> It's my government's primary responsibility to stop all of them [foreign evildoers] from harming me.
Really? I thought the government's primary responsibility was to improve the quality of life of its citizens, in all ways - letting you be educated, helping you stay healthy, helping to make you prosperous, and helping to keep you safe.
In particular, since about 99% of the threat to an American inside America is from other Americans, I would hope that the government is spending rather more of its effort protecting me from Americans than from foreigners. Simply put, there's a lot more Americans than anyone else around here.
Are you sure your view on this is an entirely rational assessment of the threat, rather than just a tad skewed or hyperbolic?
> When several "visitors" to the US decided to take advantage of our open society and kill 3000+ of our citizens.
So the correct response is to jettison your civil rights?
I suppose that's one approach - do so much damage to your own freedom and peace of mind that a terrorist would be hard-put to come up with anything worse. Sort of a "scorched earth" approach to defending your freedom, but without anywhere to retreat to.
Don't. It just gives Americans an international reputation for being liars, which just makes the situation worse.
Most foreigners genuinely like Americans, even while genuinely disliking the US government. Express sympathy for any US government foreign policy blunders in the area, ask them what you can do to help, and listen to the response. People love to be listened to, and love to be agreed with.
It's amazing how far a little politeness and tact will take you. Enough of that from enough people, and some of the international bad opinion of American tourists might well go away. Or, we could convince the rest of the world we're liars, as well as all the other things they already believe.
While it may be virtually a national passtime to take the easy way out that helps in the short term while building up long-term problems, it's no better an idea here than it is anywhere else.
> So rather than inform an obvious newcomer to your country of this fact, you instead
> took the chance to be an asshole. And your country is better...how?
And the actions of one man are the fault of his country how?
(If you think that's what the poster was saying about Americans, RTFP.)
> do you actually think that anybody in the Slashdot community would use Office if it were ported over to Linux?
In a heartbeat.
At work, my computer is a tool; I use what lets me get the job done. I use Linux because I find it a powerful, productive environment. I use PowerPoint because it's the most convenient way to create presentations. If I could use PowerPoint and Linux at the same time, for what earthly reason would I not?
"MS is evil" is a nice ideological stance, but is an unrealistic way to predict what programs people are going to use to get their work done.
> I shall bring down fiery justice on those who
> leave their bloody phones on during a live performance
I went to a performance by Marcel Marceau in LA once, and someone's cellphone went off.
During the mime performance.
Which is dead silent.
And it went off twice.
Most inappropriate cellphone timing I've ever come across. (And, btw, good mime is actually very interesting and impressive, bad street mimes notwithstanding.)
> Further, I can tell you that the vast majority of
> protestors were not city residents. Most were
> students from all over the country, indoctrinated
> by communist teachers at surrounding universities.
"indoctrinated by communist teachers"? Whoa there Joe, the Reds ain't comin' to getcha, so settle down!
Has it occurred to you that perhaps these people legitimately disagree with you? That there are opinions other that your own with solid reasoning behind them? That one of the key ways this country has improved was protests exactly like these, such as the Civil Rights movement?
You're more than free to disagree with the views espoused by the protesters (and, IMHO, it would be dangerous if everyone agreed on everything; idea-monocultures are as vulnerable as crop-monocultures). Heck, I'd probably have some...choice words...for many of them.
However, if you take the intellectually lazy route and write them off as "indoctrinated by communists", you're falling into the trap of saying "real Americans don't need to listen to the views of those people"---dangerous ground that we don't want to retread.
Laugh at ideas all you want, even laugh at individuals, but dismissing entire groups of people out of hand is the method of racists and bigots. "He's one of those people" is never a good reason to dismiss a person or argument.
> I'm recalled of the numerous instances of intentially jibberish papers making the cut in peer review
"Numerous instances"? Name a few.
(And the intentional-jibberish article by a physicist into a comp lit journal isn't one of them; you're attempting to cast aspersions on physicists, not literature academics.)
> I'm deeply disappointed the above post was modded up
Then refute some of his points with actual evidence. The "disappointment" of an anonymous poster is...less than persuasive.
