Then read up on the mall shooting that happened the weekend before Sandy Hook. It was stopped when a civilian, non-LEO/Military as far as I've read, confronted the shooter with his conceal carry pistol, was unable to get a clean shot and held his fire. The shooter then went and killed himself. And that is what happens in most of the cases when a mass shooter is confronted by police or another armed civilian. Those shooters are looking for victums, not a fight.
I suggest reading up on Koreatown during the 1992 LA Riots. Especially the part of what happened after the rioters took popshots at the police and the polcie fled as fast as they could leaving the Korean merchants and citizens to fend for themselves.
The shooter was using stock 15 round glock and 10 round walther magazines and unlike the Tuscon shooter didn't apparently suffer any jams using standard capacity mags.
Jared Loughner was not reloading. He was attempting to clear a stove pipe jam, which is technically a weapons malfunction, when he was tackled, probably caused by the fact he was using a 30 round magazine in the glock as they are known to cause jams.
It was the same thing in the North Hollywood shoot out. The cops were able to approach after one of the shooters' AK suffered a stove pipe and the shooter didn't apparently know how to clear it.
In Tucson the shooter suffered a stove pipe jam. It as not reloading. In fact using such high capactiy magazines causes a higher incident of this to occur.
The perception that the "AK" is somehow inaccurate is due to the versions used in all the 3rd world conflicts being fully automatic and used by personel with little training. There is a lot of spray and pray. Anyone that's been on the recieving end knows that the AK in the hands of someone with at least some training, the AK is certainly accurate enough.
We saw those signs in Missouri just after CCW was passed. Here a couple years later they are all but gone. A few businesses have them around, but not many and those that do I don't go to. After we passed it in Missouri the Post-Dispatch had a headline crying the streets would run red with blood from cititzens having wild west shoot outs at every precieved insult. A year later they ran an article saying "Well the crime rate didn't go down much, but we might have been wrong about the wild west shoot outs".
Guns in the hands of law abiding citizens doesn't change things much because they are law abiding citizens. What does tend to happen is fewer people get killed with the non-law abiding citizen starts a shooting rampage and then is confronted by the gun carrying law-abiding citizen. That's what happened in Oregon.
If you look at the suicide rates between the US and western Europe, they aren't much different. Yes more choose to use guns here in the US, but the stats suggest if not by gun, those wanting to end their own life will find other means.
I've looked at the statistics, unfortunately most of the studies on defensive gun use were done back in the 1990's and many are 20 years old at this point. The National Crime Victimization Survey circa 1993 was the lowest of the lot citing an estimated 108,000 Defensive Gun Uses per year. The Kleck studies put that number higher at between 650k - and 2.5M per year. The Kleck piece is Gary, Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevelance and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun", Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 1995, Vol. 86 No. 1
If you don't like the Kleck study(s) for whatever reason he the National Insitute of Justice that came up with 1.5M defensive uses of firearms per year: Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997).
The flip side of those studies being that old now is there are all of critical reviews of their data and methodology at this point.
Even if we take the lowest number of defensive gun uses at an average of 108,000 per years, the number of times a firearm was used to stop a crime was still over 3 times the total number of gun deaths. And depending on the defition of defensive gun use, oftentimes "using a firearm" means drawing and presenting the gun is enough to stop the crime or potential crime without a shot being fired.
An incident that happened to me a couple years ago. It was a hot muggy July day and I was sitting in city traffic. I had the windows rolled down as my car was old and starting to overheat so I wasn't running A/C. Some guy opened my car door, got in, and started to tell me where to drive until he looked over and saw the barrel of the revolver I had on me at the time. His eyes got large and he promptly got out of my car and walked off. To this day I have no idea why he got in my car. Did he mean me harm? I don't know. All I know is that I didn't know him, he wasn't supposed to be there, and my revolver ended the situation and no shots were fired.
Now if you want to look at statistics consider this: violent crime in the US has dropped over 50% of it's 1992 levels. The reasons are likely many, many factors. I'm sure economy, more forrms of electronic entertainment, more people allowed to carry concealed all factor into that. The violent crime rate last year for England and Wales was 4x that of the US. In fact it was almost TWICE the the 1992 US rate of violent crime.
