Not sure what both parties carrying guns would accomplish, except to make one or more parties into a fatality.
And the criminal ending up a fatality is a bad thing, because.....? The criminal is the one who made the decision that somebody was going to die when he decided to pull that knife or gun. At that point it's just a question of who.
But the few times when I have been mugged, me having any sort of weapon would have very quickly become the criminal having that weapon, along with my wallet and phone
Maybe you should learn some situational awareness so you won't get surprised like that in the future? Go take a self-defense class. You need not carry a gun to learn ways to defend yourself against those situations, although the gun certainly helps.
Should you have the right to kill someone because they want your wallet?
I would only kill someone if I believed my life was in danger. If someone pulls a gun or a knife on me then my life is in danger and his underlying motives (be it robbery or murder) don't really matter, do they?
I really dont think arming more stupid humans is the right way to go.
So what is the way to go? You'll never eliminate all crime. Criminals will always be armed with something. The only question is whether or not the citizenry should be able to defend themselves. I've yet to hear a compelling argument for why they shouldn't be able to.
What has this got to do with guns? You are aware that knives are weapons as well, I assume.
Where did I specifically mention guns? As I recall British law prohibits the plebs (err, citizens) from carrying anything that might be remotely useful for self-defense. They aren't even allowed to carry pepper spray the last time I checked.
And yes, I would think so. I think they might be even more violent if they knew that their victom was walking around with a weapon similar to theirs. Instead of saying "gimmy yo mony or I hurt ya!" They will attack and not ask, but take.
So your solution is to disarm the citizenry and make them dependent upon police response time and/or the good moral character of the criminal not to kill them? Let's play this debate from the other side of the fence: What compelling reason do you have to disarm people who aren't criminals? Is the freedom to keep and bear arms just a bit too much freedom for you?
While a lower violent crime rate in the UK is not an argument saying that outlawing guns lowers violent crime, I think it is a fairly strong argument that allowing everyone to own guns doesn't necessarily lower it either.
I suspect that we would both agree that the best way to lower crime is to address the underlying causes of it. You'll note how crime tends to go down when the economy is doing better and less people are pushed into desperate acts for example.
I also suspect that we would both agree that no matter how good of a job you do on paragraph a, you'll never be able to entirely eliminate violent crime. Once you accept this you have to decide if you want your citizenry to be able to defend themselves or if they should have to rely on the state to do it for them. Personally I want to be able to defend myself and am glad that I live in a country where that is possible.
The biggest argument against your reasoning, however, is your implied assumption that criminals use game theory to decide if it is rationally beneficial to commit their crime
*shrug*, I've seen studies of convicted criminals that suggest that one of the biggest fears they have is running into an armed victim that is able to resist their attack. Either way though I don't really have to justify my ownership of weapons in the United States. It's a Bill of Rights, not a Bill of Needs.
One of the messages touted around in England is that knife crime breeds knife crime. The children are carrying knives to protect themselves against other knife-wielding children. If you carry a knife, there's more chance of you using it.
Only if you consider self-defense to be a crime. If you are carrying around a knife/sword/gun/lightsaber and are a decent person why would you use it for any other reason?
But here guns are illegal and almost everyone is happy with that.
Outlawing hate speech would probably make "almost everyone" happy as well but that isn't a good justification to start infringing on civil liberties, IMHO.
In any case you reap what you sow -- your citizens are virtually defenseless against criminals wielding "weapons" that you'll never be able to take away unless you ban the consumption of meat. Congratulations.
but you do know that there are plenty of countries without guns where this issues aren't prevalent?
There are also plenty of countries with guns and a fairly low rate of criminal activity. There's also US States with liberal gun laws and lower crime rates than US States with strict gun laws. Perhaps the mere availability of guns doesn't cause crime and there are other underlying factors we should be addressing, like poverty?
What kills me is that if they wanted to rip off Khan and include the Romulans there were much better ways to go about it. Why not bring back Sela's character in some manner? Denise Crosby was as much of a part of TNG as anyone else and deserved to be included in the send off. Instead they invent some lame race that we've never heard about before and elect to have them led by a clone of Picard who wants to exterminate humanity for the glory of the Romulan empire even though the Romulans tortured him his whole life? WTF?
Berman needs to be taken outside and shot. Preferably with a Varon-T disruptor.
although, it makes sense in the context of the show... the aliens are supposedly a) all-powerful
But they weren't all-powerful. There were at least twoepisodes where it was revealed that you could use a plot devic^W^W"chroniton beam" to kill them. Yet the Dominion never thought to do this?
