I'm an attorney. My job frequently involves trying to figure out what the hell the law is when legislators don't do their damn job of making it clear.
And that's not the point at all. The discussion is about the use and value of firearms [and other weapons] as self defense, and the advantages and disadvantages of an armed society. The law exists because we determine what's good (we think) and codify it. We wouldn't put a law on the books that says "Murder ugly girls" because that... would be bad.
These arguments are more important than the law. They're also highly theoretical. Fortunately laws exist for a reason and some assumptions can be made--for example, we're talking about tools of death, and the law makes unjiustifiable homicide illegal. The law makes some provisions for self-defense, because we'd rather have an attempted murder end with the attempted murderer dead than with some single mother dead by murder-rape and so if she stabs him in the throat that's maybe less ideal but we don't really care all that much.
Inside all that, you have to decide if you're going to let people have guns, and who you're going to let have guns--actually the same thing, because 'who' could be 'nobody' (which covers 'if'). To do that, you have to decide who is the dangerous element, and how to reduce their access or how to make them less dangerous. Obviously, criminals are a dangerous element; non-criminals are dangerous due to lack of skill, and so training makes them less dangerous. Gun registration increases accountability.
At a point the argument tends to come down to allowing nobody access to guns or allowing "law-abiding citizens" access to guns. So now all we're down to is weeding out the "criminals" from the "non-criminals," which classically we've done by assuming that mostly anyone without a history of psychological problems or violent crime is a 'law-abiding citizen'. If you want to look at cost-benefit, you need to make some tricky adjustments: 'law-abiding citizens' aren't the people we gave guns, but rather the people who remain 'law-abiding'. That means if we arm 1000 'law-abiding citizens' and 10 of them commit crimes with guns, what we did was arm 990 'law-abiding citizens' and mistakenly arm 10 'criminals'.
So, given that, the legislature meets to decide on gun laws. Their question is: do the 990 armed law-abiding citizens improve the situation enough to offset the problem caused by the 10 now-armed 'criminals'? Another good question is: would the 10 'criminals' have had the drive and opportunity to obtain firearms in the first place? We know criminals can; the question is both how many, and of course motivation. Face it: sometimes a bad man won't go and get himself a gun, but if you make it legal and easy to get a gun he WILL go and get himself a gun and then do bad things with it.
These discussions aren't for the benefit of lawyers. The arguments over guns are centered around what the law SHOULD be. That's not the lawyer's job; it's not the judge's job; it's the jury's and the legislature's job to decide what the law SHOULD be.
Just because you dislike or don't understand something doesn't render it "loaded." I'm tempted to give you a lmgtfy link but I'll play it classier here.
So according to that definition, if a thing is well and good and you write a defensive statement explaining why it's well and good, you're an apologist? Like, if I wrote a piece about why laws that say premeditated murder is illegal are good and important, I'm a murder legislation apologist?
People aren't that quick and flexible and organized. When the first crops fail there will be a dip in available food, and then panic. Half-empty supermarket shelves lead to a mad buying rush, and empty markets. That leads to riots, fire, destruction, disrupted distribution.
I know this from experience: it happened here two years ago, and that was just from one day of rain; people went out to "stock up" for a big storm, the supermarket shelves were visibly understocked after that, so everyone rushed to the markets to buy everything else. Then, they rioted, smashed windows, tipped over shelves in aisles, and the markets had to close for a week for repairs. The surrounding neighborhoods were unaffected, so people drove out to get food.
I always have a survival stock for several weeks. I like stews and I can them like a motherfucker, so I've got a pantry full of oxtail stew and pumpkin soup and such. Also lots of flour 'cause I make my own bread. Lots of Brita filters--a year's supply, they're like half as much if you buy 10 at once than if you buy 3 at once--so I have clean water despite municipal supply issues (high lead content). I make beer but don't drink a lot and don't like high alcohol content beers, so oddly enough I have a cellar supply of water--lower alcohol beers and cider (just apple juice + english cider yeast, something like 3% ABV).
Obviously, I didn't notice the extremely temporary food shortage. A month or two out would be bad for me. All these "survival" people stocking food like crazy might last a year on their grain, if people don't realize they have all this food in the first week. All these people who bought land so they can have a farm think that their security force consisting of Farmer John, his wife, and some shotguns is going to protect their interests from starving rioters; won't happen.
If the surrounding neighborhoods hadn't been unaffected (people here are uneducated and rowdy), food distribution disruption from the panic buying would have lead to wide-spread food distribution disruption. Let's say the world food supply dips because suddenly crops fail--people don't really look and say, "Oh climate change, next year I need to plant beans"; they plant wheat and the wheat fails to grow, and they scratch their heads. They do it again next year, because they're retarded (this is happening right now in Texas, but the drought is actually over so it should work; they threw seed so many times hoping for rain and no rain came). Then they go, "Uh, need a new crop."
In the mean time, food is scarce. Not quite scarce enough that we can't ration it around, but there's a visible supply sag. The problem here is the mass of people on this planet go, "OH NO WE ALL GONNA DIE!" Then they start rioting and damaging the food distribution system. If they can get close to the farmers, they'll steal all the grain (needed to plant new grain) and slaughter the livestock for food. What now?
The point is if things shift enough that we have to reorganize the global food production and distribution system, very bad things will happen in the process. It's doable, it'll work, but a lot of stupid shit will happen along the way and a great many people will die. With that in mind, have you noticed we're trying to stop the change rather than analyze it and adjust ahead of time to avoid such panic?
Canada is huge, but our politics are a lot more nationalistic than the US. The concept of 'state' rights is not so important here, which I suppose is why Quebec wants to secede.
My point is cultural, not political. Like Russia, which is an insane nation-state that needs to die, but under which the Russian people have a strong and proud culture that is done a great disservice by its government. The Russians don't give a shit about Russia; they don't like how Russia operates, some of them outright flee Russia, but they sure as hell don't surrender their culture to their corrupt government. To the Russians, Russia is not about the state of Russia; it is about the people.
It is the same everywhere, although we're more nationalist in many places. We talk about USA or Canada or UK, but the truth is our neighbors are different than our fellow countrymen hundreds of miles away. This is as much true of Canada as the US, and even of US states.
As for the right and reason for the people to keep and bear arms, I say it is a deterrent. I say this because a strong people is better off than a weak people. People who cannot defend themselves are wholly concerned with their own safety; they are too weak to make a difference, they are too weak to help others, they can barely help themselves, and they feel no such social responsibility. I feel there is value in arming oneself with knives, swords, sticks, nunchaku, or well-trained hand-to-hand combat; a firearm is not a magical god machine, although at appreciable range it's got better reach than a spear (even if you can throw the spear, the gun can aim and fire more quickly).
