Statistics have shown that natural-sounding claim to be, in fact, wrong. Anytime a firearm in the USA hits a person, it is more than 8 times as likely to have been an innocent victim (of accident or crime) than a menacing criminal.
Statistics have also shown that defensive firearms use seldom requires that a shot be fired. Criminals don't like getting shot either, and you're not allowed to shoot them if they change their minds and walk away rapidly after you show them your gun.
No. The aggressor has the element of surprise and initiative, which almost always trumps weapons. Especially since in a place where many people carry concealed guns, the badguys will be certain to have them too...
And yet...the rate of violent crime is lower in places with concealed carry. And none of the places that recently (within the last ten years) passed Shall Issue laws has seen an enormous upsurge of crime. Or, indeed, any upsurge at all.
Can't imagine why people believe that they will be safer if guns are illegal. After all, if making guns illegal were all it took to keep them from being used in crimes, then we'd have no gun crime at all in New York City. Or Washington DC. And if we could make the guns disappear with a law, why not save ourselves some trouble, and just make murder and rape illegal? Then they'd disappear too, right?
I would be willing to bet that when the trigger is pulled on a firearm, or even a firearm is aimed, that the percentage of ciminal uses is much higher than you state.
Can't speak for gun owners in general, except indirectly. However, I shoot around a thousand rounds a year. Haven't shot anyone.
Speaking in general, indirectly, the ammunition industry produces several BILLION rounds per year. So the rate that triggers are pulled must be on the order of billions of times per year. There are ~2,000,000 violent crimes of all types in the USA.
Not all of those crimes involve firearms, and not all the ones that involve firearms require that the trigger be pulled.
But if we assume that EVERY violent crime in the USA involved someone letting rip with all six shots from a revolver, we get on the order of 1% (or less - my estimate of ammo production is based on ammo cost and total value of production of the small arms ammuntion industry. Depending on the mix of bullets fired, the total number of rounds can go quite a bit above the two billion I guesstimated) of the shots fired being criminal misuse.
So, such evidence as there is seems to support the opinion that the vast majority of fireamrs usage is NOT criminal activity. Sorry.
There are guns with built-in triggerlocks. I've not heard that they are safer in practice, though.
As to the "host of ideas", I recommend you develop one and market it, if you think they are worth it. I haven't heard of a reliable implementation of any of them yet. I'll give you a clue - if the Police and the Military don't consider the neato-keeno new safety device useful, then I don't either. And few other gun owners will.
As to your link. The link certainly asserts what you said, but provides no evidence. I searched about for a bit more evidence, but found nothing other than the same assertion in relation to the same case in several other places. The gun in question was a piece of crap, of course.
And the fool holding the gun was more responsible than the gun's design. It would never occur to me to switch the safety off, then point a gun at a friend, then try to unload it. I don't think I've ever known someone who would do something quite that stupid (thankfully). And yes, I have children. All of whom know how to handle firearms better than that.
Not especially. More relevant, I don't happen to own one right now. May get one, if I decide that I need a lightweight.45.
I have no fundamental issues with the trigger safety that Glock uses (yes, they have a safety, just an unconventional one), but am not that fond of squared-off slides.
Because the Assault Weapon Ban applied only to semi-automatic versions of various weapons. In spite of it being implicitly advertised as affecting fully automatic weapons.
By "implicitly advertised", I mean that the news pieces discussing the Bill always showed people using fully automatic weapons, not the semi-auto versions covered by the bill.
Ah, but isn't illeagal to own heavy machine guns in most parts of the counrty?
No. It requires a Federal Firearms License, Class 3.
Most states allow ownership of fully automatic weapons (but not the semi-auto versions of the same weapons), with a few exceptions, such as Delaware, DC, and Hawaii. Licensing requirements may exist at the state level other than the FFL/C3, so check with your State Police before bothering to get the FFL/C3 if you are interested in owning such things.
They're evil because they fail to make guns with safety features.
Indeed? I could have sworn that every gun I own (except for the caplock replica) has at least one safety. Though, frankly, the only truly effective safety device possible to install is a well-trained shooter.
