The problem with reduction in biodiversity is that the consequences aren't immediately obvious. Most people consider it a net gain for precisely the reason that they're incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Now, it's a philosophical question as to whether that's good or bad, as on one hand it's inherent in who we are - we haven't evolved to necessarily see the bigger picture, only to try and maximise the survival of our own genes, but on the other, as a species, we do have capacity for consideration beyond our natural tendencies where such short sightedness isn't beneficial.
The same is true of even with eradication of diseases like smallpox, because the problems are:
1) Increased population creating greater strain on resources, creating greater scarcity of resources, and hence increasing cost of resources (which in itself leads to more wars)
2) Potentially fatal diseases mostly kill the elderly and infirm, but the longer we prolong their lives the more cost and time (and hence lost productivity) we must spend catering to them.
3) When we eradicate something with medicine, and vaccination, we're creating conditions for evolution of something worse. See MRSA for example.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm most certainly not advocating we just let people die or any such thing and that's a much more complicated discussion that's not really on topic here. But I am pointing out that such eradication of biodiversity doesn't come for free. The impacts aren't immediately obvious, but they exist, and are far reaching in impact.
On that note, is there anything to stop someone creating and archive and search engine of Google's published DMCA takedown notices? Effectively a site that acts as a DMCA archive and provides easy access to all taken down URLs and their associated request details?
Ultimately this is where it all started to go wrong, when we lost the war as to whether a link could or couldn't be infringing.
We need a roll back and a retrial that determines that a link can't be any more against the law than pointing at someone's open front door can be incitement to rob the place.
If the media industries want to go after unlicensed content then it should be simply about them going straight after people who have the actual content on their hard drives and nothing else. If they can't do that, or that's too hard, or time consuming? tough shit. It's a business decision, either it's worth your time to chase up or it's not, if it's not then don't go manipulating the law in your favour to bypass well established historical precedent on such issues like the right to a trial if you're accused of a crime rather than the corporate summary judgements that are DMCA takedown notices and their enforcement.
There's a difference between economic value, and perceived economic value.
This suit may change the perception to reduced economic value, but it doesn't change the fact that reduction in biodiversity is always at a net cost to humanity.
So do you also feel someone who has a mental disability that prevents them fulfilling their responsibilities also has no rights?
Even in law we have the concept of pleading insanity and diminished responsibility because of recognition of the fact that someone who has lost the plot can't understand what their responsibilities are.
You seem to be putting forward a rather disturbing proposal - that anyone who is sufficiently disabled, or who suffers from mental breakdown or similar has no rights.
I think the problem is one of environments, the problem is that there seems to be this inherent assumption that kids need to learn the same tools that professionals use from the very outset. I'm not sure that's true.
I think some of the best historic tools for teaching programming to kids like Scratch and Klik 'n Play provide visual representations - you can have say, a monkey and the teacher can say "So how do we make the monkey move his arm?" then it's a case of filling in the procedural code there by calling monkey.move(arm) or whatever.
If we're talking about getting kids started whilst this might upset the purists who insist that children should write their first code in assembly or Borland Turbo C++ at a command prompt or whatever it's going to get the kids far more interest and be far more effective. They're learning about objects whilst writing procedural code and from there it's far easier to branch them off into either procedural or object oriented code in more professionally focussed environments. If you take them down the OO route you could use something like BlueJ which is a Java IDE that allows for dynamic execution of Java so you can see the effects of it on the fly - it's like a half way house between something like Scratch and a professional grade IDE.
The problem with OO in a classic development environment is largely one of syntax - it's not that kids couldn't grasp the abstract concept of objects in the slightest, it's just that the overhead of OO equates to much more syntax to learn and that results in an overload of keywords, and syntax to take in.
Abstract that syntax away into an environment as described above and let them write procedural code whilst referring to visualised objects and I think you have the best of both worlds quite frankly.
So to me, the problem is one of IDEs - what's great for a professional developer is 99% useless for teaching kids because the environment itself will put the vast majority of students off the topic.
I think this is where we go wrong with teaching a lot of topics for what it's worth, most prominently maths. I was always given lists of exercises to carry out with no idea what the relevance was to the real world and I found it dull and boring. I ended up with a B in maths at GCSE and dropped out at A-Level only to come back to study later on and get a 1st class honours in Maths at university. It wasn't that I was ever bad at maths, it was that the teaching was so pathetically dull I just couldn't concentrate in class - when I came back to it I was doing so because I wanted a better understanding of the fundamentals behind much of computing and because I had something to apply it too it was just all too easy.