I also feel there is little sense in disarming people of firearms in particular, at least in part because of the perceived and actual advantages and disadvantages of a gun. You CAN bring a knife to a gun fight and be at an advantage over bringing a gun, but that's a special situation--closed quarters when the gun isn't drawn at you yet, which by the way if the gun is drawn you're best off not reaching for your gun in response because you get shot. If it comes down to a guy attacking me in an alley or in my home and he reaches for a gun, when we're grappling and he's grabbing at the hand I've got a knife in he's going to get stabbed in the hand; I'm much better off here, as long as that barrel's pointed somewhere else. In any other situation, either no weapon is any use (gun pointed at your face? Try not to do anything stupid), or perhaps having a firearm of your own would be REALLY useful right about now.
Nevertheless, I feel that a requirement of carrying a weapon should be existing and continuing training--maybe not for knives and polearms (like the Jo), but for flails (nunchaku included) and swords and firearms you absolutely must be trained, because these weapons are very hard to control (bullets and flails go off in random directions, swords are huge blades with long reach).
That all said, a people who are strong--who may face a fight, but who are not entirely helpless, who have something to pit against their attacker--are easier to work with. When you tell people we must stand together, we must stand proud, we must protect ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, you have something there to work with. These people are no longer convinced that anyone who raises a fist is terrifying and insurmountable; they believe in their own strength. We say that with power comes responsibility--the truth is that power can convince us of responsibility. Strength before weakness: we are all weak at times, and so we must be strong and use our strength for the good of others; power does not make one fit to rule, but rather fit to serve. When those of us who are strong help those who are weak, we will ourselves not have to worry as much about the times we are weak, for someone may come to our own aid.
Such thinking is completely alien to a people who are at all times incapable of protecting themselves. Just like how the poor
Oh, it will. The political interests won't be able to supply enough food to quell mass riots, but not enough to let people get too comfortable. The mass riots will be damning.
Civilization, not species. Gas stations, air ports, police, fire, medical care, etc suddenly cease functioning because of food shortages everywhere. A lot of people die. A bunch of other people get a better life, some others work out how to adapt. Eventually the food supply shifts and civilization branches out again.
Well, it's going to raise the sea level by 20 feet. 2/3 of the earth's surface is covered with water, by 20 feet. Honestly, it's diameter of the earth at sea level, area of a sphere of diameter plus 40 feet minus the current diameter, that's the volume of water added. That's a lot of water. There's also quite a lot in the ocean though... I don't know the impact on salinity. It may be negligible. On the other hand, stuff on the surface of an ice cap may prefer non-salty ice.
True, but the changes will cause problems for civilization even if the earth becomes lush and habitable again. Where we can grow food changes, which will severely disrupt food production and distribution. Communications and shipping networks would become more/less viable, etc.
He means that if the ice floats, it floats because 3kg of water is displaced by a 3kg ice block that's bigger than 3kg water. When you melt the ice, you have 3kg water, which takes up exactly the amount of space that was displaced. So if you have a liter of ice above water and two liters below water, if you melt all three liters it suddenly takes up two liters of space (the density of ice versus water is not on that ratio, but it does work out that way: it's X big when frozen, and Y big when melted, where Y is the volume of water displaced when it floats in water).
What's funny is if the entire north pole melted, it wouldn't affect sea levels in the least. Not one millimeter. Greenland, on the other hand, would bring the sea level up about 20 feet or so.
There's the concern for the ocean temperature increasing, causing expansion and making water more voluminous and thus causing the same amount of water (mass) to rise; but I don't believe it. The south pole is never going to melt--it simply cannot. It never comes above -37C down there; if it gets hot enough to melt, the rest of the earth is molten slag and we don't really care much about rising sea levels. However, there will always be a free flow water border against antarctic ice. This causes antarctic ice to melt. Since the whole ice cap can't and won't melt, this melting simply draws heat away--80 times as much heat as a 1 degree difference in the same mass of water, in fact, plus the temperature of ice (so -37C would draw 37 degrees PLUS 80 degrees = 117 degrees gram for gram from water). The ice at the border of these temperature zones should be warmed to about 0C, so talk about 80 times the mass equivalence of 0C water.
In short, antarctica will keep the oceans cool as long as ocean water circulates past antarctica.
So the solution is to desalinate water in antarctica and dump it on the ice cap. We need to move basically the mass of the ice on Greenland as it melts--not insubstantial. Note that the new ice must be stored above sea level, because bobbing in the sea it will be expanded and will displace a large mass of water. Such ice, once melted, takes up less space and so the part above the water doesn't become a rise in sea level. Of course, while this means ice bergs and ice caps don't raise sea levels when they melt, dropping additional such ice into the water DOES raise sea levels, hence why it must be sequestered above sea level.
I like the part about sticking your head out the window only to see that nothing is happening, while all my life I've been told that the ice caps will melt and sea levels will rise a meter or more immediately when it starts, and enough to flood out the US east and west coast for hundreds of miles in eventually. Why is some part of Florida not underwater?
Shows that you don't have a clue what this is about. The advertisers don't care who you are. They care about _what_ you are, gathered together from little bits and pieces of information.
Yet everyone has their panties in a knit because an advertiser has a cookie that notates your behavior, doesn't know shit about you but does know what you probably like. They equate this to advertisers reading your facebook posts, your e-mail, etc, and building a profile about you like Fat Boy in Shibumi.
England actually is an empire made by invading and usurping a number of countries. Canada is fucking huge and split into provinces.
I was always told Carrol ran on significantly less income. The $11k number is news to me.
My point was more that an argument of X vs Y, therefor X = Y is short-sighted. As you've pointed out, different communities, different performance. Also Texas is big--Texas and Congress have the standing option to break Texas into five separate states. California as well, southern California is a completely separate culture from northern California in much the same way France is not Germany. Pull up Maryland's numbers for Baltimore, Montgomery County, Prince George's County, and Carrol County. Pull up New York's numbers for New York City, Boston, and Long Island (all the places I can name in New York State). Texas... Dallas and Austin, name some big cities and some more rural areas. The only city I can name in California is LA.
