In fact, the shooter in this spree had to pass an NRA firearm course in order to get his pistol license.
Which shooter/spree are you referring to? Switzerland doesn't have an NRA, and the training is by the military. And Adam Lanza didn't have his own guns - he took his mothers.
The obvious question then becomes: what, exactly, are Swiss doing right? Or rather, what the Americans are doing wrong compared to the Swiss?
Sure that's the question, and I've tackled it in another post. But perhaps it doesn't need to be answered to deal with this. It can be treated as a matter of trust. The Swiss have proved themselves responsible enough to hold weapons. Americans have not.
Are the keepers of these weapons allowed to take them out to use for leisure purposes? Hunting, shooting cans off a fence etc? Are they allowed to routinely carry them on the street?
Or are they reserved for use if there's a military purpose - training or invasion say.
I agree, lets go the Switzerland route and actually require able bodied individuals to own and be trained in firearms.
It requires more than that. It requires that they actually serve in a militia. They actually do what your second amendment talks about. For real.
Right, because the illegality of gun ownership is going to stop someone who walks into an elementary school and opens fire on kids.
Illegality of gun ownership would have stopped this one. The kid took his mothers legally owned weapons to do the deed. She was a school teacher, not a criminal - it gun ownership was illegal, she wouldn't have had the weapons, and he wouldn't have had access to them.
I think you'll find in most of the massacres in the US, they were done with legally owned weapons, and by people who were not previously in the criminal world. So yes, making guns illegal would make it either harder or impossible for them.
I mean, the war on drugs worked so well at stopping people from getting drugs...
They aren't the same. In the UK both handguns and recreational drugs are illegal. The drugs are easy for anyone to get. The guns much harder. The fact is that the penalties for gun ownership are much steeper, and the attraction to ordinary people is much lower. Criminals sell drugs on street corners, they don't sell guns like that.
You can if you amend the 2nd amendment, as the original poster suggested. Not a bad idea actually - you brought up Switzerland. Make it more like that.
Are you claiming that there are no nutters there? Or that army training somehow helps prevent killing sprees?
If I was claiming those things, I'd have written them. Resist the temptation to put words in other people's mouths.
The only logical explanation is that there's some other difference here that explains why young Swiss males don't take their SIGs and go shoot at kids at the nearest kindergarten.
As you point out, the Swiss train them to use the guns, then restrict their use to only being used on official training, or for civil defence, never for leisure. American's buy their own guns on the understanding that they are used for leisure, or for personal defence.
The difference is pretty obvious. The Swiss treat holding their weapons as a duty to the state. Americans treat them as toys. The difference is respect.
It should also be pointed out that the Swiss system is one of strict gun control - high numbers of people holding weapons doesn't mean they are not strictly controlled. Not like America, which at best has ridiculously weak gun control. So the small number of gun homicides in Switzerland is not an argument against gun control.
Do they? Switzerland has the highest number of fully automatic assault rifles in the hands of private citizens.
The difference between Switzerland and the USA is that the USA talks about a "well organised militia", whilst Switzerland actually has one.
Those Swiss fully automatic assault rifles are in the hands of people who have actually been trained by the government as a militia. In the US, they're owned by nutters.
You'll always have horrible stuff like the 22 children in the stabbing spree in China today
Notice the difference when there's low gun ownership, and thus the nutter has no gun: no one in that incident died.
Violent crime generally comes with poverty in densely populated areas.
Nonsense. The USA is the richest country in the world, and yet has one of the worst gun problems. It has the highest gun-violence per capita rate in the developed world.
The problem isn't poverty. The problem is too many of your people are fascinated by guns. Enough to make it politically difficult to restrict them.
Do a little more research on how easy it is to get a hold of a gun illegally, then come back and tell me whether or not locking down is going to resolve the issue.
Handguns are banned in the UK. But it is possible to get hold of them illegally. And yet the per capita gun murder rate is a fraction of the US.
Restrict guns. Restrict ammo. And make sure every bullet sold has a unique ID, logged to the purchaser. Those are far more rational ways to cut firearm related violence.
(The latter wouldn't help with suicidal massacres, but would help detection of lots of other gun homicides.)
Gun laws do nothing in making it harder for "fucking lunatics" to posess. There in lies the logical fallacy. It makes it for "fucking normal people" harder to posess, which is incidentily the root of the problem.
Given the USA has the highest per capita deaths by firearm, your theory clearly isn't working.
It reminded me of a pervious massacre, by a right-wing libertarian from Norway. A man who liked guns and argued against gun control. A man who disliked blacks and arabs. A man that hated those on the left. A lonely man that wanted attention. A man that wrote at length about his terribly mistaken and warped view of the world.