I think the privacy battle is already lost, if it's an apartment block on a street surrounded by shops then you've already been caught on CCTV by every shop surrounding it anyway and besides, even with DNA you're infringing privacy because you have to somehow link the dog with the owner and that means recording the dog's DNA, which then has to be associated with the owner so collection of data there already does that. It means you're recording data about even the responsible owners 'just in case'.
I think the rest of what you say is merely unfounded speculation, I've seen more of a pushback against DNA profiling and data collection than I have CCTV usage. As for how people view CCTV in relation to crime, it really depends how it's placed. If you have it on a big pole looking down on everything around people seem to view it as more Orwellian, troubling, and must be a bad area, but if it's just stuck onto the building people don't seem to give a shit or make any assumptions about increased crime because of it. Most people wont even notice it, in fact, most people don't even notice when they are and aren't caught on CCTV anyway. If they haven't noticed all the shops filming them they wont notice an apartment block doing so.
No one watches CCTV recordings back in real time. They have fast rewind and fast forward functionality. You just go to a point where the poo isn't there, find a point where it is, and keep cutting down until you narrow down to the point it happens. It takes no time at all.
Whether they're off camera depends on how well you place the camera(s) and you may not even need the owner if you recognise the dog.
But why the grass? Why not the pavement? Seems odd to take a dog out your way onto someone else's property when it will just as well piss on the sidewalk or wherever else.
Why would people intentionally let their dog piss on your grass? It's not like they couldn't piss just about anywhere else is it?
Dog piss is full of nitrogen and that's what makes it kill the grass, so trying hardy types that you have to water less isn't going to help you. You need to water your grass to dilute the nitrogen content of their urine.
FWIW I'm a dog owner and I always pick up their crap. I wish the same could be said for cat owners whose cats shit in garden beds and spend the rest of their time trying to kill all the local wildlife in your garden, sometimes rather noisily early in the morning when you're trying to sleep.
You realise that almost everyone else other than Americans living in the Western world manage to get through every single day of their lives without needing a gun to defend themselves from attackers right?
How often do you encounter this "arbitrary number of attackers" of yours?
Do you also drive an armoured vehicle? you know, just to protect you from dying in a car crash too, given that there's a far higher likelihood of that.
I can't comprehend how miserable life must be spending your entire life living in abject fear of the worst things that could possibly happen, but almost certainly wont.
It all wouldn't be so bad if America had something to show for it, but higher murder rates, lower life expectancies and so forth means you don't even have that. It's like your country needs to chill the fuck out and stop being so god damned paranoid that everything is out to get you.
Except gun control does work in the UK even though the exact same arguments had been put forward.
Nowadays in the rare case that people do get shot at in the UK the police are finding it's the same one or two guns being passed around. That's a far better situation than every criminal being able to get hold of one.
It's simple established fact from our implementation of tougher gun laws that access to guns even for criminals drastically decreased, that gun crime went down and so did mortality rates from armed assault cases.
We still allow people to have shotguns and hunting rifles, so they're not completely outlawed, but outlawing handguns, assault rifles and so forth has made a massive difference.
Given that the UK was a reasonably populous country at the time of the ban (50mill plus) then it's a healthy case study to show what nonsense the "if you outlaw guns, only criminals will have guns" argument actually is. The fact is when guns are no longer the status quo even most criminals will give them up because suddenly they can be picked up pro-actively simply for carrying. This means it doesn't take long to then take and destroy the guns that are out there.
Here when a criminal is thought to have a firearm they have the UK's equivalent of a SWAT team descend upon them. That's scary enough for most criminals that the vast majority of criminals don't even want to be seen with one, let alone threaten to use one or actually use one.
Thank you for answering my question about what mental gymnastics you need to perform to come up with the hypocritical nonsense you do - long story short it sounds like you just pretend reality isn't and referring terms incorrectly to sit you nonsense world view?
You're everything that makes America bad, you're the reason America is in decline. Congratulations on your failure to be a net benefit to the world, you must be proud.
Crime in the UK is at its lowest levels in over 30 years since well before the hand gun ban, possibly ever (that's as far back as the stats go).
Gun ownership in Switzerland is high because people hold their military issue weapons at home, but not ammo which makes the high ownership stat meaningless.
These two myths are often repeated in gun ownership debates but do not make the arguments you think they make.
"Wrong. Studies in U.S. emergency rooms show that only about 15% of intentional handgun injuries are fatal, whereas fatalities from intentional knife wounds approach 50%."
And that factors in the number of people who managed to avoid getting stabbed in the first place because knives are more easily avoidable than bullets how exactly?
