I read the Wikipedia article you linked to, and I think it backs up my claims more than yours!
I linked to two articles, did you read both? In any case you need to read it again, I'll quote you and the relevant part of the article:
The people didn't stand up to the government with weapons - they stood up to the government by small acts of terrorism (that didn't require guns)
and
...but it was definitely NOT a case of them using guns to do it. In fact, the ONLY mention of guns being used by them in the whole Wikipedia article is: [Then your reference to the destruction of stills]
But in the article itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_rebellion#The_insurrection"Finally, the civil protests became an armed rebellion. The first shots were fired at the Oliver Miller Homestead in present day South Park Township, Pennsylvania, about ten miles south of Pittsburgh. As word of the rebellion spread across the frontier, a whole series of loosely organized resistance measures were taken, including robbing the mail, stopping court proceedings, and the threat of an assault on Pittsburgh."[emphasis mine]
As for this: The military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion set a precedent that U.S. citizens who wished to change the law had to do so peacefully through constitutional means; otherwise, the government would meet any threats to disturb the status quo with force. I don't see a problem with that, the soap box, the ballot box and the jury box should be used first. If the whiskey tax was so widely hated, it should have been relatively easy to get acquitted by a jury, so why resort to armed rebellion? I do think we should preserve the right and the ability to fight, but if you're going to have a viable country, the trigger happy need to be met with force.
Armed people rebelling and being overcome by the government was well within Thomas Jefferson's ideas of private firearms ownership preserving liberty. It was not intended to facilitate continual overthrow of governments, but as a reminder to governments that they derive "their
just powers from the consent of the governed": "God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
the Liberal party (think of a fairly even mix between the US libertarian party and the Democrats,...)
Surely you jest, the Liberal Party, libertarian? Introduced gun licensing and registration, largest increase in the size of government ever, what's libertarian about them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_rebellion
The hated whiskey tax was repealed in 1803, having been largely unenforceable outside of Western Pennsylvania, and even there never having been collected with much success.
They ended up getting what they wanted, even though they could not prevail militarily. Similar results were obtained in Australia from the Eureka Stockade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Stockade where they were overcome, but within a year had achieved most of their goals, the leader even being elected into the Victorian Legislative Assembly (one of their grievances was not having the right to vote, taxation without representation).
Resistance to the government doesn't have to mean "fight to the death of the last man standing". Even the Magna Carta didn't happen as a result of deposing the King, this is something you ought to know about for someone who claims that people with a different view to you lack knowledge of history.
Further to the fact that Mr Howard was pretty much doing his best to turn AU into another US state
No, a US states citizens would be protected by the bill of rights. Howard would have done anything to stop that, you don't think he was a 2nd amendment fan do you?
What if I don't want to buy a widget? I'd like to see a Google filter which hides all the product pages from its listing.
Which, incidentally, would probably also boost googles ad business since they would no longer be providing free advertising. Sales in the sponsored links, info in the search results, sounds good to me.
1) Its a joke. You know "How to make money with OSS..."
2) The oft stated "Linux is no good for graphic designers because it doesn't have photoshop" now has a response. Not that I see any photoshop users switching because of this, but serious professional graphics work has now been done on linux.
In certain circumstances, violating someone's copyright can be and is conversion which is theft.
If you read a bit more closely the page I linked, you'd see that theft is a Class D felony, conversion is a Class A misdemeanor (except in certain circumstances which don't apply to copyright).
Don't lets have a flame war over whether conversion=theft, it's right there in the law.
This statement of yours I call highly debatable as a settlement is part of the process of law.
That was part of the argument being made in TFA, which depended on some other stuff which you can read for yourself. I didn't come up with this.
If settlements are routinely reached because the defendant considers the cost and risks of defending themselves to outweigh the settlement, regardless of innocence or guilt, then you do not have due process.