You have quite a lot in common with Anders Breivik, don't you.
So, I'll try again. If there a 100% chance that something will happen at some point in time T1 as measured from a starting point T0 defined as now, every day between T0 and T1, chances of it happening that day increases a little bit.
And your try fails once again. That does not describe problem of asteroids hitting earth. It describes for example the day you die. A one off occurrence with time constraints. Asteroid impacts are not in that category.
It doesn't matter how many times you try this, you're still going to be wrong. Because your basic layman's feeling that an asteroid impact must become more probable if there wasn't one today is wrong. No argument, nor alternate way of looking at it will make it right. All those people that have told you that know more about probability than you do.
It appears stubbornness is a more important thing for you than looking ever more stupid, the more you post.
What's the cause and effect here? Are you a dumb moron because you're a right winger? Or do you believe in right wing politics because you're a dumb moron.
A rhetorical question of course. You're also a low self-monitor, so you don't realise how dumb you are.
If you want the complete situation to put yourself in, you have to imagine you're a scalper or grey marketeer, had already bought phones from the store, then been refused to buy any more. And had then tried to get around the rules by ordering online to pick up instore.
In that situation, you'd know exactly why they wouldn't let you pick them up.
You might continue to be an arsehole as she was, and refuse to leave the store, and continue to leave for 15 minutes after a policeman arrived. And then you might resist arrest. And if you too would have done all of that, then perhaps you too would have been tasered.
When I'm dancing and do a move in which either my or my partner's arm is folded behind our backs, it's very easy to accidentally strain a muscle, cause pain and risk damage.
None of which is the "breaking" of the arm you put in your post to which I replied.
As to muscular damage or pain, that's far more likely to occur when you struggle.
And if there's already muscular damage or pain, you're not going to be able to put up a struggle that's difficult for the policeman to overcome.
Sorry, but you simply not coming up with a credible excuse. She was clearly resisting arrest because she's an arsehole. She'd already proved that with her previous behaviour.
"Confronted" by a little Google logo? You're quite insecure aren't you.
I know Apple's design standards. For example, unlike the piece of shit PC you bought, a Mac doesn't come with "Intel Inside" stickers, or the rest of the stickers, nor is it loaded up with crapware.
Apple has standards. You don't.
I dislike Apple as much as the next person
And your hatred is why your posts are so irrational.
That's closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Policemen face the prospect of injury every day, it's only reasonable for procedure to be put in place to minimise the risk.
Certainly it's disingenuous of the people who suggest the police have no risk when dealing with a 44 year old woman resisting arrest.
But I'm playing devils advocate, because I too do think that tazers tend to be used way too early.
There is an asteroid A out there that will hit us at time T. Both A and T are well defined, and both A and T are deterministic, not random and they do not change over time. They are determined by the current orbital velocity and mass of A, Earth and other celestial bodies (who are also governed by orbital mechanics). Not random. Deterministic. So, T is set. Every day that is not T brings us closer to T in unknown increments.
OK, so frame the question like that. From the point of view of omnipotence (which we don't have, but for the sake of argument). Then your claim that the probability reduces each day that there's not an event is still wrong. Why? Because the probability is zero on each day before the predetermined time, and 100% on the day of the event.
it is due to our lack of information
If you believe in a pre-determined universe, yes. That's the first time you have said anything true. The probability is due to our lack of information about the future. We can come up with a probability per day by examining what has happened in the past. We do not have enough information to change the probability from day to day. (Discounting that at some stage an actual asteroid will appear in someone's telescope - we're talking probability here, not observation.) Whether or not an event happens today, from the information we have, it doesn't change the probability of an event tomorrow.
And if you'd ever studied probability you would know this.
I would hope that someone making it difficult to cuff them isn't guilty of "Resisting arrest". There's a fine line between "The policeman was hurting my arm and shoulder by trying to force it behind me, so I was trying to move to prevent him breaking my arm"
Of course it's resisting arrest. And unless you have something very wrong with your skeletal structure, having your arm put behind your back to where it is cuffed won't in any way be even a potential arm breaking move. And that sort of skeletal deformation would probably be pretty obvious.
That was the weakest excuse for resisting arrest I ever heard.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the shooter in this spree had to pass an NRA firearm course in order to get his pistol license.
Which shooter/spree are you referring to? Switzerland doesn't have an NRA, and the training is by the military. And Adam Lanza didn't have his own guns - he took his mothers.
The obvious question then becomes: what, exactly, are Swiss doing right? Or rather, what the Americans are doing wrong compared to the Swiss?
Sure that's the question, and I've tackled it in another post. But perhaps it doesn't need to be answered to deal with this. It can be treated as a matter of trust. The Swiss have proved themselves responsible enough to hold weapons. Americans have not.