> No, I'm saying that the majority of defensive uses of a gun don't involve the discharge of the weapon
True, but Kleck's research suggests that a very large minority do involve the weapon being fired. Kleck's survey suggested that the weapon was fired in 24% of DGUs source.
> I don't think you can make this assumption - defensive uses will tend to have a lower fatality
> rate simply because the shooter is likely to be suffering from a substantial loss of fine motor
> control due to the fight-or-flight response.
Loss of fine motor control will cause fewer hits, but in no way makes those bullets hit with any less energy or wounding power. Besides, firearm wound lethality statistics already take this into account by considering large numbers of criminal shootings, which aren't likely to be any better trained than civilian shootings.
> You might notice all of my references are dated in WW2 because the
> current Bush administration is indeed what I would call a bully.
I believe that's what the original poster was referring to.
At least as I read his post, he was not saying that the US has always been arrogant, unworldly, and naive about change - he was saying that we are becoming complacent because our historical strengths have allowed us to be on top for so long. We're resting on our laurels, and that's a sure-fire way to be surpassed by someone who's still working full-bore.
I believe the original poster's point was that the US is a great nation, but that can change if we get arrogant or foolish. Without a little bit of the perspective that humility brings, we might not see our own fall until it's already over, and nobody wants that.
> Hell, what do you think those poor dumbass Iraqis are armed with?
Rocket-propelled grenades and artillery shells converted into roadside bombs (source1, source2, source3, source4.
Mere assault rifles are only minimally effective against the modern US army. That's not to say civilian gun ownership may not have other benefits, but the days of civilians with handguns and rifles holding off the troops of a tyrannical government are long gone.
> You've got a problem with your comparison here - Kleck was comparing defensive usage *only*, whereas
> the UoP study didn't make any distinctions between how the injuries were sustained
So you're claiming that bullets used "defensively" are 3% as likely to kill someone as bullets used in any other way?
Firearm assaults - which shooting at someone in a DGU counts as - are fatal approximately one third of the time. With this more specific data, Kleck's numbers actually suggest that about 65,000 firearm deaths due to DGUs should occur each year, making his results even more suspect.
There are only 60,000 total non-fatal gunshot injuries treated in US hospitals every year, but Kleck's numbers suggest DGUs alone account for 200,000 wounds (fatal and non-fatal). Unless you're saying that somehow the large majority of DGU-caused firearm wounds are never reported to a hospital, Kleck's numbers still don't add up.
Guns fire bullets in exactly the same way, regardless of whether the situation is a DGU or not. Intentional, non-suicide firearm injuries will have about the same rates of injury and lethality, regardless of whether the situation is a DGU or not. Kleck's numbers paint a picture that is demonstrably at least an order of magnitude different from reality.
> Dark Matter is a theoretical concept we as to yet have not seen or detected.
Tell that to the neutrino guys I've worked with.
Neutrinos have non-zero rest mass, and hence are known and detectable dark matter. (It's worth noting, though, that they're "hot" dark matter, and "cold" dark matter is more like what you're complaining about. Neutrinos also only account for maybe 20% of the needed dark matter.)
> It's cheaper to educate and train someone than it is to imprison them.
It's cheaper by a factor of five, according to a detailed study by Rand Corp.
They're hardly a bleeding-heart liberal group, either - they fully support California's "Three Strikes" law as a way to reduce crime. They simply looked objectively at additional methods for crime reduction and found that education incentives are by far the most cost-efficient.
Moreover, these cost/benefit analyses don't even take into account the added economic benefit of having a someone be a contributing member of society (paying taxes) rather than being a pure drain (prison).
Education is much more cost-effective than prison. Unless you like throwing people in jail and paying for the privilege, everyone should be hugely in favour of educating as many people as possible.
After doing a little digging, it turns out that Mauser is on record as saying that Canada's violent crime rate has undergone a "horrifying increase" in the last decade, despite the fact that violent crime has actually decreased 11% in that time period.
If Mauser is willing to deceive people by claiming that violent crime has increased when the readily-available facts show that violent crime has decreased, the worth of any study he is responsible for is called seriously into question.
Evidence suggests "The Failed Experiment" is little more than a biased opinion piece. Too bad - I'd hoped for much more.