In my case: I don't download any RIAA stuff, if I want to get some music, I buy a cd. If the RIAA sued me and offered me a $3000 settlement, particularly in the early days of this action before anyone had any victories against them, I would have to seriously consider settling. I've had multi-thousand lawyers bills for no result before, I'm under no illusion that my innocence would make a judgement in my favour certain. Should I risk my house over something like this? I've got a family to look after, I have no intention of being a crusader in the court. Even if I won, on the chance that I didn't get fees awarded to me it would still cost me much more than the $3000.
Yes, it bears the semblance of due process, but it isn't really.
The nasty thing of course in the RIAA cases is the huge strength difference between the parties, easily intimidating the defendant into settlement. Taking it to court would likely be more costly for any defendant, unless they manage to win their suit AND win the next suit for their lawyer's costs AND live long enough to see it through.
So you understand, or you think this situation is adequately described as due process of law?
Well, according to the Indiana Code conversion seems to be a different charge to theft. http://www.in.gov/legislative/ic/code/title35/ar43/ch4.html
I specified non-commercial anyway, so if you have a link to a legal case where non-commercial copying is charges as theft I'd be interested, otherwise not. My real point was that calling it copying theft is trolling, particularly on/. for the following reasons.
1) It is quite easy to make a case in favour of copyright without calling it theft. In fact, I am in favour of copyright laws, although not in their current effectively unlimited time forms.
2) Everyone who has been reading/. for more than a couple of weeks has had ample opportunity to understand that.
3) The particular post I replied to made no point relevant to the topic, ie: even for theft you are still entitled to due process and still protected from excessive fines.
4) Therefore I conclude that the OP was a troll.
Most posts I have seen that claim copying=theft fit into the category of troll. There are good reasons to support copyright, it is quite possible to make a reasonable case for it. Calling it theft only distracts from the real issues and detracts from the discussion. It is necessary to challenge the idea though, since there is so much propaganda from their side.
No, it's not a fact, it's a non sequitur. No matter how often a conversation occurs, it does not follow that any given person has heard the conversation. In order for your argument to be valid, everyone would have to have heard the conversation.
That's a good point.
Your argument does not address laziness in speech.
I also don't acknowledge the validity of laziness in speech. Once something is identified as such, it requires no further rebutal.
Your argument fails to address differences in opinion.
No, even someone who thinks that copying=theft can discuss copyright issues without bringing that up. For example (presuming the OP has heard the conversation) if they had said "I don't recall anything in the Constitution protecting an individual's right to infringe copyright." they would have made their point adequately. The only purpose to use the word "steal" was to provoke a reaction, an offtopic argument that has no relevance to the summary or article. That's trolling. Actually, the only reason I answer "copying=theft" trolls is for the benefit of people who haven't heard the conversation.
It's hard to get police to enforce the law, especially on white collar crime. And not just about 99c theft, but also billion dollar crimes. So you may be right in your theory, but the police argument is specious.
No matter how easy or difficult it is to get the police to do their jobs, most cases of non-commercial copying come under civil law not criminal law, ie: the law is very clear that copying!=theft, although larger scale and commercial infringement can be prosecuted.
The fact is, both the theory and practical legal aspects have been well and truly discussed here on/. to the point that calling copying theft can only be regarded as trolling.
Even ignoring your "copyright violation=theft" troll:
Amendment 5:...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
Settlement of these suits is commonly depriving people of their property without due process of law, not on the basis of any guilt by the cost of defending yourself in a lawsuit against a large corporation.
Amendment 8: Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed,
nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Neither one of these require that copyright infringement cannot be dealt with at law, simply that the current law and process being applied doesn't meet the necessary standard.
Oh, and the copying=theft thing? If that was so, why did they not simply report them to the police so they could be charged with theft? I issue this challenge to all who claim copying=theft. Provide me with a copy of your work with an indemnity from any lawsuit for copying except in the case that I am convicted of stealing the work. I'll copy it in a way you can prove, but non-commercially, then you report me to the police for theft. Once that fails, you shut up.
Open Source's true power comes from being multi platform as far as possible.
I disagree, I think that OSS power comes from this:
I could build my own binary if I wanted to.
