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If it seems like every week, there's another terrorist attack – well, you're not wrong. According to one crowdsourcing map, there have been over 500 attacks around the world since the start of 2017, with over 3,500 fatalities. For a period in 2016, ISIS-initiated attacks were occurring, on average, every 84 hours.
Despite improvements in methods and coordination among law enforcement agencies over the past 25 years, they're still hamstrung in a number of ways. With large public gatherings of people becoming more attractive targets for terrorists, what are the best strategies moving forward?
[...] But despite huge budgets and the presence of thousands of added security personnel, it's virtually impossible to prevent a determined terrorist, or guarantee absolute safety. While security efforts for events like the Olympic Games have escalated, terrorists today no longer wait for major events that draw global interest.
[...] The odds are in favor of terrorists. All they have to do is succeed once, no matter how many times they try. For public safety professionals to be fully successful, they have to prevent 100 percent of the terror attempts. It's a number to aspire to, but even the most experienced countries fighting terror – such as Israel and the U.K. – can't measure up to this standard.
[...] These days, it's necessary to consider any place where crowds congregate as vulnerable "soft targets" for the attackers. To better prepare for securing soft targets (and this isn't to say threats against "hard targets," like planes, buildings and infrastructure, have diminished) law enforcement agencies must improve coordination among one another, whether it's via intelligence, information sharing and training. And then there's the need for deconfliction, which refers to avoiding self-defeating behavior – from interagency rivalries and poor communication to insufficient coordination – by people who are on the same side.
[...] Given that there is no way to guarantee complete safety, and that the threat assessment expects more attacks, there are two more elements that ought to receive more attention: community resilience and community policing.
https://theconversation.com/how-can-we-better-protect-crowds-from-terrorism-78443
[Related]:
1996 Atlanta Olympic Games: https://www.britannica.com/event/Atlanta-Olympic-Games-bombing-of-1996
Secure Airport Design: https://skift.com/2016/07/04/how-smart-airport-design-can-make-spaces-more-secure/
Do you agree with this assessment of the security situation ? What do you think could be done to mitigate the effects of such asymmetric warfare ?
(Score: 5, Informative) by mhajicek on Sunday June 04 2017, @09:04PM (105 children)
Every member of the public needs to improve their situational awareness and arm themselves as permitted by law. Laws which limit or prohibit the arming of the public should be repealed. There will always be people who will do their best to harm others, often with little to no regard for their own safety and legal status, and these people will not follow the law.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by cellocgw on Sunday June 04 2017, @09:39PM (70 children)
What utter nonsense. A well-armed public will only lead to in incredible number of false shootings, bystanders killed, and oh yes successful suicides.
The correct way to deal with terrorism involves a long game. Ignore the attacks. Stop fear-mongering. Use police, not military, to track down and prosecute offenders. Educate the world and raise them out of the ignorance which leads to hatred.
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @09:49PM
use police????? the same police who have been warned repeatedly about the Manchester bomber and ignored it because they felt it wouldn't be PC to lock him up/deport him, all the while lefties continue defending these fucking people because muh "racial profiling". in my book if you're a muslim living in a western country, and you travel to the middle east, you should be marked as a terrorist automatically and your passport revoked as soon as you board the plane.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:06PM (5 children)
"What utter nonsense. A well-armed public will only lead to in incredible number of false shootings, bystanders killed, and oh yes successful suicides.
The correct way to deal with terrorism involves a long game. Ignore the attacks. Stop fear-mongering. Use police, not military, to track down and prosecute offenders. Educate the world and raise them out of the ignorance which leads to hatred."
.
.
.
The nonsense is yours, mister know-it-all.
You are a good example of a person who is educated yet clueless.
Ignore the attacks ? That is easy to say, until you or someone you love is killed in the attacks.
You won't find it so easy to ignore then.
The authorities prefer people like you, because you are a passive victim instead of a person who is ready willing
and able to take responsibility for your own welfare. So you will be a victim for the authorities as well as a victim
for anyone else.
You claim to be a physicist and a cellist. I'd bet big money you wouldn't survive 2 weeks if civilization collapsed and
you needed to depend on your own skills to survive.
To everyone else : don't take this twit's advice. If your life and the lives of those you love are precious to you, be proactive
and take responsibility for your own safety. Depending on others for safety is a losing strategy, as anyone who has dealt with
serious business will tell you.
Your last words in a terrorist situation will probably be : "Please don't". In case your higher education doesn't help you
understand this, that's not a winning strategy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:57PM (3 children)
Absolutely. It's insane that we waste resources on stuff that's less deadly and pervasive. We should be dedicating our resources to the really dangerous stuff" Like heart disease, automobile accidents and being struck by lightning.
Your panic at an ill-trained, very small group of people shows your cowardice. You're more likely to die slipping in your bathtub and hitting your head than being killed by a terrorist. You're more likely to die getting t-boned by a texting moron, too.
Look at the evidence and statistics. Deaths from terrorist acts are much lower than they were in the 1970s than they are now.
I won't live in fear of a minor (miniscule) threat, especially when panicking as you are doing gives those who would curtail our civil liberties some cover to try and do so.
So take your fear and go live in a bunker out in the woods somewhere. The adults have work to do.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 05 2017, @01:27AM (2 children)
Statistics surrounding terrorism are highly suspect (subject to all kinds of reporting bias), but, no matter how twisted they are, injury by terrorist has to be far far down the list of likely ways to die or even be hurt - like: people winning $100K+ in lotteries far outnumber those even injured by terrorists.
I'm not advocating denial of their existence, but ignoring their presence in daily life would go a long way toward stealing their power. Any time I pass airport security I think how great a victory the terrorists have already won... such damage done to Western society for a span of decades for so little investment.
When we can get back to how the British handled the IRA bombs and so many other things: "Keep Calm and Carry On" - that's the true victory. No matter where they come from, there will always be another nut with a bomb, or sarin gas, or whatever, but in the big picture they do so little real damage that restructuring everyone's lives in a vain attempt to 100% stop them is a waste of everyone's time and effort. Leave them at 99.999% stopped (where they are today) and quit making everybody undress on the way to the body scanner, please.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:32AM
In america you have more chance of dying while detained by ICE [cnn.com] than you do of dying at the hands of a syrian terrorist.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @06:28AM
Accidents stay the same rate approximately over time. While these Muslim terrorists increase by permanent residence, illegal entry and breeding. So it will increase and every Muslim member will passively support those that carry out any acts of violence. Accidents don't make new accidents, Muslim ones does.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @11:17PM
So you are proposing anarchy and civil war and self justice as the solution. God where do idiots like you come from?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:10PM (41 children)
Switzerland has one of the laxest gun ownership laws in the world and gun ownership there is extremely high [smallarmssurvey.org] yet, they have one of the lowest homicide rates [unodc.org] in the world.