Guns aren't a solution, but I think disarming people is short-sighted and exemplifies poor judgment. That it's true that arming everyone doesn't solve all our problems, it's not automatically true that attempting to disarm everyone (or even doing so successfully) causes none. When I was in middle school, they told us that if somebody attacks you, you should duck down on the ground and cover your head until they stop; this to my senses is less optimal than teaching everyone boxing, and when some asstard whoops some kid he's got a few missing teeth or a busted arm for the fight he just "won". There's little to no physical, bodily risk for going around beating people and stealing their stuff.
Your actions have to have consequences. Consequences must be inherent: the police are not inherent consequences, they're not around and nobody sees what happened and they have to figure out who you are and then they have to find you. Nobody commits a crime because they can't get away with it. It is, thus assumed, impossible to make people "play nice" out of the goodness of their heart or little ponies. Effectively, we must present a threat, and then we must propose a better way which avoids said threat. The threat has to be effective.
Shooting a motherfucker that's in your house coming at you and your kids with a samurai sword is not a crime.
What if it's just someone in your house running at you but you're not sure if he has a samurai sword? What if he's not really running at you, but just walking faster than you're comfortable with? What if he's not really walking toward you, but he's in your house and you don't know why and now you're feeling twitchy?
You're attempting to pre-quantify all possible scenarios. That works in computers... well, not really; a lot of input validation is "X Y ad Z are valid; all else is strange and scary." The world isn't so black and white.
When you take a martial art, they teach you about fighting. They teach you that reacting too late is often fatal. Your first clue that someone is trying to harm you isn't open hostility, a weapon in hand, or a charge; it's the way they look at you, the way they move, the way they stand. Their body language is your first clue. Someone who makes you feel threatened in any way is a potential threat; you should at that point be ready for an attack. Whether that's simply more attention, a hand on your knife or gun, or anything else is up to your assessment of the threat at that time.
Normally, every person that looks at you shouldn't threaten you, otherwise you're paranoid as a motherfucker. Maybe a little creepy, sure, but not really dangerous. However there comes a point where you must decide if an advance is benign or hostile, and what level of threat it presents. These decisions have to be made QUICKLY; false positives can lead to excessive force in self-defense, false negatives lead to NOT defending yourself and getting hurt or killed. Both, unfortunately, happen quite a bit.
The real question is: what better way do you propose? The police can't escort every single citizen around everywhere to make sure they play nice. People need to defend themselves. I can kill a man with a drinking straw or a pencil, though I'm much more effective with my bare hands or a knife. That's not really great when a firearm is involved at range; in closed quarters, I'll take my bare hands against a guy with a gun. At range? Arms are too short to box with God.
How do we deal with the criminal element who manages access to guns illegally? How do we propose self-defense is to be metered? When is it proposed that a person may reasonably react violently to a perceived threat?
It's all well and good for you to be a gun apologist, but don't be intellectually dishonest in the process.
What's with this "apologist" thing lately? It's like people wanted to find a word that says, "Well, this stuff is wrong and evil and bad, and you're saying sorry for it being wrong and evil and bad and for people doing it." Loaded wording.
How is this news? If we had a "high" risk of any kind of violent crime, population would be dropping off rather quickly. Consider it takes about 12 years for a human child to become fertile for sexual reproduction, plus almost 1 year in the womb, and really we don't let people boink them until they're 18 (or 16, ish), and even still around 24, 28, 30, etc is more usual for having a child. It takes about 25 years for one generation to produce the next? What would 25 years of wearing down the current generation do to the population? In 25 years we'd lose half the population if you were only 97.25% likely to survive 1 year without being murdered.
We're inherently arguing over something quite low risk. In my city, for example, you're 98.875% likely to live for 25 years without being murdered. 99.95% for one year.
That doesn't mean that changing the climate won't reduce the risk of violent crime. 300 murders per year in a city of a population of 660,000 is different than 50 murders, or 5 murders. Also, personally, my house has battering ram marks on the back door; I have a fucking awesome steel and hardwood back door in a sturdy door frame, so it's taken a dozen home invasion attempts involving a heavy kinetic mass and still hasn't flinched. I don't know anybody, I have no friends, I have steel bars on my windows and security doors. Me and the neighbors, we get along; these people banging on my door, they don't know me, I just happen to be in the wrong place.
That politicians tote and twist the "law-abiding citizens" statement to indicate that they KNOW who is and isn't going to commit a crime in the future has no bearing on the actual argument. What's important is probability. Just like I'm 98.875% likely to live here for 25 more years without getting shot, it's also--let's say, and this is made up for illustrative purposes--99.95% likely that arming a particular currently believed "law-abiding citizen" will not result in a violent crime being committed with the given weapon. That makes it 0.05% likely that said citizen will, in fact, turn out to be a criminal and shoot someone because he's mad his penis is too small. Okay, but 99.95% of the people we gave guns are wandering around with guns, and some very small fraction (a dozen or so) heard this gunshot a half a block away, and are now all armed and ready. If this guy comes out shooting at everyone because he's an insane whack job, someone will cap him.
It's kind of untenable to assume that even 50% of our population would get guns and start shooting at innocents. I mean, in that case, really, we don't have a viable society. 99.95% may be high, or it may be low--it could be 99.97% would be well-behaved and not use their guns for murder; it could be more of a 95% thing. You've increased the harmlessly (or helpfully, we hope) armed citizenry by a large number and the harmfully armed criminal citizenry by a smaller number--that's a predictable effect. The argument here is solely over whether or not this creates more or less murder.
In theory, it's perfectly okay to give guns to so-called "law-abiding citizens." In fact, it's okay to give guns to convicted felons, pederasts, and escaped serial murderers. As long as they're not going to murder anyone else, and just use the weapon as a defensive weapon or a white knighter, we're all better off with them armed and none's the worse except the criminals.
More importantly, in theory you want to keep guns away from people who will use them to commit murder. Murder is defined as an unjustifiable homicide, i.e. a homicide where a rational person wouldn't have determined that lethal force was necessary under those circumstances. It's justifiable if a rational person would determine lethal force is unnecessary as an observer or as a time-distant observer (i.e. hindsight), but where at that point in time the person would have lacked such judgment (for example, while under attack by someone with a knife, by which you could easily disarm them by hand, but at the time there is someone behind you and you fear that you can't evade the blade without it causing fatal harm to another person--but it "should" be blindingly obvious that bringing your arm in and up will easily clear the bystanders. Maybe you shoot this guy in the face instead, because at that exact moment you're just not that awesome).