Olympic sports, such as the Biathlon (Winter Olympics) and Pentathlon (Summer Olympics)?
The National Matches?
And no, I don't participate in the National Matches, or the Olympics. I do go to the skeet range now and then. And put holes in targets at the pistol range upon occasion.
The electronic counting method is fast, which at the very least allow us to get an instant official preliminary number.
As elections in many places have shown, speed is not of the essence. Accuracy is. Speed merely serves to provide instant gratification for those who desire it.
The question, when one has both electronic and paper records of anything, is "which one is considered the REAL record? If there is a discrepancy between the paper and electronic records, which will we trust? If the answer to that question is *always* "paper", we have no need for the electronic form. And vice versa.
Yes, being able to double-check one's work is important. Paper ballots can be counted twice. Or three times, or ten. Electronic ones can only be counted meaningfully the once. Sure, you can use paper backups to electronic records. But if you must retain the paper (and count them the several times required to ensure an accurate count), you don't really save anything over just doing the paper ballots in the first place.
Specifically...
To intentionally cheat without getting caught you now need to have skills in both electronic cheating and in paper cheating, two distinctly unrelated fields.
Not especially. Easiest way to cheat in an election is the classic Chicago method - "bring out your dead!". Fake voters are easy enough to produce, if you REALLY want to cheat. And each fake voter will produce a fake electronic vote, and a fake paper vote.
If there is an error in the counting process not related to cheating, chances are it will not affect both paper counts and electronic coutns the same, givign us evidence of a problem and allowing us to investigate and discover what happened and to make it "right"
Well, no. You have two non-equal numbers which should be equal. You cannot perform meaningful investigation to the problem unless you know which one is correct. Which anonymous voting pretty much prevents. Try this one out: 321 people voted. Electronic record shows 284 votes cast, paper trail shows 281 votes cast. 47 of the voters have died since the election. How would one even go about analyzing the problem? Remember, you can't go asking people how they voted.
We get the benefits of both electroinc counting and paper, so a power failure (as happened recently in Florida) will not destroy all the evidence unless a fire ALSO occures
Which benefits are those? I live in a place that has used electronic voting for many years. I have lived in places that used paper ballots. I've even had chads to deal with (following the instructions does wonders for ensuring that hanging chads don't occur). I have not seen any major benefits of electronic voting over paper ballots. I can't come up with one for electronic voting plus paper backups (I don't consider speed an advantage. Even so, properly sized precincts allow for vote counting manually in no more than a few hours) at all.
Electronic voting, even if it were designed with all the backups required to ensure that it was not casually abused, is not a panacea. It will not ensure honest elections, nor will it ensure absolute accuracy in counting. It will, in fact, do nothing other than give some people a warm fuzzy, and others a feeling that the elections have been rigged.
Personally, I'd rather use black and white rocks to vote that go with a system that is GUARANTEED to convince some significant fraction of the electorate that "the fix is in".
The graph shows an order of magnitude increase in population since the beginning of the industrial revolution. My computers' speed has increased more than 2 orders of magnitude in 20 years, mass storage 3 orders of magnitude, RAM more than 3 orders of magnitude.
That's pretty much what the BBC is doing in the UK. They broadcast their signal over the roof of my house but I'm still required to pay for a TV licence if I have a TV.
That's what the government is doing. Requiring you to pay a tax for owning a TV set.
He can't do that, anymore than someone who blasts music from his property over a loudspeaker system can charge passersby for the music they are listening to.
This is as opposed to the damage done by his rays, of course. You're legally obligated to not harm people by emissions from your property (shelling the neighbors is always considered a bad thing)
The idiotic publisher fogot to check and see if it was taken before naming the book?
According to the article, the publisher knew before the book was named that there was a katie.com domain name, and that it did not belong to the author of the book.
Apparently, katiet.com (the author's domain name) wouldn't have had the same impact as katie.com. Or something.
Is anyone surpised that hardware gets cheaper over time?
Moderately. Automobile hardware stays moderately close to constant price in real dollars. Performance improvements are incremental at best.
Admittedly, computer hardware is not a mature technology. Or perhaps, only became mature in the last few years. Even so, when you look at a comparable period in automobile development (there was no exact analog, because computers were in mass production long before they were "mature", and mass production was developed for the first mature automobile), you do not see such a dramatic price/performance improvement.