This is indisputable evidence that gun ownership does not correlate to increased gun violence. One of reality's well-known liberal biases I guess.
And yet we have college educated western second generation immigrants running off to join ISIS. Education certainly didn't help them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @11:50PM (2 children)
That's definitely not indisputable evidence, that's an outlier. Switzerland is very different from most other countries, for example, they vote on basically everything including whether or not a person should receive citizenship and they have a culture that has peace as deeply embedded as violence is in the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)
So a clear-cut example in which gun ownership does not lead to gun violence is not indisputable evidence evidence that gun ownership does not lead to gun violence?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:01AM
It's an outlier. As with any complex issue, you can't take what happens in one culture and assume it applies to others.
They also have much lower rates of both violence and suicide in general than the US.
Bottom line is that the more guns you've got the more likely it it's that the violent elements will have and use them.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MostCynical on Monday June 05 2017, @12:29AM (24 children)
So, one country proves what? Is the US the outlier? Rwanda, South Africa, Syria all have guns galore, and, oh, yes, lots of deaths.
Switzerland shows how far the US has to go to qualify as "civilized"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Touché) by oakgrove on Monday June 05 2017, @01:06AM (9 children)
Subtract the gun violence perpetrated by non-whites and the US is one of the safest countries in the world. Ahead of many European countries including places like Finland.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday June 05 2017, @03:18AM (1 child)
So, those bullets, fired by those "non-whites": do they only kill "non-whites", or are "whites" just as dead, after being shot?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @12:45PM
Take a look at the weekly crime statistics for Chicago, the majority of the violent deaths as black-on-black.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 05 2017, @06:30AM (5 children)
Is there any source on that? sounds interesting.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Monday June 05 2017, @09:15AM (4 children)
It's tough to find all the numbers since the doj has a habit of lumping Hispanics in as white but according to this [fbi.gov], in 2013 non-hispanic and whites of a non-determinant ethnicity (which actually overinflates the real number) committed 2,473 murders with a population (in 2012) of 197,243,423 [wikipedia.org] for a rate of about 1.25 per 100,000. According to this [wikipedia.org], the 2013 murder rate in Findland was 1.66 per 100,000.
Hopefully I got all the numbers right as I'm tablet posting in bed.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 05 2017, @11:20AM (3 children)
Those numbers speaks volumes.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @12:56PM (2 children)
I know, right?
That works out to 99.998% of whites who are not murderers. That's pretty good, right?
Ooops, my bad, its actually 99.998% of non-whites.
For whites it is 99.999%.
HUGE difference, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @01:44PM (1 child)
You are a fucking idiot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:37PM
Do you feel better now?
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday June 05 2017, @09:01AM
Where did you get that from?
1. subtract the crimes perpetrated by a third of the population in a European country, and suddenly that country is one of the safest in the world.
2. Is "gun violence" the one thing that makes things unsafe in the USA?
You'd have no worries about knives, or just about a group without weapons ganging up on you?
3. Safe for whom?
4. Wouldn't this be a reason to regulate guns?
You're arguing that guns end up in the hands of the wrong people.... the obvious fix to that is to prevent that from happening as much as possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @01:38AM (1 child)
That there is no inherent correlation between gun ownership and gun violence.
The logical extrapolation is that, rather than addressing the very beneficial practice of gun ownership, you should be addressing the problem with violence and irresponsible attitudes towards guns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:04AM
The question is whether or not we're better served by having such free access to it or not and both Australia and the UK are better data points as you can compare just the effect of firearms without changes in the culture.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @02:08AM (11 children)
In the US most gun violence happens where guns are prohibited.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:42AM (10 children)
Lol, that doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Do you think all the gang shootings happen in gun-free zones?
Or all the shootings in commission of crimes?
Or all the suicides?
Hell, not even a majority of mass shootings occur in gun-free zones - shooters don't pick easy targets, they pick targets that are connected to their rage, typically "going postal" where they work.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @07:00AM (2 children)
You obviously haven't done any research.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @12:59PM
Are you seriously trying to convince us that robbery and gang shootings happen in gun-free zones?
REALLY?
OK. Give us ONE citation, even a half-assed practically made up citation from a super biased pro-gun website.
Go ahead.
You can't. Because not even the nuttiest gun nuts are that stupid.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:13PM
Another day, another workplace mass shooting in a full-gun zone. [foxnews.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 05 2017, @01:41PM (6 children)
Technically guns aren't prohibited in NYC or Chicago but mhajicek is practically correct in general.
You can draw a nice graph of "amount of gun control" vs "amount of gun violence" and they correlate pretty strongly.
For example its virtually impossible to legally own or buy a gun in Chicago its extremely heavily controlled for 3 million or so Chicago residents and crime rates are spectacular.
Yet you go north to Wisconsin with twice as many people where guns are about as easy to buy off the shelf (and conceal carry) as popcorn and despite there being about twice as many people, WI has a murder rate about a thousand times lower, and even lower if you exclude the slum areas of Milwaukee.
Generally speaking as advice to foreigners visiting the USA if its impossible to legally purchase guns and ammo where you're visiting, then its a dangerous as hell place to be and you should GTFO as rapidly as possible, but if the local walmart has bricks of .22 LR ammo on the shelves next to the soup cans and you can cash and carry firearms from the gun store down the street, then its basically a zero crime area and you probably don't have to lock your doors etc.
Its generally a truism in the USA that if the police have to enforce weird gun control laws then its a very dangerous and violent location but if there are no gun laws then the police do nothing all day but issue speeding tickets and spend all night chasing meth/alcohol users and the occasional domestic dispute (also usually alcohol inspired)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:33PM (5 children)
Lolwut? Wisconsin has twice the population density of Chicago or NYC?
More alt-facts, eh?
You can draw a nice graph of population density vs amount of gun violence they correlate even more strongly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:05PM (4 children)
Yeah, I hypothesis that:
Population Density causes crime, including gun violence.