We can't predict individuals. We can somewhat predict groups and society as a whole. For our purposes, then, we decide that people who have been law-abiding in the past and who do not have anger management issues or a history of violence are probably not going to walk around shooting people with their new toy. We tend to assume that violent convicts aren't trustworthy with weapons. Sometimes the violent con is better than we want to believe and has grown as a person; sometimes the nice person is just a really mean fucker on the inside, or just snaps one day. It's hit and miss. In any case, there is the attempt to get guns out of the hands of the bad ones.
In the end, the numbers that we care about aren't how many people were lawful before guns and became unlawful. The numbers we care about are how many people with guns used them in a lawful, socially acceptable, economically advantageous manner (i.e. the saving of innocent life is positive; the destruction of innocent life is negative; thus economically if we have more people safe and alive now than otherwise, we did it right). All other measurements are a matter of analysis--how many of our expected "law-abiding citizens" turned out as criminals? How many of the actually "law-abiding citizens" performed direct heroic acts? What level of deterrent did an armed citizenry provide? These are interesting numbers. The most interesting, however, is "how many innocent lives should have been lost given predictive trends, and how many were actually lost?" If more were lost than predicted, something is wrong; if fewer were lost, something is better than before.
Your argument is attempting to provide that nobody should have a gun legally because you just can't know that a specific individual won't use it for crime. My argument is that you CAN know that criminals will obtain guns illegally, and you CAN know that a subset of people who have guns will use them for legal purposes of defense of themselves and neighbors, and that arming these citizens is more ideal than not arming them. All other factors are other arguments--such as an armed citizenry being a dangerous climate for violent crime, a deterrent, etc. Criminals tend to move to or develop where crime is easier and less risky; that's great, but even if it weren't true we'd still be at an advantage having a strong, armed non-criminal citizenry.
The problem here is the US isn't a country, it's a republic made up of tiny countries. More importantly, it's just immense with a varied culture--that is, parts of California are different than other parts of California, and same Texas, and a few other states.
Isolate various areas and you'll find that the correlation is very different. Let's talk about gun proliferation in Baltimore vs DC vs Detroit vs Dallas vs Austin vs Carrol County (MD). It's well known that gun proliferation in Baltimore has lead to a lot of murder, while Carrol County has ridiculously low crime. It's also, interestingly, well known that Baltimore at $13k/student per year supplies one of the shittiest school systems in the country, while Carrol County's school system at $5000 per student per year supplies one of the best. We can't, thus, justify that gun proliferation increases or decreases crime; there's a stronger argument that reducing school funding increases school performance, which of course is silly.
No, 'law-abiding' is intended to mean that the citizens are lawful and use guns for lawful use. They're criminals when they commit crimes. Shooting a motherfucker that's in your house coming at you and your kids with a samurai sword is not a crime.
Logical process works pretty well, but doesn't always cut it. Then again, a lot of "researched scientific facts" passed around in "education" are dogmatic bullshit, to the point that experts in the field don't believe them. Sometimes, experts in the field believe the dogmatic bullshit, and are regularly proven wrong, and nobody cares. For example: "Security always makes things harder" is a core concept in computer security. I've seen someone argue that ssh is inherently harder than telnet because, get this, you have to re-train telnet users to type 'ssh' instead of 'telnet'. What?
No, I have a functional human brain and those are capable of emulating other functional human brains. It's a critical socialization skill, granted my social skills are crap--I'm slow and work with masses and general trends rather than individuals, and I don't lie (though I get a lot of specific data wrong and have to keep learning) and have too much of a conscience.
Interestingly, a large part of human behavior is concealing or altering the truth, including projecting false feelings--the dating scene is impossible, for example, if you're always up-front that you really don't have any serious feelings for one girl over another, but this one seems nice and it's a good chance and you've accepted that you have to close one opportunity to open another and so you're going to date her. Seriously, I've met three girls that I was interested in because, for whatever reason, nobody else would do and I just REALLY wanted that particular girl, and you know even super-studs and plain old normal people have a LOT of misses among the dozen or so girlfriends they have. That behavior is... incorrect, and rather extreme.
In the same way, a lot of human behavior involves projecting an interest in things you don't half care about; confidence you don't have; and just over-stating your opinions. This is the core of sales and marketing. This is why people talk tough, go through with things they're shaky on but they look like they believe their own moronic bullshit, and then wind up upside down in the air on a motorcycle heading for a mound of dirt and mud like a retard with wings. People want to fit in, want to be accepted, respected, and rewarded. Dating a girl you don't honestly care about but telling her you do is a good way to get sex--doubly so if you're well aware that the relationship is much more temporary than you're saying, because you can play the I-have-a-girlfriend chip on chicks at the bar and nail some floozies. Hanging out with your guy friends drinking shitty beer and watching football is great even if you don't like football, because your guy friends would think you're lame otherwise and "male bonding" is about being the coolest guy in the group. It just goes on.
People think so much about what others think about them. It's pretty much built-in. I'm not saying there aren't crazy people, or even that people aren't over-confident or so insecure that they will do things that should frighten them because they're more afraid of being scared. I'm just saying, you know, the more you think the people around you WILL find you and WILL kill you if you do something, the more terrifying doing that something becomes. If it's just "that guy probably has a gun," you engineer the situation to where he can't use it...maybe just shoot him outright. Nobody else is going to come looking. If it's more "everyone in town is going to have their gun out when they hear the gunshot, they're going to look for people leaving the area, the police will NEVER stop looking for me," and so on, there is no way in hell you're going to commit crimes with a gun--and if you mug someone who has a gun they might SHOOT YOU so maybe you won't do that at all.
Your brain is going to try to figure out how to interact with these people; your goals might be shitty and criminal, but if everyone's behavior just screams "WE WILL FIND YOU AND WE WILL KILL YOU," you're not going to do shit like that. Not unless something is severely wrong with you. Being a "criminal" isn't wrong, strictly speaking; it's viable if you can do it without getting caught and it supports your life in a way that's acceptable. Some of us don't care about plush couches. Some of us aren't even driven much plainly by sex; others are ALWAYS thinking about sex, to a ridiculous degree. Problem comes in when you face something where every indication says what in your life you require to be "comfortable" is destroyed, and you do it anyway--at that point, something is wrong with you.
Maybe I have it backwards. Or it was Missouri. Look there's so much data in my head I'm losing track; this is not my field and I only care insofar as I don't do stupid shit like decide "Oh X immediately and simply means Y so we should stop X."
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Rocks are fine, it's the trees tha' are oot ta get ye.
I'm an attorney. My job frequently involves trying to figure out what the hell the law is when legislators don't do their damn job of making it clear.