Nobody accuses the FSF of not being true to the philosophy, but as far as I know they only distribute source. Maybe I'm wrong on that, I don't usually get my software directly from them, but from a distribution. If you can compile it and redistribute it, what's the problem? It's not like you're paying outrageous licensing fees.
They didn't care enough to put a single PPC binary to downloads, that shows their lack of care and knowledge of the platform.
Here: http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ in several languages for PPC, but not english. I suppose you can add a language pack if you can find one or extract it out of the beta or Mac intel builds.
If you ask me, the real question is how many times the files were pulled WITHOUT leaving any evidence. That's one that all you paranoid 1984 types missed here:P
Ever had the feeling that no-one is watching you? That was probably a.....
1984 describes a big governmental campagne against sexuality just for fun and for bonding, and the reduction of sexuality to a means to get children.
The idea that you could get people to not enjoy sex was a losing proposition. Brave New World's method of destroying it as a bond by indiscriminate and plentiful use of sex for pleasure is more likely to succeed.
Yes, a world were the brutal mass murder of millions of people by governments is not considered an acceptable consequence of preventing a few murders by criminals. A world where people who can look after themselves are not considered inferior to those who are dependent on others.
The gist of this is simple: the free market isn't, nor can it ever be.
I'm not really a free market purist anyway. I'm not against all regulation, I do object to blaming the free market for the results of regulation. The only reason to do that is if you're planning on introducing regulation that people would not otherwise accept. I see a fairly consistent trend of centralisation of power, the results of which I think will be quite contrary to the ideals of a free society. Like the free market, a completely free society doesn't exist, but that's no reason not to work towards it.
No, I think it's you who isn't getting it. If the government didn't step in to regulate banks, then any bank could loan X dollars, whether or not they had that money in their coffers. If someone stepped in to question them, they'd say "sorry buddy, books are closed, you'll just have to trust us."
Even free market advocates accept the role of government in enforcing contracts. The banks have basically two ways of delivering loaned money. (1) Actual currency (2) Promissory notes. With our current system, electronic payment is effectively actual currency, the government accepts it as exchangeable for printed currency and accepts it as payment of debt. This is a direct result of legislation. Without that legislation a bank could write all the promissory notes it liked but you don't have to accept them as payment. Writing promissory notes for money they didn't have could be prosecuted as fraud if they were not open about the practice.
Whatever people decide is a good idea is irrelevant to what I'm saying. If people like the idea of government backed fractional reserve lending then go for it, it's legal. That doesn't make it a free market though. So when they are blaming it on free market capitalism they are deceiving the people, it is the failure of a system that only exists through regulation. It's a failure of the artificially generated money supply. Now I'm not against all things artificial, nor am I against all regulation, but if they can't be honest about the reasons for changes they want to make, there's a very strong possibility that those changes are not in our interest.
Yeah, except for most of Africa, the middle east, most of Asia, Russia and half of South America, it's the entire world. But that's not the point. The point is that it is hypocritical of them, no matter how many they are.
Various European states do stuff like ban guns. When totalitarians rise and butcher you by the millions, like in the last century, what do you do? You beg the US to send guns and come and help. Once it's over, you promptly ban guns again! What on earth makes you think Americans should care what your opinion is? Why do you think your low crime rates are impressive when you let stuff like that happen?
Here's a hint Europe: when you need someone else to defend you, they are very unlikely to consider you their superior. This is both why the US doesn't care what you say and why it's a really stupid idea to give up the right to self-defence in favour of a large well armed police force.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the Wikipedia article you linked to, and I think it backs up my claims more than yours!