Not to mention that stat clearly fails to consider all those shot who didn't even make it to the emergency room. It could just as well mean that people with knife wounds are more likely to make it to the emergency room because they don't die as quickly whilst people who are shot almost never make it and the only ones that do are those who have suffered little more than a graze.
"What you're still missing is that if you do not have fear of someone wielding a knife at you menacingly, either you're Jean-Claude Van Damme, or you're irrationally not in fear."
Of course I fear it, but at least I can run, or try and fight. A gun? I'm fucked either way.
"I know my reflexes are not fast enough to avoid a knife. To me, there's not a significant difference here."
People with knives don't have special abilities in terms of reflexes, they can't move their body to stab any quicker than you can move to avoid assuming like for like.
But you could always run. Maybe you're heavily overweight, maybe you are weak and I sympathise, that yes, that makes you one of life's victims whatever weapon you're faced with. But you're one of many, and the fact still remains that on average, people are still going to have more hope of surviving an attacker with a knife, than a person with a gun because whilst you may be incapable of fighting back against anything, someone else is not, but no one is capable of dodging a well aimed bullet, or outrunning one, and that fundamental fact still remains. But you personally being unfit (assuming that's why you claim you have slower reflexes than a knife attacker and seem unable to even consider the idea of trying to outrun them) isn't an argument as to why everyone else should suffer increased risk from firearms vs. knives.
"Yes, if the person is 30 feet or more away, a gun is far more menacing. But inside that threat range, there's not a significant difference."
Of course there is. If nothing else you have a 30ft headstart on running away from them.
"Which is why police officers are trained to treat a knife-wielding person within 21 feet (or maybe a bigger circle) as if they were immediately beside them."
This must be an American thing. British police are trained that a bit of CS spray to the face and a baton to break the wrist with the protection of slash proof gloves and a stab proof vest is pretty effective in dealing with the problem. Though I suppose they do have tasers now a bit more often too. But then, our police have been policing without routine access to firearms since forever, so I guess they're just a bit more competent in that respect. The number that have died to firearms is so tiny and so uncommon that it's just not a consideration for them and even after police have been shot on the odd occasion their own unions insist they still do not want to be routinely armed with firearms themselves.
Yeah I know what you mean, that's why an IED isn't a problem, it's just bits of metal and stuff really, it's never hurt anyone. It's all those soldiers faults for walking right over the top of it.
I'll give you a hint: yes the weapon isn't a problem in itself, the problem is what someone can do with the weapon, and as we can't legislate against people, the only option for risk mitigation of that particular weapon is to legislate in the optimal way for risk minimisation whether that's an outright ban, some half-way measure involving some degree of restrictions, or complete unregulated use of all weaponry.
I don't pretend to know what's optimal, but given how bad things are in the US as it's historically tended towards the latter, and how successful the UK's handgun ban has been, I'd wager it's closer to the first option than the last.
With your automated shoot-back sentry-gun that's attached to every person's head, or? I don't imagine shooting back is particularly easy when you've been shot. I guess you could shoot first just in case, but that sounds like a rather effective way to cause even more incidents.
Or were you under the impression Hollywood style Clint Eastwood style holstered six shooter quickdraws are how these things go down in real life?
"Please tell all these dead children how to defend against knives. Because you're thinking of the children, right? "
Irrelevant. I don't think (and I certainly haven't) anyone has ever made the argument no one has died to knives, so what is the relevance of this? It's trivial to also pull up examples of people who have died to guns but that changes the debate not at all.
"Because the knife wielding criminals always announce themselves, right?"
Most people have the ability to sense when someone is getting close to them. I say most, because yes, I encounter a bunch of retards who manage to get in my way every day at the train station during my commute, but fundamentally you've got more chance of knowing someone's about to stab you than someone's about to shoot you for the simple fact that they have to be closer to you and you have better perception of their movements and intentions.
"Or you could be properly trained on how to use your gun to defend yourself."
It doesn't matter how well trained you are to use a gun, that doesn't prevent human error, and it doesn't allow you to bend and meld the laws of physics against such incidents. Many people have been killed by stray bullets, including from soldiers and cops who have some of the most thorough weapons training in the world.
"Why? Because I live in a rural area and the crime rate diminishes the further away I get from the "gun-free zone" urban areas."
If the crime rate is so low why do you even need a gun to defend your house? Funnily enough, in the UK the most knife crime is in areas the police are actively combating knife crime too. It's funny that isn't it? that authorities focus on certain problems in areas that are more prone to them, who'd have thought it! I'll give you a hint, the problem is the gun-free zone, it's inner city poverty leading to an increase in violence.