And that's not the point at all. The discussion is about the use and value of firearms [and other weapons] as self defense, and the advantages and disadvantages of an armed society. The law exists because we determine what's good (we think) and codify it. We wouldn't put a law on the books that says "Murder ugly girls" because that ... would be bad.
These arguments are more important than the law. They're also highly theoretical. Fortunately laws exist for a reason and some assumptions can be made--for example, we're talking about tools of death, and the law makes unjiustifiable homicide illegal. The law makes some provisions for self-defense, because we'd rather have an attempted murder end with the attempted murderer dead than with some single mother dead by murder-rape and so if she stabs him in the throat that's maybe less ideal but we don't really care all that much.
Inside all that, you have to decide if you're going to let people have guns, and who you're going to let have guns--actually the same thing, because 'who' could be 'nobody' (which covers 'if'). To do that, you have to decide who is the dangerous element, and how to reduce their access or how to make them less dangerous. Obviously, criminals are a dangerous element; non-criminals are dangerous due to lack of skill, and so training makes them less dangerous. Gun registration increases accountability.
At a point the argument tends to come down to allowing nobody access to guns or allowing "law-abiding citizens" access to guns. So now all we're down to is weeding out the "criminals" from the "non-criminals," which classically we've done by assuming that mostly anyone without a history of psychological problems or violent crime is a 'law-abiding citizen'. If you want to look at cost-benefit, you need to make some tricky adjustments: 'law-abiding citizens' aren't the people we gave guns, but rather the people who remain 'law-abiding'. That means if we arm 1000 'law-abiding citizens' and 10 of them commit crimes with guns, what we did was arm 990 'law-abiding citizens' and mistakenly arm 10 'criminals'.
So, given that, the legislature meets to decide on gun laws. Their question is: do the 990 armed law-abiding citizens improve the situation enough to offset the problem caused by the 10 now-armed 'criminals'? Another good question is: would the 10 'criminals' have had the drive and opportunity to obtain firearms in the first place? We know criminals can; the question is both how many, and of course motivation. Face it: sometimes a bad man won't go and get himself a gun, but if you make it legal and easy to get a gun he WILL go and get himself a gun and then do bad things with it.
These discussions aren't for the benefit of lawyers. The arguments over guns are centered around what the law SHOULD be. That's not the lawyer's job; it's not the judge's job; it's the jury's and the legislature's job to decide what the law SHOULD be.
Just because you dislike or don't understand something doesn't render it "loaded." I'm tempted to give you a lmgtfy link but I'll play it classier here.
So according to that definition, if a thing is well and good and you write a defensive statement explaining why it's well and good, you're an apologist? Like, if I wrote a piece about why laws that say premeditated murder is illegal are good and important, I'm a murder legislation apologist?
People aren't that quick and flexible and organized. When the first crops fail there will be a dip in available food, and then panic. Half-empty supermarket shelves lead to a mad buying rush, and empty markets. That leads to riots, fire, destruction, disrupted distribution.
I know this from experience: it happened here two years ago, and that was just from one day of rain; people went out to "stock up" for a big storm, the supermarket shelves were visibly understocked after that, so everyone rushed to the markets to buy everything else. Then, they rioted, smashed windows, tipped over shelves in aisles, and the markets had to close for a week for repairs. The surrounding neighborhoods were unaffected, so people drove out to get food.
I always have a survival stock for several weeks. I like stews and I can them like a motherfucker, so I've got a pantry full of oxtail stew and pumpkin soup and such. Also lots of flour 'cause I make my own bread. Lots of Brita filters--a year's supply, they're like half as much if you buy 10 at once than if you buy 3 at once--so I have clean water despite municipal supply issues (high lead content). I make beer but don't drink a lot and don't like high alcohol content beers, so oddly enough I have a cellar supply of water--lower alcohol beers and cider (just apple juice + english cider yeast, something like 3% ABV).
Obviously, I didn't notice the extremely temporary food shortage. A month or two out would be bad for me. All these "survival" people stocking food like crazy might last a year on their grain, if people don't realize they have all this food in the first week. All these people who bought land so they can have a farm think that their security force consisting of Farmer John, his wife, and some shotguns is going to protect their interests from starving rioters; won't happen.
If the surrounding neighborhoods hadn't been unaffected (people here are uneducated and rowdy), food distribution disruption from the panic buying would have lead to wide-spread food distribution disruption. Let's say the world food supply dips because suddenly crops fail--people don't really look and say, "Oh climate change, next year I need to plant beans"; they plant wheat and the wheat fails to grow, and they scratch their heads. They do it again next year, because they're retarded (this is happening right now in Texas, but the drought is actually over so it should work; they threw seed so many times hoping for rain and no rain came). Then they go, "Uh, need a new crop."
In the mean time, food is scarce. Not quite scarce enough that we can't ration it around, but there's a visible supply sag. The problem here is the mass of people on this planet go, "OH NO WE ALL GONNA DIE!" Then they start rioting and damaging the food distribution system. If they can get close to the farmers, they'll steal all the grain (needed to plant new grain) and slaughter the livestock for food. What now?
The point is if things shift enough that we have to reorganize the global food production and distribution system, very bad things will happen in the process. It's doable, it'll work, but a lot of stupid shit will happen along the way and a great many people will die. With that in mind, have you noticed we're trying to stop the change rather than analyze it and adjust ahead of time to avoid such panic?
Canada is huge, but our politics are a lot more nationalistic than the US. The concept of 'state' rights is not so important here, which I suppose is why Quebec wants to secede.
My point is cultural, not political. Like Russia, which is an insane nation-state that needs to die, but under which the Russian people have a strong and proud culture that is done a great disservice by its government. The Russians don't give a shit about Russia; they don't like how Russia operates, some of them outright flee Russia, but they sure as hell don't surrender their culture to their corrupt government. To the Russians, Russia is not about the state of Russia; it is about the people.
It is the same everywhere, although we're more nationalist in many places. We talk about USA or Canada or UK, but the truth is our neighbors are different than our fellow countrymen hundreds of miles away. This is as much true of Canada as the US, and even of US states.
As for the right and reason for the people to keep and bear arms, I say it is a deterrent. I say this because a strong people is better off than a weak people. People who cannot defend themselves are wholly concerned with their own safety; they are too weak to make a difference, they are too weak to help others, they can barely help themselves, and they feel no such social responsibility. I feel there is value in arming oneself with knives, swords, sticks, nunchaku, or well-trained hand-to-hand combat; a firearm is not a magical god machine, although at appreciable range it's got better reach than a spear (even if you can throw the spear, the gun can aim and fire more quickly).