Are the keepers of these weapons allowed to take them out to use for leisure purposes? Hunting, shooting cans off a fence etc? Are they allowed to routinely carry them on the street?
Or are they reserved for use if there's a military purpose - training or invasion say.
(Yes, I do know what a SIG SG 550 looks like.)
I agree, lets go the Switzerland route and actually require able bodied individuals to own and be trained in firearms.
It requires more than that. It requires that they actually serve in a militia. They actually do what your second amendment talks about. For real.
Right, because the illegality of gun ownership is going to stop someone who walks into an elementary school and opens fire on kids.
Illegality of gun ownership would have stopped this one. The kid took his mothers legally owned weapons to do the deed. She was a school teacher, not a criminal - it gun ownership was illegal, she wouldn't have had the weapons, and he wouldn't have had access to them.
I think you'll find in most of the massacres in the US, they were done with legally owned weapons, and by people who were not previously in the criminal world. So yes, making guns illegal would make it either harder or impossible for them.
I mean, the war on drugs worked so well at stopping people from getting drugs...
They aren't the same. In the UK both handguns and recreational drugs are illegal. The drugs are easy for anyone to get. The guns much harder. The fact is that the penalties for gun ownership are much steeper, and the attraction to ordinary people is much lower. Criminals sell drugs on street corners, they don't sell guns like that.
You can if you amend the 2nd amendment, as the original poster suggested. Not a bad idea actually - you brought up Switzerland. Make it more like that.
Yeah, I doubt it. It's the CIA that does the dirty work overseas.
Are you claiming that there are no nutters there? Or that army training somehow helps prevent killing sprees?
If I was claiming those things, I'd have written them. Resist the temptation to put words in other people's mouths.
The only logical explanation is that there's some other difference here that explains why young Swiss males don't take their SIGs and go shoot at kids at the nearest kindergarten.
As you point out, the Swiss train them to use the guns, then restrict their use to only being used on official training, or for civil defence, never for leisure. American's buy their own guns on the understanding that they are used for leisure, or for personal defence.
The difference is pretty obvious. The Swiss treat holding their weapons as a duty to the state. Americans treat them as toys. The difference is respect.
It should also be pointed out that the Swiss system is one of strict gun control - high numbers of people holding weapons doesn't mean they are not strictly controlled. Not like America, which at best has ridiculously weak gun control. So the small number of gun homicides in Switzerland is not an argument against gun control.
There's no overlap. You just didn't comprehend what was written in the summary. 35% was of parents. 80% was of all people responding to the survey.
Hardly surprising that the subset of parents were slightly more in favour of filtering than the entire group, which included non-parents.
There's a huge number of comments on this story. Over 2000 so far. And the majority seem to be by the pro-gun lobby.
Right after a massacre.
It's like cockroaches scuttling around. They make me sick.
Do they? Switzerland has the highest number of fully automatic assault rifles in the hands of private citizens.
The difference between Switzerland and the USA is that the USA talks about a "well organised militia", whilst Switzerland actually has one.
Those Swiss fully automatic assault rifles are in the hands of people who have actually been trained by the government as a militia. In the US, they're owned by nutters.
You'll always have horrible stuff like the 22 children in the stabbing spree in China today
Notice the difference when there's low gun ownership, and thus the nutter has no gun: no one in that incident died.
Violent crime generally comes with poverty in densely populated areas.
Nonsense. The USA is the richest country in the world, and yet has one of the worst gun problems. It has the highest gun-violence per capita rate in the developed world.
The problem isn't poverty. The problem is too many of your people are fascinated by guns. Enough to make it politically difficult to restrict them.
Do a little more research on how easy it is to get a hold of a gun illegally, then come back and tell me whether or not locking down is going to resolve the issue.
Handguns are banned in the UK. But it is possible to get hold of them illegally. And yet the per capita gun murder rate is a fraction of the US.
Restrict guns. Restrict ammo. And make sure every bullet sold has a unique ID, logged to the purchaser. Those are far more rational ways to cut firearm related violence.
(The latter wouldn't help with suicidal massacres, but would help detection of lots of other gun homicides.)
Things like this happen because people with complexes who like weapons are allowed easy access to them.
If two or three or five armed people were there then one of them would likely have killed this lunatic before the death toll could rise to this level.
If zero armed people had been there, there wouldn't have been a massacre in the first place.
(Amongst developed countries.) Obviously there are third world countries that are even more stupid with guns.
Gun laws do nothing in making it harder for "fucking lunatics" to posess. There in lies the logical fallacy. It makes it for "fucking normal people" harder to posess, which is incidentily the root of the problem.