"The only thing I'm worried about is someone breaking in to rob the house. And even in that case, I hope that the sound of me racking the 12 gauge will be enough to scare them off because if I shoot them, NY will probably throw me in jail."
So what you're saying is that your gun is a kind of security blanket, the sort of thing kids carry around and drool over but normally grow out of by the age of 3 or so? If you're not going to use it, why have it? If you have it just to scare people off then why not just use a baseball bat, a hammer, a knife, or whatever else you have instead? Because you're afraid that maybe they'll have a gun perhaps?
You realise pretty much every in the West faces this potential scenario right? that of someone breaking in? The vast majority of people get through their lives without their security blanket. In fact, of the few that do face it, some still manage to defend their home and take out the intruder despite being outnumbered:
They're not lumping him in with terrorists any more than Canada was lumping me in with terrorists because one customs officer couldn't believe I'd take a laptop on a private holiday.
"and only served the liberal wing who doesn't want to hear opposing views"
By definition, if they don't want to hear opposing views, then they're not liberal.
"liberal censorship."
Again, I don't think you know what liberalism is. "Liberal censorship"- I'll try and help you understand why that statement is stupid. It's a bit like saying "male women", or talking about the colour "black white". These things are diametrically opposed. The worst part of your whole argument is that your conservative speaker was banned by a home secretary with conservative views and the ban later upheld by the Conservative party. Where are these mystical liberals you talk of that were involved? Calling Jacqui Smith liberal is pretty comical given that she was the one who tried to push through some of the most illiberal laws the UK has seen in decades.
"That was when you crossed a line that you can't go back from."
A line that pretty much every other nation on earth already crossed years before us including the US? Oh no, we're damned!
"Israel is pretty much the best ally the U.S. has at this point"
Erm, you know Israel has denied entry to far more people for their political views than Britain ever has right? I mean, we're talking about Israel here, the country that built a wall to hold an entire fucking race of people from entering just for being that race. So what you're saying is it's okay for Israel to do that sort of thing - it makes them awesome, but if Britain does it once or twice with a handful of specific individuals it's a problem? Please explain how you justify your hypocrisy, I'm intrigued to know what kind of mental gymnastics you have to perform in your head for this to make any kind of sense.
"although Obama and the Democrats have instituted more Socialism now than Canada and the U.K.."
It doesn't look like you understand what socialism is either.
Tell me, why do you use terms you don't understand? You know it makes you look really really stupid right?
"Every knife fight is expected to end in death (not just 30%)."
I'd like to see your evidence for the fact that no one ever has apparently survived a knife fight. I'm intrigued to see what book of bollocks you managed to pull that one from along with the rest of it.
"The major difference is that you will live in abject horror for a little while longer, and then slowly bleed to death, when confronted by a madman with a knife."
That's time in which an ambulance can reach you and save you.
As an aside, why the hyperbole "abject horror", "madman", do you not ever die in "abject horror" when shot? do madmen only ever use knives?
"If someone intent on harming you with a knife is 21 feet away from you, and you have a holstered gun, you stand a pretty good chance of being dead."
You can dodge a knife easier than you can dodge a bullet, you can disarm someone with a knife charging you easier than you can disarm someone you can't even reach with a gun, you can run from someone with a knife easier than someone with a gun. All these factors make a drastic difference.
"I think you may be overestimating your ability to defend yourself should someone try and physically attack you."
Whatever the ability is, it's higher than the chance of stopping or dodging a bullet which is pretty much exactly zero.
I don't pretend that surviving a knife attack is easy, but it's still orders of magnitude easier than surviving being shot at
Pretending you're as likely to die when faced with a knife attack as opposed to a gun attack is all kinds of retarded. The very fact a gun is a ranged weapon alone drastically alters the balance, the very fact they can attack you without you physically being able to reach them back changes everything, as does the fact that their tool of harm - the bullet travels at a speed you simply can't react to compared to a knife which can only move at the same speed you too can respond - that of human reflex.
If guns didn't offer a massive advantage in terms of killing or causing harm then we'd all be walking round with broadswords and polearms because guns would've been pointless in the first place. Their very existence is based on the fact they're a far more effective and efficient method of killing whilst avoiding being killed, that's a cold hard unavoidable fact even if it is inconvenient to those paranoid enough to feel they can't possibly live their life without a firearm.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with reduction in biodiversity is that the consequences aren't immediately obvious. Most people consider it a net gain for precisely the reason that they're incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Now, it's a philosophical question as to whether that's good or bad, as on one hand it's inherent in who we are - we haven't evolved to necessarily see the bigger picture, only to try and maximise the survival of our own genes, but on the other, as a species, we do have capacity for consideration beyond our natural tendencies where such short sightedness isn't beneficial.