Then again, was Data's solution to the Borg problem in "Best of Both Worlds" any less contrived
Not in the context of that episode and what we knew about the Borg. It got pretty lame afterwards and I personally wish that Best of Both Worlds had been the last we saw of the Borg. At least DS9 stayed away from them, expect for the Pilot Episode, which was actually a good use of the existing back story IMHO.
And as for Sisko's role, well... you could just as easily level the same criticism against Picard in TNG leading the charge in any number of engagements.
Picard never commanded a fleet of 600+ ships or set Federation policy. Sisko seemed to be doing both as the war progressed. The size of the battles seemed at odds with continuity too. In the Best of Both Worlds Starfleet was only able to scrape together 40 ships to defend Earth but ten years later was regularly losing hundreds of ships at a time and was still able to continue the war effort? WTF?
It should be to use the setting as an environment in which one can then explore the human condition in a way that would otherwise be impossible. DS9 attempted to do that, exploring the decisions and compromises one must make during a time of war, and it did so better than, I think, any other other Trek, save for TNG.
Hey I'll grant you all that. And don't get me wrong -- I did enjoy DS9. It just got pretty hard to take seriously towards the end. For all the nit and grit of the war it still seemed too contrived -- Bajor never got devastated (indeed, after the first two seasons we forgot all about Bajor besides the wormhole aliens and some one-off episodes), the Dominion neatly withdrew from all of the Federation planets that it occupied without a fight and never made a second attempt at taking DS9 or ending the blockade of the wormhole. Then the female founder went from "We'll fight to the last man" to "I'll surrender and stand trial for my war crimes" after a three minute discussion with Odo.
I would have written it a lot differently. Have Bajor forced to pick sides -- maybe it even sides with the Dominion in the same manner that Finland sided with Nazi Germany in spite of being a Democracy -- have a Stalingrad fought on Federation soil (Betazed maybe?), have the Federation start conscripting it's citizens to try and offset the manpower advantage, have a pacifist Federation member try and sue for a separate peace (Vulcan maybe?) etc, etc, etc. There are many ways you could have done it better I think.
The two best ideas I've heard for a ST series are one about Section 31 (similar to stuff like Alias, but in Star Trek) and one about the 29th century with the timeships and all that.
A series about Section 31 could be pretty awesome if it was done right but anything involving time travel is a recipe for disaster and reset-button plots. Section 31 though -- think of some of the stories you could write with that. Maybe the Federation has it's own torture scandals? Maybe what they did to the Founders comes out at some point? Think of intrigue with the Tal Shiar.
but once the Dominion War plot arch started up, it went from good to truly great
Yes, if by "truly great" you mean bailed out with a plot device (wormhole aliens) and don't stop to question why Captain Sisko seemed to be single-handily running the Federation's war-effort, ranging from commanding a fleet of some 600 ships on his own to commanding a ground battle that could have been ended in two minutes if any of the Trek powers had the equivalent of machine guns or artillery. Are there really no infantry weapons bigger than rifles in the 24th century?
actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's pretty special effects
Fixed that for you.
while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted
That was actually one of the redeeming things about it. My favorite DS9 episodes were In the Pale Moonlight (Sisko and Garek assassinate a Romulan Senator to bring them into the war) and the various Maquis/Eddington episodes. Garek had the best character in the series (IMHO) and Eddington's critique of the Federation particularly damning:
"Why is the Federation so obsessed with the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism. Starships chase us through the Badlands and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators because one day they can take their "rightful place" on the Federation Council. You know In some ways you're even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious. You assimilate people and they don't even know it."
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really? At least as written by Gene Roddenberry it seems to border on communism. Even DS9 continued this trend to a certain point -- mentioning "transporter credits" in one episode. Apparently the government doles out ration coupons to control how often the citizenry can move about. Where's the individual freedom and liberty?
Yes. Generations utterly ruined Data's character for the sake of an "Oh.... shit!" joke, destroyed the Enterprise-D for the sake of an action scene and killed off Picard's family for the sake of a cheap shock and never bothered to explore the ramifications of this.
First Contact was an enjoyable standalone film but utterly destroyed whatever continuity we had from TNG for the sake of creating a single villain for the audience to focus on. It also didn't really do justice to Troi or Crusher. Actually come to think of it, none of the movies did them justice.
and Insurrection was pure Trek, albeit perhaps a bit too cheesy.