Given the USA has the highest per capita deaths by firearm, your theory clearly isn't working.
There was a massacre in Connecticut today.
It reminded me of a pervious massacre, by a right-wing libertarian from Norway. A man who liked guns and argued against gun control. A man who disliked blacks and arabs. A man that hated those on the left. A lonely man that wanted attention. A man that wrote at length about his terribly mistaken and warped view of the world.
You have quite a lot in common with Anders Breivik, don't you.
So, I'll try again. If there a 100% chance that something will happen at some point in time T1 as measured from a starting point T0 defined as now, every day between T0 and T1, chances of it happening that day increases a little bit.
And your try fails once again. That does not describe problem of asteroids hitting earth. It describes for example the day you die. A one off occurrence with time constraints. Asteroid impacts are not in that category.
It doesn't matter how many times you try this, you're still going to be wrong. Because your basic layman's feeling that an asteroid impact must become more probable if there wasn't one today is wrong. No argument, nor alternate way of looking at it will make it right. All those people that have told you that know more about probability than you do.
It appears stubbornness is a more important thing for you than looking ever more stupid, the more you post.
I am a right-winger
What's the cause and effect here? Are you a dumb moron because you're a right winger? Or do you believe in right wing politics because you're a dumb moron.
A rhetorical question of course. You're also a low self-monitor, so you don't realise how dumb you are.
If you want the complete situation to put yourself in, you have to imagine you're a scalper or grey marketeer, had already bought phones from the store, then been refused to buy any more. And had then tried to get around the rules by ordering online to pick up instore.
In that situation, you'd know exactly why they wouldn't let you pick them up.
You might continue to be an arsehole as she was, and refuse to leave the store, and continue to leave for 15 minutes after a policeman arrived. And then you might resist arrest. And if you too would have done all of that, then perhaps you too would have been tasered.
When I'm dancing and do a move in which either my or my partner's arm is folded behind our backs, it's very easy to accidentally strain a muscle, cause pain and risk damage.
None of which is the "breaking" of the arm you put in your post to which I replied.
As to muscular damage or pain, that's far more likely to occur when you struggle.
And if there's already muscular damage or pain, you're not going to be able to put up a struggle that's difficult for the policeman to overcome.
Sorry, but you simply not coming up with a credible excuse. She was clearly resisting arrest because she's an arsehole. She'd already proved that with her previous behaviour.
"Confronted" by a little Google logo?
You're quite insecure aren't you.
I know Apple's design standards. For example, unlike the piece of shit PC you bought, a Mac doesn't come with "Intel Inside" stickers, or the rest of the stickers, nor is it loaded up with crapware.
Apple has standards. You don't.
I dislike Apple as much as the next person
And your hatred is why your posts are so irrational.
That's closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Policemen face the prospect of injury every day, it's only reasonable for procedure to be put in place to minimise the risk.
Certainly it's disingenuous of the people who suggest the police have no risk when dealing with a 44 year old woman resisting arrest.
But I'm playing devils advocate, because I too do think that tazers tend to be used way too early.
Maybe they couldn't. But that doesn't excuse her resisting leaving the store, and later resisting arrest.
There is an asteroid A out there that will hit us at time T. Both A and T are well defined, and both A and T are deterministic, not random and they do not change over time. They are determined by the current orbital velocity and mass of A, Earth and other celestial bodies (who are also governed by orbital mechanics). Not random. Deterministic. So, T is set. Every day that is not T brings us closer to T in unknown increments.
OK, so frame the question like that. From the point of view of omnipotence (which we don't have, but for the sake of argument). Then your claim that the probability reduces each day that there's not an event is still wrong. Why? Because the probability is zero on each day before the predetermined time, and 100% on the day of the event.
it is due to our lack of information
If you believe in a pre-determined universe, yes. That's the first time you have said anything true. The probability is due to our lack of information about the future. We can come up with a probability per day by examining what has happened in the past. We do not have enough information to change the probability from day to day. (Discounting that at some stage an actual asteroid will appear in someone's telescope - we're talking probability here, not observation.) Whether or not an event happens today, from the information we have, it doesn't change the probability of an event tomorrow.
And if you'd ever studied probability you would know this.
I would hope that someone making it difficult to cuff them isn't guilty of "Resisting arrest". There's a fine line between "The policeman was hurting my arm and shoulder by trying to force it behind me, so I was trying to move to prevent him breaking my arm"
Of course it's resisting arrest. And unless you have something very wrong with your skeletal structure, having your arm put behind your back to where it is cuffed won't in any way be even a potential arm breaking move. And that sort of skeletal deformation would probably be pretty obvious.
That was the weakest excuse for resisting arrest I ever heard.