get the message and start leaving once the shots start flying, regardless of whether you hit cleanly (as is required for both mace and tasers). And with a minimum of 5 chances to hit, I'll take a gun over your taser any day.
By the way, both mace and a taser could kill a child just as dead as a gun. Perhaps if you were a proper parent, and actualy taught your child safety, including gun safety, and taught them that a gun was not something to mess around with, perhaps they wouldn't have been so stupid as to shoot themselves. Furthermore, if you were anywhere close to a good parent, you would have taken appropriate measures to secure your firearm against your child.
Given the evidence, it would seem to me you would be no more effective defending your house with gun, taser or mace as you clearly have no interest in actual safety and safe guarding your home and family. Your projection of your own failings and inadiquacies to the rest of the population is disheartening and yet so typical of those that hold your view points. Perhaps if your side of the debate was not so full of people who couldn't handle their own insecurities, we could perhaps have a reasonable debate over gun laws and gun control. As it stands it's clear you are incapable of such a debate.
Conveniently, just the other day, my handgun made it easier and more convenient for my 100 and nothing lb sister to prevent herself from being raped by a 300 lb waste of life.
Now that we're both done appealing to emotions, would you like to try for a reall argument or are you just trolling?
we've already had the long arguement that having licensing/a ban in place will lower crime rates of weapons, theres no arguement there.
There's plenty of arguments there. Don't pretend just because some studies coincide with your belief that the argument is over.
this is really getting into a pathetic arguement, which is easily proven through statistics. the UK doesnt have anything like the problem that the US does.
Neither does canada, which has a per capita rate of gun ownership on par to the US. As alwasy, guns are not the problem, the people are. Furthermore, it's worth noting that despite the ban, the UK still has gun crime and violent crime is on the rise.
The problem of gun bans / gun control is the same problem as the war on drugs. Only those planning on following the law in the first place are affected. Everyone else still gets their guns and drugs, they just don't get them at the corner store.
What do you need most modern technology for? A car? A microwave? A swimming pool? A golf club? A compound bow? A knife? A chain saw? You don't NEED any of these things. You want them because they make a certain task easier and more convenient, but then, so does a gun. Just because a few people don't know how to obey the law is no reason to make my life more difficult.
It only fails for the same reason protests do. Most of the people involved arent' educated about the issue, and don't really know what's going on. In protests this leads to mishmashes (why do environmental protests have anti israel and free [political prisoner du jour] activists?) and in politics it leads to apathy. In both forms it's dangerous to the cause and yet both protest organizers and politicians use the same tactics, encourage mob mentality.
But political amplification is better than mob amplification. Consider it the difference between putting an equalizer on the sound from your stereo and just cranking the volume up to 11.
Use of Force Continuum. Look it up.
True. Searing someone's flesh ruin's one person's life. A well placed computer glitch can ruin thousands of people's lives.