Perhaps? It was incredibly cheesy. And don't even get me started on Nemesis. This guy summarizes Nemesis way better than I could ever hope to.....
Two things:
1. Brent Spiner would have to lose some weight
2. They've got to get rid of Data's emotion chip. That's when Data lost his charm, I feel.
3. They've got to rip off the Spock story from "Search for Spock" to bring him back to life.
Fixed that for you;) Alternatively they could pretend that "All Good Things..." was the last real TNG story and all of the crappy movies never existed. I'd be just fine with that.....
That could work if it was well done, although personally I think DS9's plots got kind of stupid towards the end. There's also the matter of it being a blatant rip off of Babylon 5.....
or Voyager Movie or two...
Unless you are talking about V'ger I'm going to seriously question your sanity;)
Edison was one of the original patent/FUD trolls. A lot of people seem to think those tactics are new but in reality businesses have been engaging in them for a long time. Edison even went so far as to electrocute animals (including an elephant) during the "war of the currents" to try and scare people away from a competing product. He also tried to change the term from "electrocuted" to "Westinghoused".
The US financed the Wahhabi "freedom fighters" (mostly arabs) who the moment soviets were defeated turned on the local populace.
Bzzzt, wrong. Bin Ladin was mostly self-financing with a little bit of support from the Saudi Government. We financed the Afghani groups via Pakistan. I've never seen a single bit of evidence to prove this theory that we funded Bin Ladin himself and really wish people would stop repeating the claim without said evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what both parties carrying guns would accomplish, except to make one or more parties into a fatality.
And the criminal ending up a fatality is a bad thing, because.....? The criminal is the one who made the decision that somebody was going to die when he decided to pull that knife or gun. At that point it's just a question of who.
But the few times when I have been mugged, me having any sort of weapon would have very quickly become the criminal having that weapon, along with my wallet and phone
Maybe you should learn some situational awareness so you won't get surprised like that in the future? Go take a self-defense class. You need not carry a gun to learn ways to defend yourself against those situations, although the gun certainly helps.
Should you have the right to kill someone because they want your wallet?
I would only kill someone if I believed my life was in danger. If someone pulls a gun or a knife on me then my life is in danger and his underlying motives (be it robbery or murder) don't really matter, do they?
I really dont think arming more stupid humans is the right way to go.
So what is the way to go? You'll never eliminate all crime. Criminals will always be armed with something. The only question is whether or not the citizenry should be able to defend themselves. I've yet to hear a compelling argument for why they shouldn't be able to.
What has this got to do with guns? You are aware that knives are weapons as well, I assume.
Where did I specifically mention guns? As I recall British law prohibits the plebs (err, citizens) from carrying anything that might be remotely useful for self-defense. They aren't even allowed to carry pepper spray the last time I checked.
And yes, I would think so. I think they might be even more violent if they knew that their victom was walking around with a weapon similar to theirs. Instead of saying "gimmy yo mony or I hurt ya!" They will attack and not ask, but take.
So your solution is to disarm the citizenry and make them dependent upon police response time and/or the good moral character of the criminal not to kill them? Let's play this debate from the other side of the fence: What compelling reason do you have to disarm people who aren't criminals? Is the freedom to keep and bear arms just a bit too much freedom for you?
While a lower violent crime rate in the UK is not an argument saying that outlawing guns lowers violent crime, I think it is a fairly strong argument that allowing everyone to own guns doesn't necessarily lower it either.
I suspect that we would both agree that the best way to lower crime is to address the underlying causes of it. You'll note how crime tends to go down when the economy is doing better and less people are pushed into desperate acts for example.
I also suspect that we would both agree that no matter how good of a job you do on paragraph a, you'll never be able to entirely eliminate violent crime. Once you accept this you have to decide if you want your citizenry to be able to defend themselves or if they should have to rely on the state to do it for them. Personally I want to be able to defend myself and am glad that I live in a country where that is possible.
The biggest argument against your reasoning, however, is your implied assumption that criminals use game theory to decide if it is rationally beneficial to commit their crime
*shrug*, I've seen studies of convicted criminals that suggest that one of the biggest fears they have is running into an armed victim that is able to resist their attack. Either way though I don't really have to justify my ownership of weapons in the United States. It's a Bill of Rights, not a Bill of Needs.
One of the messages touted around in England is that knife crime breeds knife crime. The children are carrying knives to protect themselves against other knife-wielding children. If you carry a knife, there's more chance of you using it.