Gun violence induces people to "do something" which causes gun restrictions, which generally don't help much.
This would account for the high correlations observed, as well as removing any causal relationship with regard to laws affecting rates of violence (either way). Then again, it is merely my working hypothesis, and I don't have the money or time to do testing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 05 2017, @03:26PM (2 children)
If you want to make a "new urbanist" really cry, instead of all this gun foolishness just solve the problem at the source and zone/regulate suburban level low density living for the sake of reducing crime. Obviously the problem can't be the kind of people who live in cities, the problem must be the city population density itself, so as a human rights violation we must demolish the cities. I'm down with that in theory although I like the idea of keeping cities as a "containment zone" for problematic people. Contaminating the rural areas isn't going to fix anything.
I find the density argument rather bogus but I'm willing to run with it for the LOLs.
So put a criminal in solitary confinement and they're not magically cured although they were alone which supposedly matters.
Or for that matter it implies having the family over for a birthday party somehow magically quadruples the crime rate. Well, maybe, for some families, trivial stuff like back yard noise violations if the party runs late, or parking violations because of all the cars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:08PM (1 child)
I find you rather bogus and I've got at least as much evidence to back up my beliefs as you do yours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @07:21PM
The difference is that VLM wants to be left alone with the means to take care of himself, whereas you want to violently render VLM and everyone else helpless (except for those pesky criminals which always seem to have ways to harm others regardless of "legal" restrictions).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:06PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Monday June 05 2017, @12:29AM (8 children)
The issue in the United States isn't so much the guns themselves, as your Switzerland example shows, but the toxic gun culture in the USA. Gun ownership might be benign, even beneficial, if the majority of citizens are have a communitarian and peace-loving ethic, receive compulsory military training, and are strictly monitored for criminal or psychiatric problems. That's hard to implement if you are starting from the assumption that gun ownership is a right. That's always been our problem.
We should treat it more like having a driver's license. It's no great difficulty to obtain a driver's license but we do demand a level of competency which we test for, and if you break the laws enough times you can have this privilege taken from you for a period of time or permanently. Owning a gun is even more serious and potentially deadly than driving a car yet we have less restrictions on it because 250 years ago guns existed and cars didn't. The 2nd Amendment as it is formulated is wrong for our current world
I own guns, and I want private gun ownership to continue, but you won't see an NRA sticker on my car. Given the opportunity I would run away from my house before blowing away an intruder--the proper thing to do. It was too easy for me to get the firearms I have. I should have had to do more training to demonstrate my competency. If everyone who owned guns in the USA was like me then our stats on gun violence would look more like Switzerland's.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday June 05 2017, @12:36AM (6 children)
How exactly is our gun culture toxic? If you're law abiding you can have guns. If you aren't you can't. If you aren't you can get guns outside the law. If caught you face heavy penalties.
I'm not seeing a lot of white supremacist folks using guns (see: Oregon asshole who used a knife). I'm not seeing open carry states having a surge in gun violence. What I am seeing is a lot of shootings in Chicago, where from what I hear it's damned near impossible to get a gun.
Guns don't kill people, physics kills people (wish I knew who to attribute that to, it didn't come out of my brain).
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:17AM
Congratulations, you're the problem.
The gun culture is what prevents any sort of meaningful work be done in preventing people who are at a high risk of abusing firearms to have them. Limiting the kinds of firearms people are allowed to have and checking to make sure that people wanting to buy them aren't mentally ill, criminals or otherwise disqualified from purchasing them gets fought tooth and nail by the NRA and other gun rights clubs.
There's literally tens of thousands of people killed every year through suicide alone, not to mention the people who are accidentally maimed or killed and the people who are killed by criminals that obtained their firearms either through theft or by buying them on the black market.
Hunting and target shooting are the only legitimate reasons for owning firearms by non-law enforcement/security people. Self-defense is a really big tip off that a person shouldn't be allowed to own a gun and in some countries, you're required to have a reason for owning a gun and self-defense is not included in the list.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:51AM (1 child)
Then you are not looking.
Dylan Roof - Charleston Church Shooter
Michael Wage Page - Sikh Temple Shooter
Alexandre Bissonnette - Quebec Mosque Shooter
Adam Purinton - Olathe Kansas Bar Shooter [heavy.com]
Allen Scarsella - Shot 5 BLM protestors [atlantablackstar.com]
And that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could easily find 10x that if I googled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @01:37PM
HEY! You better stop poo-pooing the GP's alternative facts, or perhaps more appropriate, selective memory.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Monday June 05 2017, @01:56PM (1 child)
We use them all the time, just perfectly legally for target practice and other completely legal sporting purposes. Its a valid hobby.
Also the logical operation of (not (hating your own race)) doesn't magically auto imply hates all other races under any system of logic. That guilt trip is only applied to white people. Black people not hating their own race doesn't imply magically they somehow magically must hate Samoans for example. Its a constant part of Hollywood propaganda. Much as they never make a mistake in their science and computer narrative naturally they never make a mistake in their characterization of white people who are not self loathing. The point of this is most white people who are not into self loathing are not necessarily white supremacists and generally don't hate any race, although they particularly do not hate whites, which is admittedly highly politically incorrect.
What you will see a lot of is 100 black dudes shot 100 black victims in Chicago last weekend, and some white guy in Texas climbed a university tower and shot a couple students back in the 60s, so logically the highest safety priority is to take guns away from law abiding white people. I mean, white people with legally owned guns kill almost as many people per year as lightning, its obviously a high priority (LOL)
And gun control is just a dog whistle for anti-white racism, what they always mean is we need to make it impossible for white people to legally own guns. Never hear them say "we gotta take all the guns away from the Jews" or "we gotta take all the guns away from the Koreans". Gun control is implicitly an anti-white racist topic. Only racists are "into" gun control. Its sorta like how pre-civil rights era only racists cared about implementing "poll taxes" and "voting tests" in the pre-60s post civil war deep south.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @09:13PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:52PM
An excellent 90's sitcom. [wikiquote.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:58PM
You mean Toxic Ghetto Thug Culture. In absence of guns they would use knives. Calling it "Gun Culture" is a slander to many upstanding, law-abiding, gun owners, who hunt and hobby shoot. You are trying to re-frame a debate which you would lose otherwise by changing up the definitions because you cannot argue against Switzerland example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @06:38AM
The reason Switzerland has low rate of gun violence is that owning a gun there is a privilege, not a right. Background checks, mental evaluation and continuous law abiding is needed to keep it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pvanhoof on Monday June 05 2017, @09:12AM (1 child)
Switzerland has a high gun ownership because a) citizens have to serve in the military and b) once you had to serve in the miltary you have to keep your army issued rifle with you in your house. Note that the Swiss people I know all hate having this goddamn thing in their house. Also note that they have a registered box of (numbered) bullets and that these bullets get counted by the government. You're not supposed to fire them.