The same is true of even with eradication of diseases like smallpox, because the problems are:
1) Increased population creating greater strain on resources, creating greater scarcity of resources, and hence increasing cost of resources (which in itself leads to more wars)
2) Potentially fatal diseases mostly kill the elderly and infirm, but the longer we prolong their lives the more cost and time (and hence lost productivity) we must spend catering to them.
3) When we eradicate something with medicine, and vaccination, we're creating conditions for evolution of something worse. See MRSA for example.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm most certainly not advocating we just let people die or any such thing and that's a much more complicated discussion that's not really on topic here. But I am pointing out that such eradication of biodiversity doesn't come for free. The impacts aren't immediately obvious, but they exist, and are far reaching in impact.
On that note, is there anything to stop someone creating and archive and search engine of Google's published DMCA takedown notices? Effectively a site that acts as a DMCA archive and provides easy access to all taken down URLs and their associated request details?
All of them.
Ultimately this is where it all started to go wrong, when we lost the war as to whether a link could or couldn't be infringing.
We need a roll back and a retrial that determines that a link can't be any more against the law than pointing at someone's open front door can be incitement to rob the place.
If the media industries want to go after unlicensed content then it should be simply about them going straight after people who have the actual content on their hard drives and nothing else. If they can't do that, or that's too hard, or time consuming? tough shit. It's a business decision, either it's worth your time to chase up or it's not, if it's not then don't go manipulating the law in your favour to bypass well established historical precedent on such issues like the right to a trial if you're accused of a crime rather than the corporate summary judgements that are DMCA takedown notices and their enforcement.
What about Pinewood studios in the UK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinewood_Studios#2000s.E2.80.932010s
There's a difference between economic value, and perceived economic value.
This suit may change the perception to reduced economic value, but it doesn't change the fact that reduction in biodiversity is always at a net cost to humanity.
So do you also feel someone who has a mental disability that prevents them fulfilling their responsibilities also has no rights?
Even in law we have the concept of pleading insanity and diminished responsibility because of recognition of the fact that someone who has lost the plot can't understand what their responsibilities are.
You seem to be putting forward a rather disturbing proposal - that anyone who is sufficiently disabled, or who suffers from mental breakdown or similar has no rights.
I think the problem is one of environments, the problem is that there seems to be this inherent assumption that kids need to learn the same tools that professionals use from the very outset. I'm not sure that's true.
I think some of the best historic tools for teaching programming to kids like Scratch and Klik 'n Play provide visual representations - you can have say, a monkey and the teacher can say "So how do we make the monkey move his arm?" then it's a case of filling in the procedural code there by calling monkey.move(arm) or whatever.
If we're talking about getting kids started whilst this might upset the purists who insist that children should write their first code in assembly or Borland Turbo C++ at a command prompt or whatever it's going to get the kids far more interest and be far more effective. They're learning about objects whilst writing procedural code and from there it's far easier to branch them off into either procedural or object oriented code in more professionally focussed environments. If you take them down the OO route you could use something like BlueJ which is a Java IDE that allows for dynamic execution of Java so you can see the effects of it on the fly - it's like a half way house between something like Scratch and a professional grade IDE.
The problem with OO in a classic development environment is largely one of syntax - it's not that kids couldn't grasp the abstract concept of objects in the slightest, it's just that the overhead of OO equates to much more syntax to learn and that results in an overload of keywords, and syntax to take in.
Abstract that syntax away into an environment as described above and let them write procedural code whilst referring to visualised objects and I think you have the best of both worlds quite frankly.
So to me, the problem is one of IDEs - what's great for a professional developer is 99% useless for teaching kids because the environment itself will put the vast majority of students off the topic.
I think this is where we go wrong with teaching a lot of topics for what it's worth, most prominently maths. I was always given lists of exercises to carry out with no idea what the relevance was to the real world and I found it dull and boring. I ended up with a B in maths at GCSE and dropped out at A-Level only to come back to study later on and get a 1st class honours in Maths at university. It wasn't that I was ever bad at maths, it was that the teaching was so pathetically dull I just couldn't concentrate in class - when I came back to it I was doing so because I wanted a better understanding of the fundamentals behind much of computing and because I had something to apply it too it was just all too easy.