I also feel there is little sense in disarming people of firearms in particular, at least in part because of the perceived and actual advantages and disadvantages of a gun. You CAN bring a knife to a gun fight and be at an advantage over bringing a gun, but that's a special situation--closed quarters when the gun isn't drawn at you yet, which by the way if the gun is drawn you're best off not reaching for your gun in response because you get shot. If it comes down to a guy attacking me in an alley or in my home and he reaches for a gun, when we're grappling and he's grabbing at the hand I've got a knife in he's going to get stabbed in the hand; I'm much better off here, as long as that barrel's pointed somewhere else. In any other situation, either no weapon is any use (gun pointed at your face? Try not to do anything stupid), or perhaps having a firearm of your own would be REALLY useful right about now.
Nevertheless, I feel that a requirement of carrying a weapon should be existing and continuing training--maybe not for knives and polearms (like the Jo), but for flails (nunchaku included) and swords and firearms you absolutely must be trained, because these weapons are very hard to control (bullets and flails go off in random directions, swords are huge blades with long reach).
That all said, a people who are strong--who may face a fight, but who are not entirely helpless, who have something to pit against their attacker--are easier to work with. When you tell people we must stand together, we must stand proud, we must protect ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, you have something there to work with. These people are no longer convinced that anyone who raises a fist is terrifying and insurmountable; they believe in their own strength. We say that with power comes responsibility--the truth is that power can convince us of responsibility. Strength before weakness: we are all weak at times, and so we must be strong and use our strength for the good of others; power does not make one fit to rule, but rather fit to serve. When those of us who are strong help those who are weak, we will ourselves not have to worry as much about the times we are weak, for someone may come to our own aid.
Such thinking is completely alien to a people who are at all times incapable of protecting themselves. Just like how the poor
Oh, it will. The political interests won't be able to supply enough food to quell mass riots, but not enough to let people get too comfortable. The mass riots will be damning.
Warming water has to melt all of the sea ice first (there's a lot of contact area), since melting ice cools water. But, yes.
Civilization, not species. Gas stations, air ports, police, fire, medical care, etc suddenly cease functioning because of food shortages everywhere. A lot of people die. A bunch of other people get a better life, some others work out how to adapt. Eventually the food supply shifts and civilization branches out again.
How did you get two replies, both cited, one that the ice in antarctica is growing and one that it's shrinking?
Well, it's going to raise the sea level by 20 feet. 2/3 of the earth's surface is covered with water, by 20 feet. Honestly, it's diameter of the earth at sea level, area of a sphere of diameter plus 40 feet minus the current diameter, that's the volume of water added. That's a lot of water. There's also quite a lot in the ocean though ... I don't know the impact on salinity. It may be negligible. On the other hand, stuff on the surface of an ice cap may prefer non-salty ice.
True, but the changes will cause problems for civilization even if the earth becomes lush and habitable again. Where we can grow food changes, which will severely disrupt food production and distribution. Communications and shipping networks would become more/less viable, etc.
He means that if the ice floats, it floats because 3kg of water is displaced by a 3kg ice block that's bigger than 3kg water. When you melt the ice, you have 3kg water, which takes up exactly the amount of space that was displaced. So if you have a liter of ice above water and two liters below water, if you melt all three liters it suddenly takes up two liters of space (the density of ice versus water is not on that ratio, but it does work out that way: it's X big when frozen, and Y big when melted, where Y is the volume of water displaced when it floats in water).
The water frozen in Greenland is fresh water. I'm just being consistent.
What's funny is if the entire north pole melted, it wouldn't affect sea levels in the least. Not one millimeter. Greenland, on the other hand, would bring the sea level up about 20 feet or so.
There's the concern for the ocean temperature increasing, causing expansion and making water more voluminous and thus causing the same amount of water (mass) to rise; but I don't believe it. The south pole is never going to melt--it simply cannot. It never comes above -37C down there; if it gets hot enough to melt, the rest of the earth is molten slag and we don't really care much about rising sea levels. However, there will always be a free flow water border against antarctic ice. This causes antarctic ice to melt. Since the whole ice cap can't and won't melt, this melting simply draws heat away--80 times as much heat as a 1 degree difference in the same mass of water, in fact, plus the temperature of ice (so -37C would draw 37 degrees PLUS 80 degrees = 117 degrees gram for gram from water). The ice at the border of these temperature zones should be warmed to about 0C, so talk about 80 times the mass equivalence of 0C water.
In short, antarctica will keep the oceans cool as long as ocean water circulates past antarctica.
So the solution is to desalinate water in antarctica and dump it on the ice cap. We need to move basically the mass of the ice on Greenland as it melts--not insubstantial. Note that the new ice must be stored above sea level, because bobbing in the sea it will be expanded and will displace a large mass of water. Such ice, once melted, takes up less space and so the part above the water doesn't become a rise in sea level. Of course, while this means ice bergs and ice caps don't raise sea levels when they melt, dropping additional such ice into the water DOES raise sea levels, hence why it must be sequestered above sea level.
Ham?
I like the part about sticking your head out the window only to see that nothing is happening, while all my life I've been told that the ice caps will melt and sea levels will rise a meter or more immediately when it starts, and enough to flood out the US east and west coast for hundreds of miles in eventually. Why is some part of Florida not underwater?
Shows that you don't have a clue what this is about. The advertisers don't care who you are. They care about _what_ you are, gathered together from little bits and pieces of information.
Yet everyone has their panties in a knit because an advertiser has a cookie that notates your behavior, doesn't know shit about you but does know what you probably like. They equate this to advertisers reading your facebook posts, your e-mail, etc, and building a profile about you like Fat Boy in Shibumi.
England actually is an empire made by invading and usurping a number of countries. Canada is fucking huge and split into provinces.
I was always told Carrol ran on significantly less income. The $11k number is news to me.
My point was more that an argument of X vs Y, therefor X = Y is short-sighted. As you've pointed out, different communities, different performance. Also Texas is big--Texas and Congress have the standing option to break Texas into five separate states. California as well, southern California is a completely separate culture from northern California in much the same way France is not Germany. Pull up Maryland's numbers for Baltimore, Montgomery County, Prince George's County, and Carrol County. Pull up New York's numbers for New York City, Boston, and Long Island (all the places I can name in New York State). Texas... Dallas and Austin, name some big cities and some more rural areas. The only city I can name in California is LA.