I linked to two articles, did you read both? In any case you need to read it again, I'll quote you and the relevant part of the article:
The people didn't stand up to the government with weapons - they stood up to the government by small acts of terrorism (that didn't require guns)
and
...but it was definitely NOT a case of them using guns to do it. In fact, the ONLY mention of guns being used by them in the whole Wikipedia article is: [Then your reference to the destruction of stills]
But in the article itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_rebellion#The_insurrection "Finally, the civil protests became an armed rebellion. The first shots were fired at the Oliver Miller Homestead in present day South Park Township, Pennsylvania, about ten miles south of Pittsburgh. As word of the rebellion spread across the frontier, a whole series of loosely organized resistance measures were taken, including robbing the mail, stopping court proceedings, and the threat of an assault on Pittsburgh."[emphasis mine]
... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
As for this: The military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion set a precedent that U.S. citizens who wished to change the law had to do so peacefully through constitutional means; otherwise, the government would meet any threats to disturb the status quo with force. I don't see a problem with that, the soap box, the ballot box and the jury box should be used first. If the whiskey tax was so widely hated, it should have been relatively easy to get acquitted by a jury, so why resort to armed rebellion? I do think we should preserve the right and the ability to fight, but if you're going to have a viable country, the trigger happy need to be met with force.
Armed people rebelling and being overcome by the government was well within Thomas Jefferson's ideas of private firearms ownership preserving liberty. It was not intended to facilitate continual overthrow of governments, but as a reminder to governments that they derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed":
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
The second amendment specifically is now useless for the purposes of a civilian uprising against an oppressive government anyway.
For that, sir, I refer you to another post of mine: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1014967&cid=25593697
You may prefer to go straight to the parent for context: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1014967&cid=25593027
the Liberal party (think of a fairly even mix between the US libertarian party and the Democrats,...)
Surely you jest, the Liberal Party, libertarian? Introduced gun licensing and registration, largest increase in the size of government ever, what's libertarian about them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_rebellion
The hated whiskey tax was repealed in 1803, having been largely unenforceable outside of Western Pennsylvania, and even there never having been collected with much success.
They ended up getting what they wanted, even though they could not prevail militarily. Similar results were obtained in Australia from the Eureka Stockade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Stockade where they were overcome, but within a year had achieved most of their goals, the leader even being elected into the Victorian Legislative Assembly (one of their grievances was not having the right to vote, taxation without representation).
Resistance to the government doesn't have to mean "fight to the death of the last man standing". Even the Magna Carta didn't happen as a result of deposing the King, this is something you ought to know about for someone who claims that people with a different view to you lack knowledge of history.
Further to the fact that Mr Howard was pretty much doing his best to turn AU into another US state
No, a US states citizens would be protected by the bill of rights. Howard would have done anything to stop that, you don't think he was a 2nd amendment fan do you?
What if I don't want to buy a widget? I'd like to see a Google filter which hides all the product pages from its listing.
Which, incidentally, would probably also boost googles ad business since they would no longer be providing free advertising. Sales in the sponsored links, info in the search results, sounds good to me.
1) Its a joke. You know "How to make money with OSS ..."
2) The oft stated "Linux is no good for graphic designers because it doesn't have photoshop" now has a response. Not that I see any photoshop users switching because of this, but serious professional graphics work has now been done on linux.
In certain circumstances, violating someone's copyright can be and is conversion which is theft.
If you read a bit more closely the page I linked, you'd see that theft is a Class D felony, conversion is a Class A misdemeanor (except in certain circumstances which don't apply to copyright).
Don't lets have a flame war over whether conversion=theft, it's right there in the law.
This statement of yours I call highly debatable as a settlement is part of the process of law.
That was part of the argument being made in TFA, which depended on some other stuff which you can read for yourself. I didn't come up with this.
If settlements are routinely reached because the defendant considers the cost and risks of defending themselves to outweigh the settlement, regardless of innocence or guilt, then you do not have due process.
In my case: I don't download any RIAA stuff, if I want to get some music, I buy a cd. If the RIAA sued me and offered me a $3000 settlement, particularly in the early days of this action before anyone had any victories against them, I would have to seriously consider settling. I've had multi-thousand lawyers bills for no result before, I'm under no illusion that my innocence would make a judgement in my favour certain. Should I risk my house over something like this? I've got a family to look after, I have no intention of being a crusader in the court. Even if I won, on the chance that I didn't get fees awarded to me it would still cost me much more than the $3000.