True. However, when you factor in inflation, it has dropped quite a bit. Since 1980, in the USA, inflation has increased prices by a factor of ~2.4 (according to this inflation calculator.
So, $5000 back then is ~$12000 now. Don't know about you, but even ignoring superior performance, I don't pay anywhere near $12000 for a decent computer these days. Closer to 1/10th that.
And when you factor in superior performance, it gets positively frightening. Modern PC is to 1980 PC as Concorde is to DC3. And Concorde doesn't cost 1/10th of what a DC3 cost.
That's a high speed differential. I suspect too high to matter. Interstate minimum speeds tend to be 50mph (when they're posted at all), so only a 20 mph differential. Assuming noone is speeding, or going to slow....
Ahh. Yah, that answers that. I withdraw the comment.
However, I do not approve of a Presidential vote count being invalidated, even with an error. There are Constitutional issues that come into play if you provably disenfranchise voters, and tossing the results of a voting machine would clearly disenfranchise some specific, identifiable people.
Impeaching a President requires a supermajority in both House and Senate to dislike a President. Think how trivial it would be to trump up an excuse for a President with NO allies in either House or Senate.
As for the conventions, I would prefer no tax money used at all. The special interest money is now termed soft money, used by PACS to slam the other guy, so nothing has really changed with the "reforms"
No, no, no. Different set of reforms entirely! In the Convention case, the problem didn't go away because the Conventioneers just increased to cost of the Conventions to take into account the extra Federal money. So, yes, nothing changed with the reforms. But we're not talking "soft money" - that's a whole different set of reforms that failed.
The QWERTY Keyboard was designed back in the day of the manual typewriter. It was designed to to slow down a typist below the physical limits of the manual typewriters in question. Touch Typing was developed to produce really fast typists, who made no mistakes.
So, if touch-typing is still terribly important, then getting rid of the QWERTY keyboard, and replacing it with one optimized for modern technology would be helpful. I don't pretend to know how to arrange the keys to so optimize things.
In addition, the ease of correction of computer-input text (backspace key is so much nicer than white-out) eliminates some of the issues with touch-typing. It's faster to blast through, making mistakes and correcting them on the fly than it is to do it slowly enough to make no mistakes in the first place.
I am sorta touch-typing this, using anywere from two to six fingers in any given ten second span (I'm paying close attention to what I do, so I'll probably drop it big time any second now). My typing speed is not the limiting factor in this post, however. Seems deciding exactly what I want to say is taking longer than the typing is taking. Which suggests that classical touch-typing may, in fact, be obsolete.
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Statistics have also shown that defensive firearms use seldom requires that a shot be fired. Criminals don't like getting shot either, and you're not allowed to shoot them if they change their minds and walk away rapidly after you show them your gun.
No. The aggressor has the element of surprise and initiative, which almost always trumps weapons. Especially since in a place where many people carry concealed guns, the badguys will be certain to have them too...
And yet...the rate of violent crime is lower in places with concealed carry. And none of the places that recently (within the last ten years) passed Shall Issue laws has seen an enormous upsurge of crime. Or, indeed, any upsurge at all.
Can't imagine why people believe that they will be safer if guns are illegal. After all, if making guns illegal were all it took to keep them from being used in crimes, then we'd have no gun crime at all in New York City. Or Washington DC. And if we could make the guns disappear with a law, why not save ourselves some trouble, and just make murder and rape illegal? Then they'd disappear too, right?
Can't speak for gun owners in general, except indirectly. However, I shoot around a thousand rounds a year. Haven't shot anyone.
Speaking in general, indirectly, the ammunition industry produces several BILLION rounds per year. So the rate that triggers are pulled must be on the order of billions of times per year. There are ~2,000,000 violent crimes of all types in the USA.
Not all of those crimes involve firearms, and not all the ones that involve firearms require that the trigger be pulled.