If you break down the homicide rates in the US, as the Justice Statistics has, with the latest report I found being from 2008, amoung whites, the murder rate is a little higher at around 1.6/100k, but still within the same rates as most of Western Europe. But amoung the black population it was 8.6/100k and 8.2/100k in the hispanic population increasing the overall homicide rate in the US to around 4 - 5/100k. Sucide rates didn't look much different between the US and Europe. Yes more people used guns to commit sucicide, but it suggests that if guns were not used they would have found another way.
Personally the 28 guns deaths vs the 100 or more crimes that were prevented by guns per day is a price that I can live with.
The last time I checked Webkit was opensource. While Apple maintains functional control over the project if they tried to extend it you don't think Google or someone else couldn't fork it in a moment?
A few years ago the closest grocery store to where I was living was a Coop. Which was great in the summer because it was stocked with a lot of fresh stuff from local farmers (it was a rural college town).
Well one of my biggest sources of income is the family farms I've inherited along with my Dad that we lease out. We're semi involved helping the farmer with trying new methods on our farms trying to boost yields (Rice & Soybeans are the primary crop, some years corn). This is mainly my father as he's retired and it gives him something to do, but as he's gotten up into his 70's I've started to take a more involved role in things.
One time I was at the Coop and commented about rice and lack of a particular brand that we sold our rice to which led to a conversation with one of the patrons who flipped out when I mentioned we had switched to a new hybrid seed. She went on this total anti-GMO rant at which point there were several people looking on and I said, "I said Hybrid. As in Rice A was bred with Rice B to produce the strain we plant. Farmers have been doing this for centuries now. Pretty much everything in your bag has been Genetically Modified using cross breeding."
Then I left and went on about my business leaving her red in the face not exactly sure how to respond to that.
And that's what I've never understood. To these people using cross breeding and classical Mendelian genetics to modify plants are fine. But go in scientifically and do the same thing in a sophisticated lab and suddenly it's evil.
When I lived in Germany the movies had about a 10 - 15 intermission. They'd come around with snack trays like venders at a ball game here in the states. Even for 90 minute comedies there were intermissions. It was wonderful during longer movies. And probably made the theaters more money as people would use the restroom and usually by another beer, soda, snacks (the concept of free refills doesn't really exist in Europe).
There is a lot of truth in this. After my last printer quit I don't have one in my home anymore. If I need to print something I'll go to the office supply store. Usually it is for a work presentation I was going there anyway to get color copies made.
I've not even had to print an invoice in over a year. They are all emailed to clients and the clients I have now I don't have problems getting paid from.
This is really a hedge against Google. WIth Google aquiring Motorola Mobility, they are actually posed to start producing their own consumer oriented branded hardware for Android. This far the "Google phones/tablets" have really been aimed at developers, not the end consumers. Therefore they aren't a perceived threat to Samsung. But the instant Google gets serious about releasing their own branded hardware aimed at consumers you'll notice how quickly Samsung will start to ship other OSes.
You'd better view it as an entertainment expense no different than cable TV or going to see a Movie or a play or a baseball game. That's what I do. I play Star Trek Online. About once a month I buy $20 worth of game cards. When I went out on a week night to watch a game with friends at a sports bar I'd spend at least that much, probably more on food and drink. Hell It's $15 to see a movie anymore for 2 hours of entertainment. I play STO 20 - 30 hours a month.
Growing up there was a sign on I-70 westbound near St. Peters, MO with the distance to Columbia, MO in both KM and Miles. I remember my parents saying it was from back in the push to adopt the metric system back in the 1970's. Well it's not there anymore. It was replaced with one in just miles several years ago between the time I left for college and moved back to the area two years ago.
To become part of the HTML5 spec. We've already sort of have it with geolocation, but I seriously thought in the near future we'll see access to cameras etc. without having to use Cordova or some other abstraction library.
I call it, "you think people running into things while paying attention to their phones is bad, wait until they are checking their twitter feeds in the left eye and facebook in the right...."
Until the Army realized that putting a computer on every soldiers back only paints a target on them for any opposing force with even minimal ELINT capabilities with off the shelf gear these days.