> The homicide rate in the United States has be falling steadily for the last several years,
> while the homicide rate for Canada has been increasing.
A moment with Google and a quick look at the actual homicide statistics in Canada shows that the parent poster is completely wrong. The summary of Canada's homicide trend in the last several years is:
The national homicide rate fell 7% last year [2003] to its lowest level in over 35 years.
> John Lott has an article discussing the abysmal failure of Canada's gun control program here.
If you're getting your information from John Lott, that helps explain why you have no idea what the truth is. Lott is a known liar whose research has come under increasing fire as poorly supported and possibly entirely fabricated.
If you want a pro-gun researcher to tout, check out Kleck. His studies have some serious methodological problems, too, but at least he seems honest.
You're comparing total gun deaths in Canada to gun homicides in the US, without mentioning that the large majority of those Canadian "gun deaths" are suicides!
That is, at best, woefully delinquent reading of the links you cite.
For a truthful comparison of firearm killings between Canada and the US, look here. In particular, check out this summary:
Firearm homicide rates in the United States are 8.1 times higher than in Canada.
Two things to note:
1) The Frasier Institute (which released the study) is well-known in Canada for being a right-wing think tank. That by no means invalidates the findings of the study, but is important context to consider while reading it.
2) The main theme of the report is simply "violent crime in the US is falling faster than in Canada, so Canada's gun control laws are a failure". As the report completely fails to take into account the massive increases in incarceration and other justice-system oversight that have occurred in the US in recent years, it's worth asking whether the report is correct in its findings. It is entirely possible, as some appear to argue that America's drop in crime has been in large part due to this massive surge in its prison population.
Mauser's study is interesting, but fails to examine its assumptions nearly enough to establish the kind of causal relationship between gun laws and crime that it's claiming.
Kleck's numbers don't add up - numerical analysis
on
Home Defense, Geek Style?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> Based on his extensive independent survey research, Kleck estimates that each year Americans
> use guns for protection from criminals more than 2.5 million times annually.
If you look at Kleck's numbers, they don't add up.
Kleck's survey reported that 8% of defensive gun uses involved the target being wounded or killed. With Kleck's estimate of 2,500,000 DGUs per year, that gives us 200,000 DGU-caused firearm deaths or injuries per year.
Studies have shown that approximately 23% of firearm injuries are fatal. Accordingly, Kleck's survey numbers imply that DGUs account for 46,000 killings by firearm per year.
However, the total number of non-suicide firearm deaths per year is only 20,000.
We're left with only a few possibilities:
1) DGU gunshot wounds are vastly less lethal than any other gunshot wound. Unlikely - bullets are bullets.
2) DGU-performing people are very good at hiding bodies. Unlikely.
3) Kleck's survey numbers are unreliable.
Occam's Razor points very strongly at that latter choice. Kleck's survey produces numbers that do not match reality; ergo, Kleck's survey is not reliable.
By contrast, the government's National Crime Victimization Survey suggests that about 100,000 DGUs occur each year. At an 8% hit rate and a 23% fatality rate, that would give 2,000 defensive firearm killings per year. That's still 10 times what the FBI cites the number as, but is quite close to Kleck's own estimates.
Why is Kleck's survey result so unreliable? Consider what is meant by "defensive gun usage": any time the presence of a gun - even if not shown - makes the owner believe a crime or attack was prevented, that's a defensive gun use.
The last time she had a bear nosing around her yard, my mother threw a rubber boot at it to scare it away. According to the methodology used to define defensive gun usages, this would count as a "defensive boot usage" against the bear.
Virtually anything would have worked to scare the bear off; had the boot not been available, there still would have been no bear attack. Self-reported "defensive gun usages" suffer from exactly the same bias and flaw - people report protecting themselves with a gun when either:
(a) there was in reality no protection needed, or
(b) any of a number of alternative techniques would have defended the person just as well.
For example, consider this "defensive gun usage" story from a similar survey:
`The police called. The alarm in my building went off so I went there to shut it off. Two men were outside my building, so from my car I shot at the ground near them.'
That's self-defense? Who's to say those two men hadn't just stopped for a smoke? Similarly,
A 58-year-old male is watching TV with a holster strapped on him. He tells us, `I was watching a movie, and he (an acquaintance) interrupted me. I yelled that I was going to shoot him, and he ran to his car.'