Also note that most Swiss people are peaceful and the ones who don't live in the cities live in mountain villages where everybody knows each other. It's a bad idea to start pointing guns at people you've known for years. You might have to leave your house and go live somewhere else after that. As everybody in the village will hate you. But then again, this stuff simply doesn't happen much to a highly civilized country like Switzerland.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @01:10PM
Ah, the myth of the swiss guns. [nih.gov]
Switzerland has lower firearm ownership rates than the US and a much lower handgun ownership rate.
The army myth is particularly egregious, only people above a certain rank were required to keep their rifle at home, equating to just 25% of households and over the last decade and a half they've switched to keeping the rifles at local depots in town because swiss suicide rates were off the chart compared to neighboring countries.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday June 05 2017, @10:08AM
Here's another anecdote...
Kennesaw is a surburb just North of Atlanta, Georgia. The citizens of that little town were being invaded by Atlanta folks, having their stuff taken, and other sometimes violent crimes.
I know of this because some of my family live in its environs.
The fed-up citizens and city council were being overwhelmed with high crime rates. So they passed a law. *REQUIRING* everyone to be armed!!!!
Here's the Wikipedia writeup on it. [wikipedia.org]
TLDR:
So, for what its worth, this is what happened there, when citizens got fed up and quit begging government to fix it - and did it themselves.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday June 04 2017, @11:12PM (2 children)
Well, we have grandparent and parent with opposed strategies, both reasonable, both missing context.
Terrorists have been intentionally created, like dogs prepped for illegal fights, both by the Guantanamo madness (jailing mere suspects, torturing, and then RELEASING them) and the arab spring, which was more of an USraeli winter. The infrastructure, same since the helping afghans against soviets era.
Terror is useful for those in power or sure to be gaining it.
What does this mean? it means that the real strategy will be: militarization of police (already begun before the crisis, like army drills about crowd control happened well before the crisis) secret police methods (begun before the crisis) digital panopticon (begun before the crisis) no freedom of press, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of expression especially religious (these freedom will remain only nominally).
Other scenario, civil war, intervention from either Russia or Usa, Yugoslavia war 2.0.
I will add that your comment about arming citizens is true, but because citizens have been monkeyed by years of mass media. When people were all armed (blades) there were many killings for trivial reasons (even this can be discussed, though, because if the right of passage meant loss of reputation in front of the superior, they were pretty right to knife each others), but it was far from the anarchy we witness now. The propaganda in the media, where police apprehending the culprit after investigations seems to set things straight, is utter bullshit. The crime is done and the victim will suffer it for years, decades, forever.
Plus, every time governments reduced citizens to sheep, bad things eventually happened. Society is for man, not the other way round.
Plus, if you really want to see the broad picture, all of these wars are just the way for a system designed for failure to justify the failure. Remember that even with no 9/11 nor wars, economy would have tanked, only a bit later and with puzzled people. Instead, we have our nice emmanuel goldsteins.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Sunday June 04 2017, @11:14PM (1 child)
note, I forgot to say that militant Islam is terrorist by default, else it seems it's all fault of the imperialists, which is not honest.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:48PM
All the fault of the imperialists? No, I don't think that's fair either. Are recent incursions into Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. giving the extremists another lever to use in terms of radicalising others? That's likely to be a yes. If people want to win this battle by warfare, then they're going to have to be OK with turning the entire middle east into a smoking ruin. I'm no expert but I believe that's called genocide and civilised people don't do that sort of thing. While you may argue that these Wahhabists[1] are not civilised, is it worth becoming worse than your enemy - who may well want to subjugate or kill all of us but does not have the capability to do so - to be rid of that enemy? That "hearts and minds" thing needs more work. Go to their country humbly, when requested, as liberators and educators rather than conquerors, to stop the weed taking root.
[1] I initially misspelled that with one 'h' and autocorrect suggested "wabbits".
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @12:27AM
"Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190), MORON resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume" [box.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 05 2017, @01:18AM (1 child)
Wrong, you have it: Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to anger, ANGER leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
Educate the world and raise them out of ignorance to defeat the Dark Side.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @01:44AM
Phone rings at police headquarters.
Excited caller: There are 2 men with guns and knives killing people at my school!
Dispatcher: Right, ma'am. Offer them seats so you can teach them out of ignorance.
Excited caller: Thank you, officer, the dead feel so much better now.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 05 2017, @01:57AM (11 children)
You mutter nonsense yourself. Texas does not have an incredible number of false shootings. Bystanders? How about the Pulse. Just suppose that only 2 or 4 persons in the Pulse had been armed when the shooter opened up. The shooter was shooting indiscriminately, and that is pretty damned obvious. If the shooter had aimed his weapon anywhere near one of the other armed patrons, that patron could have shot back, and ended the senseless killing.
Ignore the attacks? Arm every adult male, and all the adult females who wish to be armed. When two damned fools tried to stage a terror attack on a speech in Texas, the only two fatalities were the terrorists themselves. THAT is the result of a real world test in arming civilians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:21AM (8 children)
There would have been a couple of well-armed dead men. Few people have the guts to actually use that firearm that they bought for self-defense to actually shoot somebody. It's a huge problem that they used to have with conscripts into the army, they'd flee or deliberately miss because they didn't want to shoot the enemy.
Locally, there was a mall shooting years back and one of the victims was a concealed carry and had the firearm out and pointed at the shooter and couldn't pull the trigger. He wound up gut shot. IIRC, he did survive, but he was shot because he stood there like a target and didn't fire a single shot.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 05 2017, @02:55AM
So, it is your opinion that because one person froze when action was required, that the same response will be the norm.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @02:55AM (6 children)
That's a pretty rare occurrence, actually the first time I've heard of such happening. Link please? What Runaway's talking about in TX is an actual occurrence, not a hypothetical, and I've read about several other times when a legally armed (permit or constitutional carry) bystander has brought a killing spree to a rapid end. These occurrences generally don't make big headlines because when the death toll is small it isn't a big enough tragedy, and it goes against the "narrative". You wouldn't live in fear and beg the government to take all your rights in order to protect you if you thought you could defend yourself, so they don't want you to believe that you can defend yourself.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:17AM (5 children)
Those tend to be exaggerated.