Only if you consider self-defense to be a crime. If you are carrying around a knife/sword/gun/lightsaber and are a decent person why would you use it for any other reason?
they should impose a tax on stabbing people.
Hey, it's how they got Capone ;)
Taxes increase the price of the knife, regardless of whether the knife is sold on the open or black market.
As evidenced by the fact that I can buy an eighth of fairly decent weed for about the cost of a bottle of gray goose. Oh wait.....
But here guns are illegal and almost everyone is happy with that.
Outlawing hate speech would probably make "almost everyone" happy as well but that isn't a good justification to start infringing on civil liberties, IMHO.
In any case you reap what you sow -- your citizens are virtually defenseless against criminals wielding "weapons" that you'll never be able to take away unless you ban the consumption of meat. Congratulations.
but you do know that there are plenty of countries without guns where this issues aren't prevalent?
There are also plenty of countries with guns and a fairly low rate of criminal activity. There's also US States with liberal gun laws and lower crime rates than US States with strict gun laws. Perhaps the mere availability of guns doesn't cause crime and there are other underlying factors we should be addressing, like poverty?
What has this got to do with guns?
Do you think violent crime would be so rampant if the criminals weren't assured of having unarmed victims?
I really hope you are being sarcastic. If you aren't, can I have some of what you are smoking?
You erroneously assume that logic comes into play with government.
Fixed that for you ;)
sucks that the UK government is punishing the citizenry for the acts of a few disturbed individuals.
I think they started that sometime ago.....
whereas a kid who buys lots of violent video games for his next-gen console and HDTV probably comes from a higher-income family.
Or knows how to use bittorrent and a soldering iron ;)
What is a person supposed to do now against someone who has a knife? Ask politely for them to stop?
Call the police. They should get there in 5 to 30 minutes, depending on where you live. What's the problem?
What kills me is that if they wanted to rip off Khan and include the Romulans there were much better ways to go about it. Why not bring back Sela's character in some manner? Denise Crosby was as much of a part of TNG as anyone else and deserved to be included in the send off. Instead they invent some lame race that we've never heard about before and elect to have them led by a clone of Picard who wants to exterminate humanity for the glory of the Romulan empire even though the Romulans tortured him his whole life? WTF?
Berman needs to be taken outside and shot. Preferably with a Varon-T disruptor.
although, it makes sense in the context of the show... the aliens are supposedly a) all-powerful
But they weren't all-powerful. There were at least two episodes where it was revealed that you could use a plot devic^W^W"chroniton beam" to kill them. Yet the Dominion never thought to do this?
Then again, was Data's solution to the Borg problem in "Best of Both Worlds" any less contrived
Not in the context of that episode and what we knew about the Borg. It got pretty lame afterwards and I personally wish that Best of Both Worlds had been the last we saw of the Borg. At least DS9 stayed away from them, expect for the Pilot Episode, which was actually a good use of the existing back story IMHO.
And as for Sisko's role, well... you could just as easily level the same criticism against Picard in TNG leading the charge in any number of engagements.
Picard never commanded a fleet of 600+ ships or set Federation policy. Sisko seemed to be doing both as the war progressed. The size of the battles seemed at odds with continuity too. In the Best of Both Worlds Starfleet was only able to scrape together 40 ships to defend Earth but ten years later was regularly losing hundreds of ships at a time and was still able to continue the war effort? WTF?
It should be to use the setting as an environment in which one can then explore the human condition in a way that would otherwise be impossible. DS9 attempted to do that, exploring the decisions and compromises one must make during a time of war, and it did so better than, I think, any other other Trek, save for TNG.
Hey I'll grant you all that. And don't get me wrong -- I did enjoy DS9. It just got pretty hard to take seriously towards the end. For all the nit and grit of the war it still seemed too contrived -- Bajor never got devastated (indeed, after the first two seasons we forgot all about Bajor besides the wormhole aliens and some one-off episodes), the Dominion neatly withdrew from all of the Federation planets that it occupied without a fight and never made a second attempt at taking DS9 or ending the blockade of the wormhole. Then the female founder went from "We'll fight to the last man" to "I'll surrender and stand trial for my war crimes" after a three minute discussion with Odo.