But if we assume that EVERY violent crime in the USA involved someone letting rip with all six shots from a revolver, we get on the order of 1% (or less - my estimate of ammo production is based on ammo cost and total value of production of the small arms ammuntion industry. Depending on the mix of bullets fired, the total number of rounds can go quite a bit above the two billion I guesstimated) of the shots fired being criminal misuse.
So, such evidence as there is seems to support the opinion that the vast majority of fireamrs usage is NOT criminal activity. Sorry.
That said, how can someone who can't spell "literature" be expected to recognize it when he sees it?
As to the "host of ideas", I recommend you develop one and market it, if you think they are worth it. I haven't heard of a reliable implementation of any of them yet. I'll give you a clue - if the Police and the Military don't consider the neato-keeno new safety device useful, then I don't either. And few other gun owners will.
As to your link. The link certainly asserts what you said, but provides no evidence. I searched about for a bit more evidence, but found nothing other than the same assertion in relation to the same case in several other places. The gun in question was a piece of crap, of course.
And the fool holding the gun was more responsible than the gun's design. It would never occur to me to switch the safety off, then point a gun at a friend, then try to unload it. I don't think I've ever known someone who would do something quite that stupid (thankfully). And yes, I have children. All of whom know how to handle firearms better than that.
I have no fundamental issues with the trigger safety that Glock uses (yes, they have a safety, just an unconventional one), but am not that fond of squared-off slides.
By "implicitly advertised", I mean that the news pieces discussing the Bill always showed people using fully automatic weapons, not the semi-auto versions covered by the bill.
Of course, this particular review is semiliterate, at best. Not sure I'd trust a review saying "it is poorly written" by someone who writes so poorly.
What are these "other, better safety features"? Just curious.
No. It requires a Federal Firearms License, Class 3.
Most states allow ownership of fully automatic weapons (but not the semi-auto versions of the same weapons), with a few exceptions, such as Delaware, DC, and Hawaii. Licensing requirements may exist at the state level other than the FFL/C3, so check with your State Police before bothering to get the FFL/C3 if you are interested in owning such things.
Indeed? I could have sworn that every gun I own (except for the caplock replica) has at least one safety. Though, frankly, the only truly effective safety device possible to install is a well-trained shooter.
Target shooting in general?
Skeet shooting in particular?
Olympic sports, such as the Biathlon (Winter Olympics) and Pentathlon (Summer Olympics)?
The National Matches?
And no, I don't participate in the National Matches, or the Olympics. I do go to the skeet range now and then. And put holes in targets at the pistol range upon occasion.
I'm sure that joke is old, but it's new to me. Lucky I had put my drink down just before I read it, or I'd need a new keyboard.
As elections in many places have shown, speed is not of the essence. Accuracy is. Speed merely serves to provide instant gratification for those who desire it.
The question, when one has both electronic and paper records of anything, is "which one is considered the REAL record? If there is a discrepancy between the paper and electronic records, which will we trust? If the answer to that question is *always* "paper", we have no need for the electronic form. And vice versa.
Yes, being able to double-check one's work is important. Paper ballots can be counted twice. Or three times, or ten. Electronic ones can only be counted meaningfully the once. Sure, you can use paper backups to electronic records. But if you must retain the paper (and count them the several times required to ensure an accurate count), you don't really save anything over just doing the paper ballots in the first place.
Specifically...
To intentionally cheat without getting caught you now need to have skills in both electronic cheating and in paper cheating, two distinctly unrelated fields.
Not especially. Easiest way to cheat in an election is the classic Chicago method - "bring out your dead!". Fake voters are easy enough to produce, if you REALLY want to cheat. And each fake voter will produce a fake electronic vote, and a fake paper vote.
If there is an error in the counting process not related to cheating, chances are it will not affect both paper counts and electronic coutns the same, givign us evidence of a problem and allowing us to investigate and discover what happened and to make it "right"
Well, no. You have two non-equal numbers which should be equal. You cannot perform meaningful investigation to the problem unless you know which one is correct. Which anonymous voting pretty much prevents. Try this one out: 321 people voted. Electronic record shows 284 votes cast, paper trail shows 281 votes cast. 47 of the voters have died since the election. How would one even go about analyzing the problem? Remember, you can't go asking people how they voted.