For example:
Joel Myrck, Asst Principal at Pearl High School. [snopes.com]
He "stopped" a shooter with his gun only after the shooter was done shooting and trying to drive away.
Or Mark Kram [soylentnews.org]
Who shot the guy fleeing on his bicycle, and then ran him over with his car.
Or Joseph Robert Wilcox [bbc.com]
Who drew his gun to stop the Las Vegas Walmart mass shooters ... and was killed.
Or Joe Zamudio [slate.com]
Who got to the Gabby Giffords shooting after the perp was tackled by unarmed people and nearly shot a good guy.
Remember the Dallas sniper from last year?
There were 20-30 armed civilians in that crowd. [nytimes.com]
They didn't help the situation at all, instead making it harder for the police to determine who was a good guy and who was a bad guy.
The "good guy with a gun" is the rare exception. It sounds like a good story, some real dirty harry shit. But the reality is much more rare.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @07:03AM (4 children)
I notice most of the anti gun quacks are posting anonymously. Perhaps they're all shills.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:28PM (3 children)
Aren't you one of those people who whine about ad-hominem attacks that aren't really ad-hominems, they are just people being mean to you?
Well guess what buddy, you just indulged in a actual ad-hominem fallacy. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @04:19PM (2 children)
Actually no. In order for that to be true I would have to say that your argument should be ignored because you're not a credible source. I was merely observing a correlation and suggesting a hypothesis which could explain it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @05:31PM (1 child)
Lol.
No, LOL
Surely you aren't so stupid to think we're that stupid?
Accusing someone of being a shill is literally calling for their argument to be ignored because shills are by definition not trustworthy.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @05:44PM
Well if you don't want to be thought a shill perhaps you should put a name to your words.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:20PM (1 child)
How do you know they didn't?
FL law makes guns easy accessible.
The club had a capacity of 300, reports are that it was at capacity, maybe even over-capacity.
It seems extremely unlikely that in a 300+ size crowd of young, minorities who regularly traffic in illegal pharmaceuticals not a single person was armed. Its not like they had a metal detector at the door.
Hey dummy, those guys were shot by an on-duty cop. [dallasnews.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 05 2017, @07:15PM
Those cops were Texans, weren't they? Citizens? So, they were loitering, looking for problems. Any two citizens could have done the same. It's how things are done in Texas.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 05 2017, @06:08AM
Doesn't work when the offenders can only be reached by military means. For example, Al Qaeda had a strong military presence in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 and was a favorite of the Taliban government then in place. Police wouldn't be able to arrest anyone until said government was overthrown and Al Qaeda's military presence was neutralized or destroyed. In other words, you don't use police for a military problem and that was a military problem.
Except of course, when the ignorance is among the educated. Communism of the last century was of that sort. It started in the colleges. Even for the nastier variants that exploited an uneducated underclass, the founders and early leaders generally were college-educated (though not necessarily to the point of getting a degree). For example, the Khmer Rouge started as a student group in Paris. The Shining Path started at at a Peruvian university. In current times, a lot of the leadership of the Islamic radical groups that are currently creating a hubbub are educated.
IMHO, it is likely that most such future terrorist groups will start among the educated. The reasons are rather simple. The kind of people with the talent and ambition to create and organize such groups will also usually give college a try. That combined with the increased social atmosphere of colleges allow them more opportunity to connect with other people of similar views. Physical proximity is probably also necessary for the creation of such groups (I think strong group cohesion being a key dynamic) though it might be possible to create a group via the internet. College tends to be very immersive. Colleges also happen to be where the impressionable, gullible young adults are.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday June 05 2017, @07:23AM
Educate the world and raise them out of the ignorance which leads to hatred.
That is so naive that it hurts. They don't want educated, at least, not by outsiders. Wall them off, and let them figure things out themselves. GTFO of the Middle East and Africa. Seriously, "build a wall" and leave them alone. In a hundred years, or two, or three, they may achieve civilization.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @08:17PM
texas is already this mythical place where people are well armed. i carry *everywhere* without a stupid fucking license and dumb asses like you never even know. police? those useless thieves? stfu!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday June 04 2017, @09:51PM (26 children)
Given that -- even under present "restrictive" gun laws -- I'm already much more likely to be shot by a person with a legally owned firearm than a terrorist, I'm not sure how this solution is supposed to improve matters. (Actually, the vast majority of mass shootings use legally acquired weapons anyway.)
Terrorism is rare. The main reason it gets attention is the media response. But lots of people get accidentally or deliberately shot by firearms on a regular basis. Heck, lots of shooters actually steal a weapon from a guard/policeman and shoot people. I haven't looked up the stats, but I'm pretty sure even that happens more than terrorism.
The main thing you'll get if you have more people carrying guns around is more random shootings. Whatever effect it might theoretically have on terrorism would probably be a couple of orders of magnitude smaller, if it makes a measurable impact at all.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:18PM (25 children)
if you don't like guns, then don't own one. No one is telling you that YOU must own a gun.
However, just because you do not like guns does not mean you have the right to tell others what they should do with respect to guns.
If the stabbing victims in London had guns, most or all of them would still be alive. If that doesn't give you pause, then your thought processes are defective.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:31PM
... on the other hand if guns was easy to come by they would all have used guns instead of knives to. You can kill a lot more people with an AK in 8 minutes then with a knife.
Plus a lot of people with guns are really horrible at shooting, it might give a false sense of security and they are probably far more likely to hit someone they didn't intend on hitting or harming themselves.
That said I wouldn't mind if Europe was more pro-guns. I like guns. It's starting to be a bit of a drag with new weapon directives from the EU that passed the vote in March.
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2017/04/25-control-acquisition-possession-weapons/ [europa.eu]
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20170308IPR65677/parliament-approves-revised-eu-gun-law-to-close-security-loopholes [europa.eu]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @11:00PM (6 children)
This is why we can't have nice things. They don't have problems with mass shootings in places with restrictive gun restrictions. Making firearms easier to get hasn't worked anywhere ever. All it does is increase the ease with which criminals get guns and increase the amount of firepower used when crimes are committed.