This is a defensive gun usage? This is the kind of "self-defense" story that gets multiplied by 10,000 by Kleck to estimate the number of DGUs per year? No wonder his numbers are off.
(source)
The logical flaw is similar to the famous anti-tiger stone ("this stone repels tigers from my lawn; I know it works because I haven't seen any tigers here in downtown Springfield in the last 10 years") - whether or not a gun has made them safer, participants in this
Slashdot Mirror
Reason enough right there to get a Canadian television feed. (Why are they not negotiating nonstop?? Whyyyyyy????...)
Really? I thought the government's primary responsibility was to improve the quality of life of its citizens, in all ways - letting you be educated, helping you stay healthy, helping to make you prosperous, and helping to keep you safe.
In particular, since about 99% of the threat to an American inside America is from other Americans, I would hope that the government is spending rather more of its effort protecting me from Americans than from foreigners. Simply put, there's a lot more Americans than anyone else around here.
Are you sure your view on this is an entirely rational assessment of the threat, rather than just a tad skewed or hyperbolic?
So the correct response is to jettison your civil rights?
I suppose that's one approach - do so much damage to your own freedom and peace of mind that a terrorist would be hard-put to come up with anything worse. Sort of a "scorched earth" approach to defending your freedom, but without anywhere to retreat to.
Don't. It just gives Americans an international reputation for being liars, which just makes the situation worse.
Most foreigners genuinely like Americans, even while genuinely disliking the US government. Express sympathy for any US government foreign policy blunders in the area, ask them what you can do to help, and listen to the response. People love to be listened to, and love to be agreed with.
It's amazing how far a little politeness and tact will take you. Enough of that from enough people, and some of the international bad opinion of American tourists might well go away. Or, we could convince the rest of the world we're liars, as well as all the other things they already believe.
While it may be virtually a national passtime to take the easy way out that helps in the short term while building up long-term problems, it's no better an idea here than it is anywhere else.
> took the chance to be an asshole. And your country is better...how?
And the actions of one man are the fault of his country how?
(If you think that's what the poster was saying about Americans, RTFP.)
In a heartbeat.
At work, my computer is a tool; I use what lets me get the job done. I use Linux because I find it a powerful, productive environment. I use PowerPoint because it's the most convenient way to create presentations. If I could use PowerPoint and Linux at the same time, for what earthly reason would I not?
"MS is evil" is a nice ideological stance, but is an unrealistic way to predict what programs people are going to use to get their work done.
> leave their bloody phones on during a live performance
I went to a performance by Marcel Marceau in LA once, and someone's cellphone went off.
During the mime performance.
Which is dead silent.
And it went off twice.
Most inappropriate cellphone timing I've ever come across. (And, btw, good mime is actually very interesting and impressive, bad street mimes notwithstanding.)
> protestors were not city residents. Most were
> students from all over the country, indoctrinated
> by communist teachers at surrounding universities.
"indoctrinated by communist teachers"? Whoa there Joe, the Reds ain't comin' to getcha, so settle down!
Has it occurred to you that perhaps these people legitimately disagree with you? That there are opinions other that your own with solid reasoning behind them? That one of the key ways this country has improved was protests exactly like these, such as the Civil Rights movement?
You're more than free to disagree with the views espoused by the protesters (and, IMHO, it would be dangerous if everyone agreed on everything; idea-monocultures are as vulnerable as crop-monocultures). Heck, I'd probably have some...choice words...for many of them. However, if you take the intellectually lazy route and write them off as "indoctrinated by communists", you're falling into the trap of saying "real Americans don't need to listen to the views of those people"---dangerous ground that we don't want to retread.
Laugh at ideas all you want, even laugh at individuals, but dismissing entire groups of people out of hand is the method of racists and bigots. "He's one of those people" is never a good reason to dismiss a person or argument.
"Numerous instances"? Name a few.
(And the intentional-jibberish article by a physicist into a comp lit journal isn't one of them; you're attempting to cast aspersions on physicists, not literature academics.)
> I'm deeply disappointed the above post was modded up
Then refute some of his points with actual evidence. The "disappointment" of an anonymous poster is...less than persuasive.