And what do you call it when I insist on $.99 in exchange for being allowed to use the program I wrote and you are using that program and paid me nothing? It cost me time (labor) to write the code, compile the code, go through the checklists to submit to the app stores. I don't work for free. My time is worth something to me. So in a way it is theft. Theft of my time. Time I could have spent earning extra income helping someone with an odd job or time I could have spent going out with friends or even getting a couple extra hours of sleep.
I've had people say to me, "But you should feel proud that people are using your app."
My response is I didn't write that app to get a happy feeling. Happy feelings don't buy coffee. I wrote my apps in the hopes others would find them fun or helpful and in exchange spend a buck that goes towards my coffee fund.
Do I make a lot of money from my apps? I made a little over $8500 last year. It's not replacing my day job yet, but it did buy this laptop and plenty of coffee on the weekends.
I think both sides realize there has to be some real spending cuts, but neither side wants to be the party that fesses up to it. So with these automatic cuts, what needs to be done can be done and both sides can continue to blame the other.
The biggest problem has always been that with the tax cuts also have to come spending cuts. We've had the tax cuts, but never the spending cuts. A spending "cut" in washington is only increasing a program's budget by 3% over the next year instead of 5%.
We're to the point where taxes aren't the problem: spending is the problem. Even if the administration got all the tax increases they wanted, the additional revenue will only make up about 20% of the proposed deficits. If we want a balanced budget where is that other 80% going to come from? More taxes?
We've got to face the fact that spending has to be cut across the board on everything from entitlements to defense. And I'm not talking about increasing spending by 3% instead of 5% for >. I'm talking about departments getting 15% - 20% less over the next 5 years than they had last year. That's what really needs to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Then read up on the mall shooting that happened the weekend before Sandy Hook. It was stopped when a civilian, non-LEO/Military as far as I've read, confronted the shooter with his conceal carry pistol, was unable to get a clean shot and held his fire. The shooter then went and killed himself. And that is what happens in most of the cases when a mass shooter is confronted by police or another armed civilian. Those shooters are looking for victums, not a fight.
I suggest reading up on Koreatown during the 1992 LA Riots. Especially the part of what happened after the rioters took popshots at the police and the polcie fled as fast as they could leaving the Korean merchants and citizens to fend for themselves.
They want all guns banned. And it works something like this. A tragedy happens like the one last month:
"We must ban all 'Assault-rifles' and hi cap mags. Don't worry sportsmen, your guns are safe."
Ban goes into place, and then a few weeks/months/years later another incident happens.
"We must limit magazines further to 5 rounds and ban handguns. Don't worry sportsmen, you're guns are safe."
Ban goes into place, and then a few weeks/months/years later another incident happens.
"We must limit guns to single shot rimfire and shotguns, don't worry sportsmen, you can still hunt."
Ban goes into place and a few weeks/months/years later another incident happens:
"We must ban all guns. (Well unless you're really rich or something)".
That is the method they are using wanting to follow models of how it happened in Austrailia and the UK throughout the 1980's and 90's.
Untill the next mass shooting. Then the cries will come to ban those. That's what happened in the UK and Austrailia through the 1980's and 90's.
The shooter was using stock 15 round glock and 10 round walther magazines and unlike the Tuscon shooter didn't apparently suffer any jams using standard capacity mags.
Jared Loughner was not reloading. He was attempting to clear a stove pipe jam, which is technically a weapons malfunction, when he was tackled, probably caused by the fact he was using a 30 round magazine in the glock as they are known to cause jams.
It was the same thing in the North Hollywood shoot out. The cops were able to approach after one of the shooters' AK suffered a stove pipe and the shooter didn't apparently know how to clear it.
In Tucson the shooter suffered a stove pipe jam. It as not reloading. In fact using such high capactiy magazines causes a higher incident of this to occur.
The perception that the "AK" is somehow inaccurate is due to the versions used in all the 3rd world conflicts being fully automatic and used by personel with little training. There is a lot of spray and pray. Anyone that's been on the recieving end knows that the AK in the hands of someone with at least some training, the AK is certainly accurate enough.
We saw those signs in Missouri just after CCW was passed. Here a couple years later they are all but gone. A few businesses have them around, but not many and those that do I don't go to. After we passed it in Missouri the Post-Dispatch had a headline crying the streets would run red with blood from cititzens having wild west shoot outs at every precieved insult. A year later they ran an article saying "Well the crime rate didn't go down much, but we might have been wrong about the wild west shoot outs".