Had the London stabbing victims had guns, the attacker would have as well. The reason it was a knife attack rather than gun was because the restrictions were effective in keeping the terrorist from having one.
The problem is that there's enough irresponsible gun owners and dealers that terrorists and criminals have no problem getting them. And unlike credit cards you're presumed to be ok to own one unless specifically disqualified.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday June 05 2017, @12:11AM (4 children)
The criminals are willing to break the law and get guns for yourselves. The citizens do not do that. As result, the balance is shifted - attackers are more likely to have guns than their victims. However if the gun laws are relaxed, the public would be as likely to be armed as the criminal.
There is yet another aspect - the great equalization property of a gun. Imagine that a crowd of women and children all have knives, and the attacker has a knife as well. Will the victims be able to defend themselves? Of course, not - knife fight requires muscle power and skills. However a woman with a gun is able to kill the strong man just as easily as the other way around.
Long story short, you cannot reliably deny guns to the terrorists by denying them to the public. Terrorists will smuggle the guns in from Syria, Libya or wherever they care. It's just a short sail across the Mediterranean sea, and the shipping traffic is so high that there is hardly any chance to find a small package. (If the smuggler cannot keep it, he will throw it overboard.) All you will get is the repeat of Mumbai, when attackers used AK-74s [wikipedia.org], and the public was disarmed. Your method may work to some extent only against the lazy terrorist who is just itching to kill some infidels right now. It won't even work against a terrorist who is driving a truck into the crowd, again and again - the public needs ranged weapons to stop him.
It's a war out there, and it makes no sense to pretend that there is no war, and if you make yourself look small and harmless, nothing bad will happen. Things don't work that way. The chance of encountering a terrorist is low, so far - however for too many people that probability pegged the meter. And you cannot stop the knife with a bare hand. All proposals to disarm the population amount to sacrificing the victims on the altar of political correctness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:26AM (1 child)
That's a load of crap. Just look at the UK, China and Australia if you don't believe me. Or most of Europe.
The source of those weapons that the criminals use are either dealers breaking the law or theft from people that failed to secure their piece. Both of which happen less the fewer people are legally allowed to have firearms. What's more, there's much less point in acquiring a firearm for criminal activities if the people you're committing crimes against haven't got one.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday June 05 2017, @03:09AM
You may be right about the criminals, but the terrorists have deeper connections and can get a machine gun from a "hot spot." That's the problem - and that's why so much is talked about terrorist networks. Lone wolves are rarely successful, no matter if they are criminals or terrorists.
Huh? The people do not have bombs, therefore it makes no sense for a terrorist to get a bomb? False. Q.E.D. Again, you are mixing together a street robber and a mass murderer. The robber is OK with a heavy fist if that's all that it takes to subdue a frail grandmother. A terrorist wants to kill and maim as many people as he can, for that reason he goes for the most efficient tool he can get - the bomb, the machine gun, the truck, the poison (in Tokyo) ... He is also not always worried about his own survival, unlilke the street thug.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @03:14AM (1 child)
Indeed. I practice medieval European martial arts as a hobby. If no one had guns I could put on my armor, grab my sword and shield, and be death incarnate to all around me until I get too tired or am met by my equal in strength, skill, and equipment. In a society where some percentage of people have carry permits however, if I tried the above or started shooting people some little old granny could drop me with her .22 purse gun.
Maybe we should just make everyone be a cop, then people who think only cops should have guns would be happy.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:24PM
Oh jesus hussein christ! "Death incarnate?" "Equal in strength, skill and equipment?"
Can you not hear yourself?
Your fantasies not withstanding, Real life is not a LARP.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 05 2017, @01:59AM
"Making firearms easier to get hasn't worked anywhere ever."
Texas.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday June 04 2017, @11:57PM (16 children)
I have no problem with guns. Why is it that everyone assumes if you state some facts that add some nuance to a situation that you must subscribe to one of two narrowly defined "sides" on an issue? Newsflash: there's more nuance in the world than that. Just because you don't think it's a great idea to have every random untrained trigger-happy person always walking around with guns doesn't mean you're "anti-gun."
I have nothing against guns. I used to own one. I don't currently. Most of my family members own them. A couple of my family members are actually gun collectors. I have no problem with any of that.
I'm not against gun ownership. I am in favor of regulations that would require some training to purchase a dangerous weapon, just as one needs some training to operate a motor vehicle on the public roads. I suppose if you want to buy a weapon and only store it in your own home and NEVER remove it from there, I don't necessarily have a problem with that. But if you're going to wander the streets with it, you should at least have some training.
If guns were widely enough available, there likely wouldn't have been "stabbing victims," there would be shooting victims instead. And no, relying on untraining civilians to draw weapons in a dangerous situation is frequently not an improvement. I'm not saying people don't have a right to "defend themselves," but untrained people often end up shooting themselves or bystanders or have accidental shootings at random times.
My point, if you haven't yet figured it out, wasn't that guns are "evil" or that they can never be used in defense. My point was that having lots of random people walking around carrying guns is more likely to increase random shooting incidents (both accidental and deliberate) MORE than it prevents the relatively rare terrorist attack.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Monday June 05 2017, @12:25AM (1 child)
As I understand, it is required to go through some training to get the concealed carry license in the USA.
This is already the case, and it was so for as long as I can remember. You have to demonstrate safe operation of the gun that you are buying. You also have to pass a written test on the laws if you are buying a handgun.
Don't be afraid of your fellow humans. Those who want to kill you can kill you, no matter what the law says. The rest won't harm you - in fact, they will protect you if necessary. Otherwise instead of carrying a gun you need to carry a cop.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 05 2017, @02:04AM
That's definitely not true everywhere. Top search hit says 26 states [thetrace.org] don't require you to actually demonstrate you can handle a gun properly to obtain a concealed carry permit. I believe some of those still require a short training class, but many have basically no requirements other than a "clean" criminal record and no serious mental health problems. There have actually been controversies recently in some states that have even bare-bones restrictions (like requiring approval of a local sheriff to check out your record), and the NRA wanting to overturn them to REQUIRE issuance of permits (so-called "shall issue" provisions).
Open carry laws are also very permissive in many states.