True, but Kleck's research suggests that a very large minority do involve the weapon being fired. Kleck's survey suggested that the weapon was fired in 24% of DGUs source.
Some more problems with Kleck's methodology: link
> I don't think you can make this assumption - defensive uses will tend to have a lower fatality
> rate simply because the shooter is likely to be suffering from a substantial loss of fine motor
> control due to the fight-or-flight response.
Loss of fine motor control will cause fewer hits, but in no way makes those bullets hit with any less energy or wounding power. Besides, firearm wound lethality statistics already take this into account by considering large numbers of criminal shootings, which aren't likely to be any better trained than civilian shootings.
> current Bush administration is indeed what I would call a bully.
I believe that's what the original poster was referring to.
At least as I read his post, he was not saying that the US has always been arrogant, unworldly, and naive about change - he was saying that we are becoming complacent because our historical strengths have allowed us to be on top for so long. We're resting on our laurels, and that's a sure-fire way to be surpassed by someone who's still working full-bore.
I believe the original poster's point was that the US is a great nation, but that can change if we get arrogant or foolish. Without a little bit of the perspective that humility brings, we might not see our own fall until it's already over, and nobody wants that.
Rocket-propelled grenades and artillery shells converted into roadside bombs (source1, source2, source3, source4.
Mere assault rifles are only minimally effective against the modern US army. That's not to say civilian gun ownership may not have other benefits, but the days of civilians with handguns and rifles holding off the troops of a tyrannical government are long gone.
> the UoP study didn't make any distinctions between how the injuries were sustained
So you're claiming that bullets used "defensively" are 3% as likely to kill someone as bullets used in any other way?
Firearm assaults - which shooting at someone in a DGU counts as - are fatal approximately one third of the time. With this more specific data, Kleck's numbers actually suggest that about 65,000 firearm deaths due to DGUs should occur each year, making his results even more suspect.
There are only 60,000 total non-fatal gunshot injuries treated in US hospitals every year, but Kleck's numbers suggest DGUs alone account for 200,000 wounds (fatal and non-fatal). Unless you're saying that somehow the large majority of DGU-caused firearm wounds are never reported to a hospital, Kleck's numbers still don't add up.
Guns fire bullets in exactly the same way, regardless of whether the situation is a DGU or not. Intentional, non-suicide firearm injuries will have about the same rates of injury and lethality, regardless of whether the situation is a DGU or not. Kleck's numbers paint a picture that is demonstrably at least an order of magnitude different from reality.
Kleck's numbers are not reliable.
Tell that to the neutrino guys I've worked with.
Neutrinos have non-zero rest mass, and hence are known and detectable dark matter. (It's worth noting, though, that they're "hot" dark matter, and "cold" dark matter is more like what you're complaining about. Neutrinos also only account for maybe 20% of the needed dark matter.)
It's cheaper by a factor of five, according to a detailed study by Rand Corp.
They're hardly a bleeding-heart liberal group, either - they fully support California's "Three Strikes" law as a way to reduce crime. They simply looked objectively at additional methods for crime reduction and found that education incentives are by far the most cost-efficient.
Moreover, these cost/benefit analyses don't even take into account the added economic benefit of having a someone be a contributing member of society (paying taxes) rather than being a pure drain (prison).
Education is much more cost-effective than prison. Unless you like throwing people in jail and paying for the privilege, everyone should be hugely in favour of educating as many people as possible.
After doing a little digging, it turns out that Mauser is on record as saying that Canada's violent crime rate has undergone a "horrifying increase" in the last decade, despite the fact that violent crime has actually decreased 11% in that time period.
If Mauser is willing to deceive people by claiming that violent crime has increased when the readily-available facts show that violent crime has decreased, the worth of any study he is responsible for is called seriously into question. Evidence suggests "The Failed Experiment" is little more than a biased opinion piece. Too bad - I'd hoped for much more.
> while the homicide rate for Canada has been increasing.
A moment with Google and a quick look at the actual homicide statistics in Canada shows that the parent poster is completely wrong. The summary of Canada's homicide trend in the last several years is:
The national homicide rate fell 7% last year [2003] to its lowest level in over 35 years.