I would have written it a lot differently. Have Bajor forced to pick sides -- maybe it even sides with the Dominion in the same manner that Finland sided with Nazi Germany in spite of being a Democracy -- have a Stalingrad fought on Federation soil (Betazed maybe?), have the Federation start conscripting it's citizens to try and offset the manpower advantage, have a pacifist Federation member try and sue for a separate peace (Vulcan maybe?) etc, etc, etc. There are many ways you could have done it better I think.
The two best ideas I've heard for a ST series are one about Section 31 (similar to stuff like Alias, but in Star Trek) and one about the 29th century with the timeships and all that.
A series about Section 31 could be pretty awesome if it was done right but anything involving time travel is a recipe for disaster and reset-button plots. Section 31 though -- think of some of the stories you could write with that. Maybe the Federation has it's own torture scandals? Maybe what they did to the Founders comes out at some point? Think of intrigue with the Tal Shiar.
but once the Dominion War plot arch started up, it went from good to truly great
Yes, if by "truly great" you mean bailed out with a plot device (wormhole aliens) and don't stop to question why Captain Sisko seemed to be single-handily running the Federation's war-effort, ranging from commanding a fleet of some 600 ships on his own to commanding a ground battle that could have been ended in two minutes if any of the Trek powers had the equivalent of machine guns or artillery. Are there really no infantry weapons bigger than rifles in the 24th century?
actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's pretty special effects
Fixed that for you.
while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted
That was actually one of the redeeming things about it. My favorite DS9 episodes were In the Pale Moonlight (Sisko and Garek assassinate a Romulan Senator to bring them into the war) and the various Maquis/Eddington episodes. Garek had the best character in the series (IMHO) and Eddington's critique of the Federation particularly damning:
"Why is the Federation so obsessed with the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism. Starships chase us through the Badlands and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators because one day they can take their "rightful place" on the Federation Council. You know In some ways you're even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious. You assimilate people and they don't even know it."
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really? At least as written by Gene Roddenberry it seems to border on communism. Even DS9 continued this trend to a certain point -- mentioning "transporter credits" in one episode. Apparently the government doles out ration coupons to control how often the citizenry can move about. Where's the individual freedom and liberty?
Were all of them crap?
Yes. Generations utterly ruined Data's character for the sake of an "Oh.... shit!" joke, destroyed the Enterprise-D for the sake of an action scene and killed off Picard's family for the sake of a cheap shock and never bothered to explore the ramifications of this.
First Contact was an enjoyable standalone film but utterly destroyed whatever continuity we had from TNG for the sake of creating a single villain for the audience to focus on. It also didn't really do justice to Troi or Crusher. Actually come to think of it, none of the movies did them justice.
and Insurrection was pure Trek, albeit perhaps a bit too cheesy.
Perhaps? It was incredibly cheesy. And don't even get me started on Nemesis. This guy summarizes Nemesis way better than I could ever hope to.....
Two things:
1. Brent Spiner would have to lose some weight
2. They've got to get rid of Data's emotion chip. That's when Data lost his charm, I feel.
3. They've got to rip off the Spock story from "Search for Spock" to bring him back to life.
Fixed that for you ;) Alternatively they could pretend that "All Good Things..." was the last real TNG story and all of the crappy movies never existed. I'd be just fine with that.....
I'd have loved to get a DS9
That could work if it was well done, although personally I think DS9's plots got kind of stupid towards the end. There's also the matter of it being a blatant rip off of Babylon 5.....
or Voyager Movie or two...
Unless you are talking about V'ger I'm going to seriously question your sanity ;)
And not by Edison, who just got the patent...
Edison was one of the original patent/FUD trolls. A lot of people seem to think those tactics are new but in reality businesses have been engaging in them for a long time. Edison even went so far as to electrocute animals (including an elephant) during the "war of the currents" to try and scare people away from a competing product. He also tried to change the term from "electrocuted" to "Westinghoused".
The US financed the Wahhabi "freedom fighters" (mostly arabs) who the moment soviets were defeated turned on the local populace.
Bzzzt, wrong. Bin Ladin was mostly self-financing with a little bit of support from the Saudi Government. We financed the Afghani groups via Pakistan. I've never seen a single bit of evidence to prove this theory that we funded Bin Ladin himself and really wish people would stop repeating the claim without said evidence.
Depends on whether or not Microsoft lobbyists were involved in writing the bill ;) If they weren't 8% of $0 = $0. If they were then 8% of $0 = $1,000.
You can tax my porn when you pry it from my wet sticky fingers ;)
and that New York is considering taxing downloads of all kinds.