That may be true where you live. It is not true in the majority of U.S. states [huffingtonpost.com]. And in states that don't require a carry permit, even if such tests exist, they wouldn't be effective when other people beyond the buyer could carry the gun.
The NRA and 2nd Amendment absolutists make sure that there's always as little regulation as possible everywhere.
I'm not "afraid of my fellow humans." I grew up around guns. I know how to handle them safely, because I was taught by my family at a young age. However, gun accidents happen. People don't lock up guns to keep away from kids. People don't teach kids about guns. People also do stupid stuff with guns. Inexperienced people frequently don't handle guns well when they try to shoot one for the first time (or even the tenth time, particularly if under stress).
I'm not in any way saying that gun accidents are very frequent, but they happen a lot more than terrorist attacks. Studies show that places with higher numbers of guns have more gun accidents (duh). And that's not even including additional shootings that occur deliberately because a gun is available and a disagreement escalates (rather than less lethal weapons).
Again, I repeat my original claim that IF the goal is to stop terrorists, having people carry around guns more often will undoubtedly result in MORE shootings than terrorist events they could possibly prevent.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 05 2017, @02:00AM (13 children)
"if you state some facts that add some nuance"
Those nuances are demonstrably false.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 05 2017, @02:37AM (12 children)
Citation needed.
I'll give you mine, if you show me yours. I'll even take stats from a gun advocacy group, which is trying to argue how "safe" guns are through all sorts of comparisons. Here you go. [nssf.org] Let's just start with accidental fatalities. That link mentions that ACCIDENTAL fatalities from guns were at an all-time low in 2011 of 600, compared to 1441 in 1991. Sounds great, no? They point out that the rate of ACCIDENTAL gun fatalities per 100,000 declined 0.3 in 2001 to 0.2 in 2011.
Well, that all sounds good until you look at the numbers of terrorism fatalities. A few top hits go here [umd.edu] and here [johnstonsarchive.net], though there are plenty others. Even including the big blip from the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the average number of fatalities from terrorism in the U.S. between 1985 and 2013 was 0.44 per million, nearly an order of magnitude lower than just deaths from gun accidents.
Now, start adding in other unnecessary gun deaths that result from the additional presence of firearms: shootings in escalating arguments, suicides that might have been prevented without such a convenient fatal weapon, etc., and you're talking orders of magnitude more deaths than terrorism.
And note these are just deaths. If you start including injuries, the comparison gets even worse. The CDC says between 2001 and 2015, the number of accidental gunshot injuries was 5.46 per 100,000 (actually down from previous decades). Compare that to less than 0.2 per 100,000 for ALL CASUALTIES (deaths and injuries) from terrorism over the past few decades. Again, that gun injury number doesn't include deliberate non-fatal injuries that likely wouldn't have happened (or wouldn't have been as serious) without a gun present.
Once again, I'm NOT anti-gun. But guns are already involved in orders of magnitude more preventable deaths and injuries than terrorist attacks. Introducing more guns into these equations MIGHT prevent some terror attacks (maybe), but will DEFINITELY kill and injure more people by merely having more of them around.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 05 2017, @02:52AM
Oh and I forgot my "stolen guns" stat. I tried finding stats on how often criminals steal guns owned by law enforcement, and although I've read anecdotes, I can't find a decent data source. BUT over 200,000 guns are stolen [bjs.gov] in general during burglaries every year. The vast majority aren't recovered. Increasing gun ownership will thus also likely create a more effective pipeline of stolen guns, adding even more guns to be used by criminals.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @03:27AM (9 children)
If the sole or primary purpose for being armed were to stop terrists, you'd be right. However, the ability for any random bystander to stop a terrist is merely a small bonus. The primary purpose is to deter violent crime without the arms ever having to be used, and statistics show them to be very effective in that regard. The secondary purpose is for them to actually be used to prevent or limit violent crime.
You are made safer if you are allowed to be armed, whether or not you are actually armed, due to the fact that a potential aggressor doesn't know whether or not you and all those around you are armed.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 05 2017, @03:46AM (8 children)
But whether or not people would be made safer from terrorists is the point of this thread. If the suggested action ends up harming more innocent people than prevention of terrorist deaths and injuries, then I would argue it has not achieved the goal of this thread.
Anyhow, the question of how much violent crime is actually stopped through guns is always a controversial question, and both sides of the argument are known to distort numbers on this point. Nevertheless, there was a reason that even in the "Wild West" many towns required visitors to check their guns with the sheriff upon arrival. Having guns "out on the range" was a necessity against both dangerous animals and villains; having a high concentration of guns in towns/cities (and crowds, which again is the subject of this thread) generally created more problems than it was worth.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @07:13AM (7 children)
It's only contraversial until you look up the numbers for yourself. Then you'll find that where guns are more readily available, and in particular where people can carry, there is less violent crime. Since I would categorize terrizm as violent crime, it's hard to argue that arming the populace wouldn't help.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 05 2017, @03:25PM (2 children)
I have looked up the numbers. Lots of times. One of my best friends is strongly anti-gun. As I've said multiple times, I grew up with guns, and I thought his arguments were hogwash, and people should have the right to own a gun to defend themselves. I had a bunch of arguments with him a decade ago, and I trotted out a bunch of the stats that you obviously think are "reality."
Over they years, though, I've read more articles. I've read more criticism of various metrics. A lot of stats supposedly based on "self-defense" uses of guns are based on bad metrics. Pro-gun folks pick the studies that inflate the self-defense uses the most; anti-gun folks pick the opposite. The best we can say is that the number of "defensive gun uses" in the U.S. is likely somewhere between 50,000 and 5,000,000 per year. That's a huge range, and whatever the number is, it's not clear in how many cases a gun was NECESSARY for defense. The reality is likely somewhere in the middle. (More rigorous studies generally tend to go toward the lower end of that spectrum, but we can still argue about the numbers at least across an order of magnitude.)
As for your claim that "where people can carry, there is less violent crime," the correlations again are not clear. Countries with low rates of gun ownership tend to have lower violent crime. But there are other studies that show impacts that support your view, particularly when looking at areas within the U.S. Unfortunately, comparisons are difficult because the U.S. already has SO MANY guns in circulation compared to countries that have strict gun laws, that it's really tough to make comparisons. Even if a particular city or state introduces stronger gun legislation, it's very easy for illegal guns to flow across state borders and into the hands of criminals, which isn't as true at international borders.