Guns in the hands of law abiding citizens doesn't change things much because they are law abiding citizens. What does tend to happen is fewer people get killed with the non-law abiding citizen starts a shooting rampage and then is confronted by the gun carrying law-abiding citizen. That's what happened in Oregon.
If you look at the suicide rates between the US and western Europe, they aren't much different. Yes more choose to use guns here in the US, but the stats suggest if not by gun, those wanting to end their own life will find other means.
I've looked at the statistics, unfortunately most of the studies on defensive gun use were done back in the 1990's and many are 20 years old at this point. The National Crime Victimization Survey circa 1993 was the lowest of the lot citing an estimated 108,000 Defensive Gun Uses per year. The Kleck studies put that number higher at between 650k - and 2.5M per year. The Kleck piece is Gary, Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevelance and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun", Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology 1995, Vol. 86 No. 1
If you don't like the Kleck study(s) for whatever reason he the National Insitute of Justice that came up with 1.5M defensive uses of firearms per year: Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997).
The flip side of those studies being that old now is there are all of critical reviews of their data and methodology at this point.
Even if we take the lowest number of defensive gun uses at an average of 108,000 per years, the number of times a firearm was used to stop a crime was still over 3 times the total number of gun deaths. And depending on the defition of defensive gun use, oftentimes "using a firearm" means drawing and presenting the gun is enough to stop the crime or potential crime without a shot being fired.
An incident that happened to me a couple years ago. It was a hot muggy July day and I was sitting in city traffic. I had the windows rolled down as my car was old and starting to overheat so I wasn't running A/C. Some guy opened my car door, got in, and started to tell me where to drive until he looked over and saw the barrel of the revolver I had on me at the time. His eyes got large and he promptly got out of my car and walked off. To this day I have no idea why he got in my car. Did he mean me harm? I don't know. All I know is that I didn't know him, he wasn't supposed to be there, and my revolver ended the situation and no shots were fired.
Now if you want to look at statistics consider this: violent crime in the US has dropped over 50% of it's 1992 levels. The reasons are likely many, many factors. I'm sure economy, more forrms of electronic entertainment, more people allowed to carry concealed all factor into that. The violent crime rate last year for England and Wales was 4x that of the US. In fact it was almost TWICE the the 1992 US rate of violent crime.
If you break down the homicide rates in the US, as the Justice Statistics has, with the latest report I found being from 2008, amoung whites, the murder rate is a little higher at around 1.6/100k, but still within the same rates as most of Western Europe. But amoung the black population it was 8.6/100k and 8.2/100k in the hispanic population increasing the overall homicide rate in the US to around 4 - 5/100k. Sucide rates didn't look much different between the US and Europe. Yes more people used guns to commit sucicide, but it suggests that if guns were not used they would have found another way.
Personally the 28 guns deaths vs the 100 or more crimes that were prevented by guns per day is a price that I can live with.
The last time I checked Webkit was opensource. While Apple maintains functional control over the project if they tried to extend it you don't think Google or someone else couldn't fork it in a moment?
A few years ago the closest grocery store to where I was living was a Coop. Which was great in the summer because it was stocked with a lot of fresh stuff from local farmers (it was a rural college town).
Well one of my biggest sources of income is the family farms I've inherited along with my Dad that we lease out. We're semi involved helping the farmer with trying new methods on our farms trying to boost yields (Rice & Soybeans are the primary crop, some years corn). This is mainly my father as he's retired and it gives him something to do, but as he's gotten up into his 70's I've started to take a more involved role in things.
One time I was at the Coop and commented about rice and lack of a particular brand that we sold our rice to which led to a conversation with one of the patrons who flipped out when I mentioned we had switched to a new hybrid seed. She went on this total anti-GMO rant at which point there were several people looking on and I said, "I said Hybrid. As in Rice A was bred with Rice B to produce the strain we plant. Farmers have been doing this for centuries now. Pretty much everything in your bag has been Genetically Modified using cross breeding."
Then I left and went on about my business leaving her red in the face not exactly sure how to respond to that.