Guns aren't a solution, but I think disarming people is short-sighted and exemplifies poor judgment. That it's true that arming everyone doesn't solve all our problems, it's not automatically true that attempting to disarm everyone (or even doing so successfully) causes none. When I was in middle school, they told us that if somebody attacks you, you should duck down on the ground and cover your head until they stop; this to my senses is less optimal than teaching everyone boxing, and when some asstard whoops some kid he's got a few missing teeth or a busted arm for the fight he just "won". There's little to no physical, bodily risk for going around beating people and stealing their stuff.
Your actions have to have consequences. Consequences must be inherent: the police are not inherent consequences, they're not around and nobody sees what happened and they have to figure out who you are and then they have to find you. Nobody commits a crime because they can't get away with it. It is, thus assumed, impossible to make people "play nice" out of the goodness of their heart or little ponies. Effectively, we must present a threat, and then we must propose a better way which avoids said threat. The threat has to be effective.
Shooting a motherfucker that's in your house coming at you and your kids with a samurai sword is not a crime.
What if it's just someone in your house running at you but you're not sure if he has a samurai sword? What if he's not really running at you, but just walking faster than you're comfortable with? What if he's not really walking toward you, but he's in your house and you don't know why and now you're feeling twitchy?
You're attempting to pre-quantify all possible scenarios. That works in computers... well, not really; a lot of input validation is "X Y ad Z are valid; all else is strange and scary." The world isn't so black and white.
When you take a martial art, they teach you about fighting. They teach you that reacting too late is often fatal. Your first clue that someone is trying to harm you isn't open hostility, a weapon in hand, or a charge; it's the way they look at you, the way they move, the way they stand. Their body language is your first clue. Someone who makes you feel threatened in any way is a potential threat; you should at that point be ready for an attack. Whether that's simply more attention, a hand on your knife or gun, or anything else is up to your assessment of the threat at that time.
Normally, every person that looks at you shouldn't threaten you, otherwise you're paranoid as a motherfucker. Maybe a little creepy, sure, but not really dangerous. However there comes a point where you must decide if an advance is benign or hostile, and what level of threat it presents. These decisions have to be made QUICKLY; false positives can lead to excessive force in self-defense, false negatives lead to NOT defending yourself and getting hurt or killed. Both, unfortunately, happen quite a bit.
The real question is: what better way do you propose? The police can't escort every single citizen around everywhere to make sure they play nice. People need to defend themselves. I can kill a man with a drinking straw or a pencil, though I'm much more effective with my bare hands or a knife. That's not really great when a firearm is involved at range; in closed quarters, I'll take my bare hands against a guy with a gun. At range? Arms are too short to box with God.
How do we deal with the criminal element who manages access to guns illegally? How do we propose self-defense is to be metered? When is it proposed that a person may reasonably react violently to a perceived threat?
It's all well and good for you to be a gun apologist, but don't be intellectually dishonest in the process.
What's with this "apologist" thing lately? It's like people wanted to find a word that says, "Well, this stuff is wrong and evil and bad, and you're saying sorry for it being wrong and evil and bad and for people doing it." Loaded wording.
How is this news? If we had a "high" risk of any kind of violent crime, population would be dropping off rather quickly. Consider it takes about 12 years for a human child to become fertile for sexual reproduction, plus almost 1 year in the womb, and really we don't let people boink them until they're 18 (or 16, ish), and even still around 24, 28, 30, etc is more usual for having a child. It takes about 25 years for one generation to produce the next? What would 25 years of wearing down the current generation do to the population? In 25 years we'd lose half the population if you were only 97.25% likely to survive 1 year without being murdered.
We're inherently arguing over something quite low risk. In my city, for example, you're 98.875% likely to live for 25 years without being murdered. 99.95% for one year.
That doesn't mean that changing the climate won't reduce the risk of violent crime. 300 murders per year in a city of a population of 660,000 is different than 50 murders, or 5 murders. Also, personally, my house has battering ram marks on the back door; I have a fucking awesome steel and hardwood back door in a sturdy door frame, so it's taken a dozen home invasion attempts involving a heavy kinetic mass and still hasn't flinched. I don't know anybody, I have no friends, I have steel bars on my windows and security doors. Me and the neighbors, we get along; these people banging on my door, they don't know me, I just happen to be in the wrong place.
That politicians tote and twist the "law-abiding citizens" statement to indicate that they KNOW who is and isn't going to commit a crime in the future has no bearing on the actual argument. What's important is probability. Just like I'm 98.875% likely to live here for 25 more years without getting shot, it's also--let's say, and this is made up for illustrative purposes--99.95% likely that arming a particular currently believed "law-abiding citizen" will not result in a violent crime being committed with the given weapon. That makes it 0.05% likely that said citizen will, in fact, turn out to be a criminal and shoot someone because he's mad his penis is too small. Okay, but 99.95% of the people we gave guns are wandering around with guns, and some very small fraction (a dozen or so) heard this gunshot a half a block away, and are now all armed and ready. If this guy comes out shooting at everyone because he's an insane whack job, someone will cap him.
It's kind of untenable to assume that even 50% of our population would get guns and start shooting at innocents. I mean, in that case, really, we don't have a viable society. 99.95% may be high, or it may be low--it could be 99.97% would be well-behaved and not use their guns for murder; it could be more of a 95% thing. You've increased the harmlessly (or helpfully, we hope) armed citizenry by a large number and the harmfully armed criminal citizenry by a smaller number--that's a predictable effect. The argument here is solely over whether or not this creates more or less murder.
Not really.
In theory, it's perfectly okay to give guns to so-called "law-abiding citizens." In fact, it's okay to give guns to convicted felons, pederasts, and escaped serial murderers. As long as they're not going to murder anyone else, and just use the weapon as a defensive weapon or a white knighter, we're all better off with them armed and none's the worse except the criminals.
More importantly, in theory you want to keep guns away from people who will use them to commit murder. Murder is defined as an unjustifiable homicide, i.e. a homicide where a rational person wouldn't have determined that lethal force was necessary under those circumstances. It's justifiable if a rational person would determine lethal force is unnecessary as an observer or as a time-distant observer (i.e. hindsight), but where at that point in time the person would have lacked such judgment (for example, while under attack by someone with a knife, by which you could easily disarm them by hand, but at the time there is someone behind you and you fear that you can't evade the blade without it causing fatal harm to another person--but it "should" be blindingly obvious that bringing your arm in and up will easily clear the bystanders. Maybe you shoot this guy in the face instead, because at that exact moment you're just not that awesome).