Again, it's easy to cherry pick studies. My personal view after reading a LOT of this stuff is that it seems when guns are WIDELY available, there might be a small correlation between areas with higher legal gun ownership and lower crime rates, just due to the number of illegal guns around. Gun stats seem to apply differently in countries that have high violence in general vs. low violence (e.g., most of Western Europe). Unfortunately, the U.S. seems to edge closer to the "high violence" type countries.
When guns are not widely available, it seems clear that fewer guns leads to less violent crime. (A lot of this also tends to depend on how study authors classify suicides. If you view increased suicide rates as a problem, you can often skew the stats anti-gun; if you view suicides as just an "unfortunate byproduct," there might be a pro-gun case.) Regardless, one thing that is true even in the U.S. is that lenient "right to carry" laws (i.e., which require no permits, allow guns in public spaces that many places prohibit them, etc.) are almost always correlated with higher violent crime rates.
Unfortunately, as I said, both sides tend to exaggerate numbers and prey on the ignorance of those who don't care about stats or want to look at methodologies closely. My post here is a bit wishy-washy on the business, because I've read dozens of studies and most of them are so poor and obviously written by people with agendas (one way or the other) that it's tough to sort out truth from fact.
And just to be clear: despite the fact that I have my doubts about your alleged correlations in general, I still believe in the 2nd Amendment and the right of U.S. citizens to own guns. I just don't think having large numbers of people carrying them around everywhere is helpful, particularly if those people are untrained or inexperienced with guns.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 05 2017, @03:51PM (1 child)
By the way, the simpler and quicker version of this argument is just to note that the U.S. is a huge outlier in terms of gun ownership compared to other countries. The U.S. owns significantly more guns per capita. And yet, despite this huge number of guns, it does NOT have the lowest violent crime rates, nor anywhere close to the lowest. So the first question you'd need to answer if your claim is true is -- why doesn't the U.S. have the lowest violent crime rate in the world?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:43PM
"why doesn't the U.S. have the lowest violent crime rate in the world?"
To answer that, would require studies in a lot of seemingly unrelated fields. How does out prison for profit system affect our violent crime rate? How does our government's inherent racist slant affect violent crime rate? How do our various corrupt police forces affect violent crime rates? What about our welfare system, which rewards healthy young people for not working?
As has been noted many times, crime rates fluctuate, city to city, state to state, and even nationwide. And, no one has ever figured out why that is so. On the one hand, crime seems to go down because of some law that has been passed, and on the other hand, crime goes up or down despite some similar law.
Gotta figure out how and why those crime rates fluctuate, before you can hope to explain how or why guns may or may not contribute to the fluctuations.
And, we don't have an Einstein working on the question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:59PM (3 children)
Exactly backwards.
A major part of the problem with finding reliable numbers is that the NRA has blocked the government from looking for reliable numbers. [businessinsider.com]
Which ought to promote any critical thinker to ask, what are they trying to hide?
If the numbers actually support their arguments, you'd think they would want them backed up by good, conscientious research.
And yet they've fought tooth and nail to smoother it.
Just like the way marijuana research has been blocked. [marijuana.com]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @04:10PM (2 children)
You're looking at "firearm homocide rates". I'm talking about violent crime. Apples and oranges. A murder victim probably doesn't care much about what weapon was used.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:17PM (1 child)
Is it your belief that gun violence and other kinds of violence do are not proportionally related?
Why would that be?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 05 2017, @05:46PM
Because in US times and locations where the general public can carry, there is less violent crime overall.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:33PM
Let me start by apologizing, Athanasius. You offer serious discussion here, and I don't mean to ignore you. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to put into the serious reply you deserve.
Please, skim over this journal entry, it touches on the lies commonly spread by the media, and the progressives: https://soylentnews.org/~Runaway1956/journal/1674 [soylentnews.org] No, that article doesn't addresss this discussion, directly, but it does show that we are constantly LIED TO, in the interest of the progressive agenda.
This article isn't exactly to my liking, but it DAMNED SURE won't be very palatable to progressives and gun control freaks: http://www.rgj.com/story/news/crime/2015/06/03/fact-checker-do-more-guns-increase-crime/28327545/ [rgj.com] In the article, Mark Robinson first asserts that fewer guns will not reduce crime, then asserts that more guns won't reduce crime. Within the article, he addresses John Lott's claims that more guns lead to less crime. Personally, I believe John Lott. If a criminal knows that there is a 50-50 chance that he'll be shot while burglarizing a home, he ain't gonna burgle it. Just because a guy is a criminal, doesn't necessarily mean he is stupid. Criminals are smart enough to do risk evaluations.
Let me quote just one paragraph from Robison's article:
Even as the number of guns in American society climb to ever higher levels — around 300 million currently — the violent crime rate is down 22 percent over the past decade while the murder rate has dropped in half over the past 20 years. According to FactCheck.org, the rate of gun murder recently hit its lowest point since 1981: 3.6 per 100,000 people.
And, once again, I say give honest citizens the means to defend themselves, and they are far less likely to become victims.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:15PM
Every good guy should be provided with arms to carry on publicly, and the terrorist must be left unarmed.
This way we'll know who the terrorists are and shoot them down on the spot.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:50PM
Or, disperse - meet in Second Life (ducks.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:51PM (4 children)
Our we could just nuke Mecca. No more magic rock, no more muslims.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday June 05 2017, @12:04AM
And that will work why? My money is on it having the opposite effect. It's like you've never heard of martyrs.
I find this whole argument bizarre. Islamic cooties are so powerful that western civilization is threatened by the immigration or conversion of small numbers of people. So how do we defeat this near invincible belief system? Blow up their pet rock. It's Islamic kryptonite somehow. Your cognition is dissonating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @12:24AM (2 children)
Pakistan is over 95 percent Muslim and they have a bunch of nuclear weapons.
What do you think their response would be to blowing up The Holy of Holies?
It's interesting how "Nuke them" is repeatedly a thing among the poorly-informed.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:01AM (1 child)
Nuke Pakistan first, targeting all of their nuclear sites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:34AM
The Soviets joined the nuclear club in 1949.
Since then, there has been no such thing as a limited nuclear war.
The "use them or lose them" thing is part of the deal.
As far back as the 1950s, clued-in folks have known the global implications of nuclear war. [google.com]
Even you punk kids should know there is no winner. [google.com]
Use of nuclear weapons means the end of the world.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]