Yes, it bears the semblance of due process, but it isn't really.
The nasty thing of course in the RIAA cases is the huge strength difference between the parties, easily intimidating the defendant into settlement. Taking it to court would likely be more costly for any defendant, unless they manage to win their suit AND win the next suit for their lawyer's costs AND live long enough to see it through.
So you understand, or you think this situation is adequately described as due process of law?
Well, according to the Indiana Code conversion seems to be a different charge to theft. http://www.in.gov/legislative/ic/code/title35/ar43/ch4.html /. for the following reasons.
/. for more than a couple of weeks has had ample opportunity to understand that.
I specified non-commercial anyway, so if you have a link to a legal case where non-commercial copying is charges as theft I'd be interested, otherwise not. My real point was that calling it copying theft is trolling, particularly on
1) It is quite easy to make a case in favour of copyright without calling it theft. In fact, I am in favour of copyright laws, although not in their current effectively unlimited time forms.
2) Everyone who has been reading
3) The particular post I replied to made no point relevant to the topic, ie: even for theft you are still entitled to due process and still protected from excessive fines.
4) Therefore I conclude that the OP was a troll.
Most posts I have seen that claim copying=theft fit into the category of troll. There are good reasons to support copyright, it is quite possible to make a reasonable case for it. Calling it theft only distracts from the real issues and detracts from the discussion. It is necessary to challenge the idea though, since there is so much propaganda from their side.
No, it's not a fact, it's a non sequitur. No matter how often a conversation occurs, it does not follow that any given person has heard the conversation. In order for your argument to be valid, everyone would have to have heard the conversation.
That's a good point.
Your argument does not address laziness in speech.
I also don't acknowledge the validity of laziness in speech. Once something is identified as such, it requires no further rebutal.
Your argument fails to address differences in opinion.
No, even someone who thinks that copying=theft can discuss copyright issues without bringing that up. For example (presuming the OP has heard the conversation) if they had said "I don't recall anything in the Constitution protecting an individual's right to infringe copyright." they would have made their point adequately. The only purpose to use the word "steal" was to provoke a reaction, an offtopic argument that has no relevance to the summary or article. That's trolling. Actually, the only reason I answer "copying=theft" trolls is for the benefit of people who haven't heard the conversation.
You must be a mad scientist.
That's what they all said, but now ... I SHALL RULE THE WORLD!!!
That said, my "convoluted scheme" can be reduced to "put up or shut up".
It's hard to get police to enforce the law, especially on white collar crime. And not just about 99c theft, but also billion dollar crimes. So you may be right in your theory, but the police argument is specious.
No matter how easy or difficult it is to get the police to do their jobs, most cases of non-commercial copying come under civil law not criminal law, ie: the law is very clear that copying!=theft, although larger scale and commercial infringement can be prosecuted.
/. to the point that calling copying theft can only be regarded as trolling.
The fact is, both the theory and practical legal aspects have been well and truly discussed here on
Even ignoring your "copyright violation=theft" troll:
...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
Amendment 5:
Settlement of these suits is commonly depriving people of their property without due process of law, not on the basis of any guilt by the cost of defending yourself in a lawsuit against a large corporation.
Amendment 8: Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Neither one of these require that copyright infringement cannot be dealt with at law, simply that the current law and process being applied doesn't meet the necessary standard.
Oh, and the copying=theft thing? If that was so, why did they not simply report them to the police so they could be charged with theft? I issue this challenge to all who claim copying=theft. Provide me with a copy of your work with an indemnity from any lawsuit for copying except in the case that I am convicted of stealing the work. I'll copy it in a way you can prove, but non-commercially, then you report me to the police for theft. Once that fails, you shut up.
Nobody downloads them. Logical fail.
Ah, but how many times did nobody download them?
10,000 times, that's how many.
Open Source's true power comes from being multi platform as far as possible.
I disagree, I think that OSS power comes from this:
I could build my own binary if I wanted to.