And that's what I've never understood. To these people using cross breeding and classical Mendelian genetics to modify plants are fine. But go in scientifically and do the same thing in a sophisticated lab and suddenly it's evil.
The 4 boxes of liberty are the Soap Box, Ballot Box, Jury Box, Ammo Box to be used in that order. Right now we're at the Jury box stage...
When I lived in Germany the movies had about a 10 - 15 intermission. They'd come around with snack trays like venders at a ball game here in the states. Even for 90 minute comedies there were intermissions. It was wonderful during longer movies. And probably made the theaters more money as people would use the restroom and usually by another beer, soda, snacks (the concept of free refills doesn't really exist in Europe).
There is a lot of truth in this. After my last printer quit I don't have one in my home anymore. If I need to print something I'll go to the office supply store. Usually it is for a work presentation I was going there anyway to get color copies made.
I've not even had to print an invoice in over a year. They are all emailed to clients and the clients I have now I don't have problems getting paid from.
This is really a hedge against Google. WIth Google aquiring Motorola Mobility, they are actually posed to start producing their own consumer oriented branded hardware for Android. This far the "Google phones/tablets" have really been aimed at developers, not the end consumers. Therefore they aren't a perceived threat to Samsung. But the instant Google gets serious about releasing their own branded hardware aimed at consumers you'll notice how quickly Samsung will start to ship other OSes.
You'd better view it as an entertainment expense no different than cable TV or going to see a Movie or a play or a baseball game. That's what I do. I play Star Trek Online. About once a month I buy $20 worth of game cards. When I went out on a week night to watch a game with friends at a sports bar I'd spend at least that much, probably more on food and drink. Hell It's $15 to see a movie anymore for 2 hours of entertainment. I play STO 20 - 30 hours a month.
Growing up there was a sign on I-70 westbound near St. Peters, MO with the distance to Columbia, MO in both KM and Miles. I remember my parents saying it was from back in the push to adopt the metric system back in the 1970's. Well it's not there anymore. It was replaced with one in just miles several years ago between the time I left for college and moved back to the area two years ago.
To become part of the HTML5 spec. We've already sort of have it with geolocation, but I seriously thought in the near future we'll see access to cameras etc. without having to use Cordova or some other abstraction library.
I call it, "you think people running into things while paying attention to their phones is bad, wait until they are checking their twitter feeds in the left eye and facebook in the right...."
Until the Army realized that putting a computer on every soldiers back only paints a target on them for any opposing force with even minimal ELINT capabilities with off the shelf gear these days.
And what do you call it when I insist on $.99 in exchange for being allowed to use the program I wrote and you are using that program and paid me nothing? It cost me time (labor) to write the code, compile the code, go through the checklists to submit to the app stores. I don't work for free. My time is worth something to me. So in a way it is theft. Theft of my time. Time I could have spent earning extra income helping someone with an odd job or time I could have spent going out with friends or even getting a couple extra hours of sleep.
I've had people say to me, "But you should feel proud that people are using your app."
My response is I didn't write that app to get a happy feeling. Happy feelings don't buy coffee. I wrote my apps in the hopes others would find them fun or helpful and in exchange spend a buck that goes towards my coffee fund.
Do I make a lot of money from my apps? I made a little over $8500 last year. It's not replacing my day job yet, but it did buy this laptop and plenty of coffee on the weekends.
I think both sides realize there has to be some real spending cuts, but neither side wants to be the party that fesses up to it. So with these automatic cuts, what needs to be done can be done and both sides can continue to blame the other.
The biggest problem has always been that with the tax cuts also have to come spending cuts. We've had the tax cuts, but never the spending cuts. A spending "cut" in washington is only increasing a program's budget by 3% over the next year instead of 5%.
We're to the point where taxes aren't the problem: spending is the problem. Even if the administration got all the tax increases they wanted, the additional revenue will only make up about 20% of the proposed deficits. If we want a balanced budget where is that other 80% going to come from? More taxes?
We've got to face the fact that spending has to be cut across the board on everything from entitlements to defense. And I'm not talking about increasing spending by 3% instead of 5% for >. I'm talking about departments getting 15% - 20% less over the next 5 years than they had last year. That's what really needs to happen.