I think the privacy battle is already lost, if it's an apartment block on a street surrounded by shops then you've already been caught on CCTV by every shop surrounding it anyway and besides, even with DNA you're infringing privacy because you have to somehow link the dog with the owner and that means recording the dog's DNA, which then has to be associated with the owner so collection of data there already does that. It means you're recording data about even the responsible owners 'just in case'.
I think the rest of what you say is merely unfounded speculation, I've seen more of a pushback against DNA profiling and data collection than I have CCTV usage. As for how people view CCTV in relation to crime, it really depends how it's placed. If you have it on a big pole looking down on everything around people seem to view it as more Orwellian, troubling, and must be a bad area, but if it's just stuck onto the building people don't seem to give a shit or make any assumptions about increased crime because of it. Most people wont even notice it, in fact, most people don't even notice when they are and aren't caught on CCTV anyway. If they haven't noticed all the shops filming them they wont notice an apartment block doing so.
No one watches CCTV recordings back in real time. They have fast rewind and fast forward functionality. You just go to a point where the poo isn't there, find a point where it is, and keep cutting down until you narrow down to the point it happens. It takes no time at all.
Whether they're off camera depends on how well you place the camera(s) and you may not even need the owner if you recognise the dog.
But why the grass? Why not the pavement? Seems odd to take a dog out your way onto someone else's property when it will just as well piss on the sidewalk or wherever else.
If it's at the door wouldn't CCTV on the building be far cheaper and easier?
It'd take what, 5 mins to rewind to the point of spotting it and recognising the resident no?
It's because there's profit in this, but sadly not in helping rape victims.
Which ultimately shows how fucked up society is.
Why would people intentionally let their dog piss on your grass? It's not like they couldn't piss just about anywhere else is it?
Dog piss is full of nitrogen and that's what makes it kill the grass, so trying hardy types that you have to water less isn't going to help you. You need to water your grass to dilute the nitrogen content of their urine.
FWIW I'm a dog owner and I always pick up their crap. I wish the same could be said for cat owners whose cats shit in garden beds and spend the rest of their time trying to kill all the local wildlife in your garden, sometimes rather noisily early in the morning when you're trying to sleep.
You realise that almost everyone else other than Americans living in the Western world manage to get through every single day of their lives without needing a gun to defend themselves from attackers right?
How often do you encounter this "arbitrary number of attackers" of yours?
Do you also drive an armoured vehicle? you know, just to protect you from dying in a car crash too, given that there's a far higher likelihood of that.
I can't comprehend how miserable life must be spending your entire life living in abject fear of the worst things that could possibly happen, but almost certainly wont.
It all wouldn't be so bad if America had something to show for it, but higher murder rates, lower life expectancies and so forth means you don't even have that. It's like your country needs to chill the fuck out and stop being so god damned paranoid that everything is out to get you.
Except gun control does work in the UK even though the exact same arguments had been put forward.
Nowadays in the rare case that people do get shot at in the UK the police are finding it's the same one or two guns being passed around. That's a far better situation than every criminal being able to get hold of one.
It's simple established fact from our implementation of tougher gun laws that access to guns even for criminals drastically decreased, that gun crime went down and so did mortality rates from armed assault cases.
We still allow people to have shotguns and hunting rifles, so they're not completely outlawed, but outlawing handguns, assault rifles and so forth has made a massive difference.
Given that the UK was a reasonably populous country at the time of the ban (50mill plus) then it's a healthy case study to show what nonsense the "if you outlaw guns, only criminals will have guns" argument actually is. The fact is when guns are no longer the status quo even most criminals will give them up because suddenly they can be picked up pro-actively simply for carrying. This means it doesn't take long to then take and destroy the guns that are out there.
Here when a criminal is thought to have a firearm they have the UK's equivalent of a SWAT team descend upon them. That's scary enough for most criminals that the vast majority of criminals don't even want to be seen with one, let alone threaten to use one or actually use one.
Thank you for answering my question about what mental gymnastics you need to perform to come up with the hypocritical nonsense you do - long story short it sounds like you just pretend reality isn't and referring terms incorrectly to sit you nonsense world view?
You're everything that makes America bad, you're the reason America is in decline. Congratulations on your failure to be a net benefit to the world, you must be proud.
Crime in the UK is at its lowest levels in over 30 years since well before the hand gun ban, possibly ever (that's as far back as the stats go).
Gun ownership in Switzerland is high because people hold their military issue weapons at home, but not ammo which makes the high ownership stat meaningless.
These two myths are often repeated in gun ownership debates but do not make the arguments you think they make.
"Wrong. Studies in U.S. emergency rooms show that only about 15% of intentional handgun injuries are fatal, whereas fatalities from intentional knife wounds approach 50%."