Nobody accuses the FSF of not being true to the philosophy, but as far as I know they only distribute source. Maybe I'm wrong on that, I don't usually get my software directly from them, but from a distribution. If you can compile it and redistribute it, what's the problem? It's not like you're paying outrageous licensing fees.
They didn't care enough to put a single PPC binary to downloads, that shows their lack of care and knowledge of the platform.
Here: http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ in several languages for PPC, but not english. I suppose you can add a language pack if you can find one or extract it out of the beta or Mac intel builds.
where's the 64-bit version of OO.org?
http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~adrian/torrentphp/torrent.php/OOo_3.0.0_LinuxX86-64_install_en-US.tar.gz.torrent
Found on the p2p download page: http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/
I can't see it on the normal download page, don't know why.
If you ask me, the real question is how many times the files were pulled WITHOUT leaving any evidence. That's one that all you paranoid 1984 types missed here :P
Ever had the feeling that no-one is watching you? That was probably a .....
1984 describes a big governmental campagne against sexuality just for fun and for bonding, and the reduction of sexuality to a means to get children.
The idea that you could get people to not enjoy sex was a losing proposition. Brave New World's method of destroying it as a bond by indiscriminate and plentiful use of sex for pleasure is more likely to succeed.
At work, one of our filters even blocked microsoft for a day or so.
You're right, if it's only going to be for a day or so, it's just not worth it!
Your the ones doing the murdering dumb ass.
Yeah well lets do a numbers comparison over the last hundred years for that proposition, shall we?
What a world you live in.
Yes, a world were the brutal mass murder of millions of people by governments is not considered an acceptable consequence of preventing a few murders by criminals. A world where people who can look after themselves are not considered inferior to those who are dependent on others.
Weird, isn't it.
The gist of this is simple: the free market isn't, nor can it ever be.
I'm not really a free market purist anyway. I'm not against all regulation, I do object to blaming the free market for the results of regulation. The only reason to do that is if you're planning on introducing regulation that people would not otherwise accept. I see a fairly consistent trend of centralisation of power, the results of which I think will be quite contrary to the ideals of a free society. Like the free market, a completely free society doesn't exist, but that's no reason not to work towards it.
No, I think it's you who isn't getting it. If the government didn't step in to regulate banks, then any bank could loan X dollars, whether or not they had that money in their coffers. If someone stepped in to question them, they'd say "sorry buddy, books are closed, you'll just have to trust us."
Even free market advocates accept the role of government in enforcing contracts. The banks have basically two ways of delivering loaned money. (1) Actual currency (2) Promissory notes. With our current system, electronic payment is effectively actual currency, the government accepts it as exchangeable for printed currency and accepts it as payment of debt. This is a direct result of legislation. Without that legislation a bank could write all the promissory notes it liked but you don't have to accept them as payment. Writing promissory notes for money they didn't have could be prosecuted as fraud if they were not open about the practice.
Whatever people decide is a good idea is irrelevant to what I'm saying. If people like the idea of government backed fractional reserve lending then go for it, it's legal. That doesn't make it a free market though. So when they are blaming it on free market capitalism they are deceiving the people, it is the failure of a system that only exists through regulation. It's a failure of the artificially generated money supply. Now I'm not against all things artificial, nor am I against all regulation, but if they can't be honest about the reasons for changes they want to make, there's a very strong possibility that those changes are not in our interest.
Yeah, except for most of Africa, the middle east, most of Asia, Russia and half of South America, it's the entire world. But that's not the point. The point is that it is hypocritical of them, no matter how many they are.
Various European states do stuff like ban guns. When totalitarians rise and butcher you by the millions, like in the last century, what do you do? You beg the US to send guns and come and help. Once it's over, you promptly ban guns again! What on earth makes you think Americans should care what your opinion is? Why do you think your low crime rates are impressive when you let stuff like that happen?
Here's a hint Europe: when you need someone else to defend you, they are very unlikely to consider you their superior. This is both why the US doesn't care what you say and why it's a really stupid idea to give up the right to self-defence in favour of a large well armed police force.