We get the benefits of both electroinc counting and paper, so a power failure (as happened recently in Florida) will not destroy all the evidence unless a fire ALSO occures
Which benefits are those? I live in a place that has used electronic voting for many years. I have lived in places that used paper ballots. I've even had chads to deal with (following the instructions does wonders for ensuring that hanging chads don't occur). I have not seen any major benefits of electronic voting over paper ballots. I can't come up with one for electronic voting plus paper backups (I don't consider speed an advantage. Even so, properly sized precincts allow for vote counting manually in no more than a few hours) at all.
Electronic voting, even if it were designed with all the backups required to ensure that it was not casually abused, is not a panacea. It will not ensure honest elections, nor will it ensure absolute accuracy in counting. It will, in fact, do nothing other than give some people a warm fuzzy, and others a feeling that the elections have been rigged.
Personally, I'd rather use black and white rocks to vote that go with a system that is GUARANTEED to convince some significant fraction of the electorate that "the fix is in".
The graph shows an order of magnitude increase in population since the beginning of the industrial revolution. My computers' speed has increased more than 2 orders of magnitude in 20 years, mass storage 3 orders of magnitude, RAM more than 3 orders of magnitude.
That's what the government is doing. Requiring you to pay a tax for owning a TV set.
Too bad noone is on the moon now to bring a case before the World Court. Might be interesting to see....
This is as opposed to the damage done by his rays, of course. You're legally obligated to not harm people by emissions from your property (shelling the neighbors is always considered a bad thing)
We used to call it Cattlecar Bonanza. And have you noticed that SciFi Channel will be doing a new version next year? Frightful thought....
According to the article, the publisher knew before the book was named that there was a katie.com domain name, and that it did not belong to the author of the book.
Apparently, katiet.com (the author's domain name) wouldn't have had the same impact as katie.com. Or something.
Moderately. Automobile hardware stays moderately close to constant price in real dollars. Performance improvements are incremental at best.
Admittedly, computer hardware is not a mature technology. Or perhaps, only became mature in the last few years. Even so, when you look at a comparable period in automobile development (there was no exact analog, because computers were in mass production long before they were "mature", and mass production was developed for the first mature automobile), you do not see such a dramatic price/performance improvement.
So, $5000 back then is ~$12000 now. Don't know about you, but even ignoring superior performance, I don't pay anywhere near $12000 for a decent computer these days. Closer to 1/10th that.
And when you factor in superior performance, it gets positively frightening. Modern PC is to 1980 PC as Concorde is to DC3. And Concorde doesn't cost 1/10th of what a DC3 cost.
That's a high speed differential. I suspect too high to matter. Interstate minimum speeds tend to be 50mph (when they're posted at all), so only a 20 mph differential. Assuming noone is speeding, or going to slow....
However, I do not approve of a Presidential vote count being invalidated, even with an error. There are Constitutional issues that come into play if you provably disenfranchise voters, and tossing the results of a voting machine would clearly disenfranchise some specific, identifiable people.
As for the conventions, I would prefer no tax money used at all. The special interest money is now termed soft money, used by PACS to slam the other guy, so nothing has really changed with the "reforms"
No, no, no. Different set of reforms entirely! In the Convention case, the problem didn't go away because the Conventioneers just increased to cost of the Conventions to take into account the extra Federal money. So, yes, nothing changed with the reforms. But we're not talking "soft money" - that's a whole different set of reforms that failed.
So, if touch-typing is still terribly important, then getting rid of the QWERTY keyboard, and replacing it with one optimized for modern technology would be helpful. I don't pretend to know how to arrange the keys to so optimize things.
In addition, the ease of correction of computer-input text (backspace key is so much nicer than white-out) eliminates some of the issues with touch-typing. It's faster to blast through, making mistakes and correcting them on the fly than it is to do it slowly enough to make no mistakes in the first place.
I am sorta touch-typing this, using anywere from two to six fingers in any given ten second span (I'm paying close attention to what I do, so I'll probably drop it big time any second now). My typing speed is not the limiting factor in this post, however. Seems deciding exactly what I want to say is taking longer than the typing is taking. Which suggests that classical touch-typing may, in fact, be obsolete.