And that factors in the number of people who managed to avoid getting stabbed in the first place because knives are more easily avoidable than bullets how exactly?
Not to mention that stat clearly fails to consider all those shot who didn't even make it to the emergency room. It could just as well mean that people with knife wounds are more likely to make it to the emergency room because they don't die as quickly whilst people who are shot almost never make it and the only ones that do are those who have suffered little more than a graze.
"What you're still missing is that if you do not have fear of someone wielding a knife at you menacingly, either you're Jean-Claude Van Damme, or you're irrationally not in fear."
Of course I fear it, but at least I can run, or try and fight. A gun? I'm fucked either way.
"I know my reflexes are not fast enough to avoid a knife. To me, there's not a significant difference here."
People with knives don't have special abilities in terms of reflexes, they can't move their body to stab any quicker than you can move to avoid assuming like for like.
But you could always run. Maybe you're heavily overweight, maybe you are weak and I sympathise, that yes, that makes you one of life's victims whatever weapon you're faced with. But you're one of many, and the fact still remains that on average, people are still going to have more hope of surviving an attacker with a knife, than a person with a gun because whilst you may be incapable of fighting back against anything, someone else is not, but no one is capable of dodging a well aimed bullet, or outrunning one, and that fundamental fact still remains. But you personally being unfit (assuming that's why you claim you have slower reflexes than a knife attacker and seem unable to even consider the idea of trying to outrun them) isn't an argument as to why everyone else should suffer increased risk from firearms vs. knives.
"Yes, if the person is 30 feet or more away, a gun is far more menacing. But inside that threat range, there's not a significant difference."
Of course there is. If nothing else you have a 30ft headstart on running away from them.
"Which is why police officers are trained to treat a knife-wielding person within 21 feet (or maybe a bigger circle) as if they were immediately beside them."
This must be an American thing. British police are trained that a bit of CS spray to the face and a baton to break the wrist with the protection of slash proof gloves and a stab proof vest is pretty effective in dealing with the problem. Though I suppose they do have tasers now a bit more often too. But then, our police have been policing without routine access to firearms since forever, so I guess they're just a bit more competent in that respect. The number that have died to firearms is so tiny and so uncommon that it's just not a consideration for them and even after police have been shot on the odd occasion their own unions insist they still do not want to be routinely armed with firearms themselves.
Yeah I know what you mean, that's why an IED isn't a problem, it's just bits of metal and stuff really, it's never hurt anyone. It's all those soldiers faults for walking right over the top of it.
I'll give you a hint: yes the weapon isn't a problem in itself, the problem is what someone can do with the weapon, and as we can't legislate against people, the only option for risk mitigation of that particular weapon is to legislate in the optimal way for risk minimisation whether that's an outright ban, some half-way measure involving some degree of restrictions, or complete unregulated use of all weaponry.
I don't pretend to know what's optimal, but given how bad things are in the US as it's historically tended towards the latter, and how successful the UK's handgun ban has been, I'd wager it's closer to the first option than the last.
"You could shoot back."
With your automated shoot-back sentry-gun that's attached to every person's head, or? I don't imagine shooting back is particularly easy when you've been shot. I guess you could shoot first just in case, but that sounds like a rather effective way to cause even more incidents.
Or were you under the impression Hollywood style Clint Eastwood style holstered six shooter quickdraws are how these things go down in real life?
"Please tell all these dead children how to defend against knives. Because you're thinking of the children, right? "
Irrelevant. I don't think (and I certainly haven't) anyone has ever made the argument no one has died to knives, so what is the relevance of this? It's trivial to also pull up examples of people who have died to guns but that changes the debate not at all.
"Because the knife wielding criminals always announce themselves, right?"
Most people have the ability to sense when someone is getting close to them. I say most, because yes, I encounter a bunch of retards who manage to get in my way every day at the train station during my commute, but fundamentally you've got more chance of knowing someone's about to stab you than someone's about to shoot you for the simple fact that they have to be closer to you and you have better perception of their movements and intentions.
"Or you could be properly trained on how to use your gun to defend yourself."
It doesn't matter how well trained you are to use a gun, that doesn't prevent human error, and it doesn't allow you to bend and meld the laws of physics against such incidents. Many people have been killed by stray bullets, including from soldiers and cops who have some of the most thorough weapons training in the world.
"Why? Because I live in a rural area and the crime rate diminishes the further away I get from the "gun-free zone" urban areas."