> John Lott has an article discussing the abysmal failure of Canada's gun control program here.
If you're getting your information from John Lott, that helps explain why you have no idea what the truth is. Lott is a known liar whose research has come under increasing fire as poorly supported and possibly entirely fabricated.
If you want a pro-gun researcher to tout, check out Kleck. His studies have some serious methodological problems, too, but at least he seems honest.
That is, at best, woefully delinquent reading of the links you cite.
For a truthful comparison of firearm killings between Canada and the US, look here. In particular, check out this summary:
Firearm homicide rates in the United States are 8.1 times higher than in Canada.
> I've done all the hard math...
Maybe, but Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Interesting read - the full text is online here.
Two things to note:
1) The Frasier Institute (which released the study) is well-known in Canada for being a right-wing think tank. That by no means invalidates the findings of the study, but is important context to consider while reading it.
2) The main theme of the report is simply "violent crime in the US is falling faster than in Canada, so Canada's gun control laws are a failure". As the report completely fails to take into account the massive increases in incarceration and other justice-system oversight that have occurred in the US in recent years, it's worth asking whether the report is correct in its findings. It is entirely possible, as some appear to argue that America's drop in crime has been in large part due to this massive surge in its prison population.
Mauser's study is interesting, but fails to examine its assumptions nearly enough to establish the kind of causal relationship between gun laws and crime that it's claiming.
> use guns for protection from criminals more than 2.5 million times annually.
If you look at Kleck's numbers, they don't add up.
Kleck's survey reported that 8% of defensive gun uses involved the target being wounded or killed. With Kleck's estimate of 2,500,000 DGUs per year, that gives us 200,000 DGU-caused firearm deaths or injuries per year.
Studies have shown that approximately 23% of firearm injuries are fatal. Accordingly, Kleck's survey numbers imply that DGUs account for 46,000 killings by firearm per year.
However, the total number of non-suicide firearm deaths per year is only 20,000.
We're left with only a few possibilities:
1) DGU gunshot wounds are vastly less lethal than any other gunshot wound. Unlikely - bullets are bullets.
2) DGU-performing people are very good at hiding bodies. Unlikely.
3) Kleck's survey numbers are unreliable.
Occam's Razor points very strongly at that latter choice. Kleck's survey produces numbers that do not match reality; ergo, Kleck's survey is not reliable.
By contrast, the government's National Crime Victimization Survey suggests that about 100,000 DGUs occur each year. At an 8% hit rate and a 23% fatality rate, that would give 2,000 defensive firearm killings per year. That's still 10 times what the FBI cites the number as, but is quite close to Kleck's own estimates.
Why is Kleck's survey result so unreliable? Consider what is meant by "defensive gun usage": any time the presence of a gun - even if not shown - makes the owner believe a crime or attack was prevented, that's a defensive gun use.
The last time she had a bear nosing around her yard, my mother threw a rubber boot at it to scare it away. According to the methodology used to define defensive gun usages, this would count as a "defensive boot usage" against the bear.
Virtually anything would have worked to scare the bear off; had the boot not been available, there still would have been no bear attack. Self-reported "defensive gun usages" suffer from exactly the same bias and flaw - people report protecting themselves with a gun when either:
(a) there was in reality no protection needed, or
(b) any of a number of alternative techniques would have defended the person just as well.
For example, consider this "defensive gun usage" story from a similar survey:
`The police called. The alarm in my building went off so I went there to shut it off. Two men were outside my building, so from my car I shot at the ground near them.'
That's self-defense? Who's to say those two men hadn't just stopped for a smoke? Similarly,
A 58-year-old male is watching TV with a holster strapped on him. He tells us, `I was watching a movie, and he (an acquaintance) interrupted me. I yelled that I was going to shoot him, and he ran to his car.'
This is a defensive gun usage? This is the kind of "self-defense" story that gets multiplied by 10,000 by Kleck to estimate the number of DGUs per year? No wonder his numbers are off.
(source)
The logical flaw is similar to the famous anti-tiger stone ("this stone repels tigers from my lawn; I know it works because I haven't seen any tigers here in downtown Springfield in the last 10 years") - whether or not a gun has made them safer, participants in this