We can't predict individuals. We can somewhat predict groups and society as a whole. For our purposes, then, we decide that people who have been law-abiding in the past and who do not have anger management issues or a history of violence are probably not going to walk around shooting people with their new toy. We tend to assume that violent convicts aren't trustworthy with weapons. Sometimes the violent con is better than we want to believe and has grown as a person; sometimes the nice person is just a really mean fucker on the inside, or just snaps one day. It's hit and miss. In any case, there is the attempt to get guns out of the hands of the bad ones.
In the end, the numbers that we care about aren't how many people were lawful before guns and became unlawful. The numbers we care about are how many people with guns used them in a lawful, socially acceptable, economically advantageous manner (i.e. the saving of innocent life is positive; the destruction of innocent life is negative; thus economically if we have more people safe and alive now than otherwise, we did it right). All other measurements are a matter of analysis--how many of our expected "law-abiding citizens" turned out as criminals? How many of the actually "law-abiding citizens" performed direct heroic acts? What level of deterrent did an armed citizenry provide? These are interesting numbers. The most interesting, however, is "how many innocent lives should have been lost given predictive trends, and how many were actually lost?" If more were lost than predicted, something is wrong; if fewer were lost, something is better than before.
Your argument is attempting to provide that nobody should have a gun legally because you just can't know that a specific individual won't use it for crime. My argument is that you CAN know that criminals will obtain guns illegally, and you CAN know that a subset of people who have guns will use them for legal purposes of defense of themselves and neighbors, and that arming these citizens is more ideal than not arming them. All other factors are other arguments--such as an armed citizenry being a dangerous climate for violent crime, a deterrent, etc. Criminals tend to move to or develop where crime is easier and less risky; that's great, but even if it weren't true we'd still be at an advantage having a strong, armed non-criminal citizenry.
The problem here is the US isn't a country, it's a republic made up of tiny countries. More importantly, it's just immense with a varied culture--that is, parts of California are different than other parts of California, and same Texas, and a few other states.
Isolate various areas and you'll find that the correlation is very different. Let's talk about gun proliferation in Baltimore vs DC vs Detroit vs Dallas vs Austin vs Carrol County (MD). It's well known that gun proliferation in Baltimore has lead to a lot of murder, while Carrol County has ridiculously low crime. It's also, interestingly, well known that Baltimore at $13k/student per year supplies one of the shittiest school systems in the country, while Carrol County's school system at $5000 per student per year supplies one of the best. We can't, thus, justify that gun proliferation increases or decreases crime; there's a stronger argument that reducing school funding increases school performance, which of course is silly.
No, 'law-abiding' is intended to mean that the citizens are lawful and use guns for lawful use. They're criminals when they commit crimes. Shooting a motherfucker that's in your house coming at you and your kids with a samurai sword is not a crime.
Logical process works pretty well, but doesn't always cut it. Then again, a lot of "researched scientific facts" passed around in "education" are dogmatic bullshit, to the point that experts in the field don't believe them. Sometimes, experts in the field believe the dogmatic bullshit, and are regularly proven wrong, and nobody cares. For example: "Security always makes things harder" is a core concept in computer security. I've seen someone argue that ssh is inherently harder than telnet because, get this, you have to re-train telnet users to type 'ssh' instead of 'telnet'. What?
No, I have a functional human brain and those are capable of emulating other functional human brains. It's a critical socialization skill, granted my social skills are crap--I'm slow and work with masses and general trends rather than individuals, and I don't lie (though I get a lot of specific data wrong and have to keep learning) and have too much of a conscience.
Interestingly, a large part of human behavior is concealing or altering the truth, including projecting false feelings--the dating scene is impossible, for example, if you're always up-front that you really don't have any serious feelings for one girl over another, but this one seems nice and it's a good chance and you've accepted that you have to close one opportunity to open another and so you're going to date her. Seriously, I've met three girls that I was interested in because, for whatever reason, nobody else would do and I just REALLY wanted that particular girl, and you know even super-studs and plain old normal people have a LOT of misses among the dozen or so girlfriends they have. That behavior is ... incorrect, and rather extreme.
In the same way, a lot of human behavior involves projecting an interest in things you don't half care about; confidence you don't have; and just over-stating your opinions. This is the core of sales and marketing. This is why people talk tough, go through with things they're shaky on but they look like they believe their own moronic bullshit, and then wind up upside down in the air on a motorcycle heading for a mound of dirt and mud like a retard with wings. People want to fit in, want to be accepted, respected, and rewarded. Dating a girl you don't honestly care about but telling her you do is a good way to get sex--doubly so if you're well aware that the relationship is much more temporary than you're saying, because you can play the I-have-a-girlfriend chip on chicks at the bar and nail some floozies. Hanging out with your guy friends drinking shitty beer and watching football is great even if you don't like football, because your guy friends would think you're lame otherwise and "male bonding" is about being the coolest guy in the group. It just goes on.
People think so much about what others think about them. It's pretty much built-in. I'm not saying there aren't crazy people, or even that people aren't over-confident or so insecure that they will do things that should frighten them because they're more afraid of being scared. I'm just saying, you know, the more you think the people around you WILL find you and WILL kill you if you do something, the more terrifying doing that something becomes. If it's just "that guy probably has a gun," you engineer the situation to where he can't use it...maybe just shoot him outright. Nobody else is going to come looking. If it's more "everyone in town is going to have their gun out when they hear the gunshot, they're going to look for people leaving the area, the police will NEVER stop looking for me," and so on, there is no way in hell you're going to commit crimes with a gun--and if you mug someone who has a gun they might SHOOT YOU so maybe you won't do that at all.
Your brain is going to try to figure out how to interact with these people; your goals might be shitty and criminal, but if everyone's behavior just screams "WE WILL FIND YOU AND WE WILL KILL YOU," you're not going to do shit like that. Not unless something is severely wrong with you. Being a "criminal" isn't wrong, strictly speaking; it's viable if you can do it without getting caught and it supports your life in a way that's acceptable. Some of us don't care about plush couches. Some of us aren't even driven much plainly by sex; others are ALWAYS thinking about sex, to a ridiculous degree. Problem comes in when you face something where every indication says what in your life you require to be "comfortable" is destroyed, and you do it anyway--at that point, something is wrong with you.
By the by, method actors make a career out of us
Maybe I have it backwards. Or it was Missouri. Look there's so much data in my head I'm losing track; this is not my field and I only care insofar as I don't do stupid shit like decide "Oh X immediately and simply means Y so we should stop X."
And I think you're a dumbass and somebody should have sex with your sister in your bed so we can all laugh at you.
Do I go to jail now?