If the crime rate is so low why do you even need a gun to defend your house? Funnily enough, in the UK the most knife crime is in areas the police are actively combating knife crime too. It's funny that isn't it? that authorities focus on certain problems in areas that are more prone to them, who'd have thought it! I'll give you a hint, the problem is the gun-free zone, it's inner city poverty leading to an increase in violence.
"The only thing I'm worried about is someone breaking in to rob the house. And even in that case, I hope that the sound of me racking the 12 gauge will be enough to scare them off because if I shoot them, NY will probably throw me in jail."
So what you're saying is that your gun is a kind of security blanket, the sort of thing kids carry around and drool over but normally grow out of by the age of 3 or so? If you're not going to use it, why have it? If you have it just to scare people off then why not just use a baseball bat, a hammer, a knife, or whatever else you have instead? Because you're afraid that maybe they'll have a gun perhaps?
You realise pretty much every in the West faces this potential scenario right? that of someone breaking in? The vast majority of people get through their lives without their security blanket. In fact, of the few that do face it, some still manage to defend their home and take out the intruder despite being outnumbered:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8814700/Man-who-stabbed-to-death-intruder-will-not-face-court.html
They're not lumping him in with terrorists any more than Canada was lumping me in with terrorists because one customs officer couldn't believe I'd take a laptop on a private holiday.
"and only served the liberal wing who doesn't want to hear opposing views"
By definition, if they don't want to hear opposing views, then they're not liberal.
"liberal censorship."
Again, I don't think you know what liberalism is. "Liberal censorship"- I'll try and help you understand why that statement is stupid. It's a bit like saying "male women", or talking about the colour "black white". These things are diametrically opposed. The worst part of your whole argument is that your conservative speaker was banned by a home secretary with conservative views and the ban later upheld by the Conservative party. Where are these mystical liberals you talk of that were involved? Calling Jacqui Smith liberal is pretty comical given that she was the one who tried to push through some of the most illiberal laws the UK has seen in decades.
"That was when you crossed a line that you can't go back from."
A line that pretty much every other nation on earth already crossed years before us including the US? Oh no, we're damned!
"Israel is pretty much the best ally the U.S. has at this point"
Erm, you know Israel has denied entry to far more people for their political views than Britain ever has right? I mean, we're talking about Israel here, the country that built a wall to hold an entire fucking race of people from entering just for being that race. So what you're saying is it's okay for Israel to do that sort of thing - it makes them awesome, but if Britain does it once or twice with a handful of specific individuals it's a problem? Please explain how you justify your hypocrisy, I'm intrigued to know what kind of mental gymnastics you have to perform in your head for this to make any kind of sense.
"although Obama and the Democrats have instituted more Socialism now than Canada and the U.K.."
It doesn't look like you understand what socialism is either.
Tell me, why do you use terms you don't understand? You know it makes you look really really stupid right?
"Every knife fight is expected to end in death (not just 30%)."
I'd like to see your evidence for the fact that no one ever has apparently survived a knife fight. I'm intrigued to see what book of bollocks you managed to pull that one from along with the rest of it.
"The major difference is that you will live in abject horror for a little while longer, and then slowly bleed to death, when confronted by a madman with a knife."
That's time in which an ambulance can reach you and save you.
As an aside, why the hyperbole "abject horror", "madman", do you not ever die in "abject horror" when shot? do madmen only ever use knives?
"If someone intent on harming you with a knife is 21 feet away from you, and you have a holstered gun, you stand a pretty good chance of being dead."
You can dodge a knife easier than you can dodge a bullet, you can disarm someone with a knife charging you easier than you can disarm someone you can't even reach with a gun, you can run from someone with a knife easier than someone with a gun. All these factors make a drastic difference.
"I think you may be overestimating your ability to defend yourself should someone try and physically attack you."
Whatever the ability is, it's higher than the chance of stopping or dodging a bullet which is pretty much exactly zero.
I don't pretend that surviving a knife attack is easy, but it's still orders of magnitude easier than surviving being shot at
Pretending you're as likely to die when faced with a knife attack as opposed to a gun attack is all kinds of retarded. The very fact a gun is a ranged weapon alone drastically alters the balance, the very fact they can attack you without you physically being able to reach them back changes everything, as does the fact that their tool of harm - the bullet travels at a speed you simply can't react to compared to a knife which can only move at the same speed you too can respond - that of human reflex.
If guns didn't offer a massive advantage in terms of killing or causing harm then we'd all be walking round with broadswords and polearms because guns would've been pointless in the first place. Their very existence is based on the fact they're a far more effective and efficient method of killing whilst avoiding being killed, that's a cold hard unavoidable fact even if it is inconvenient to those paranoid enough to feel they can't possibly live their life without a firearm.