SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the celebrate-with-sangria-not-beer dept.
Irish culture will soon be celebrated across the globe with parades, pub crawls and seas of green. But newly uncovered documents prove unlike previous belief, St. Patrick's Day celebrations did not start in Boston, rather at least 100 years earlier in St. Augustine, Florida.
The curious discovery comes from a rather unlikely source: gunpowder expenditures lists from St. Augustine for the years 1600-1601.While cannons and other artillery were often fired to help guide ships safely across St. Augustine's protective sandbar, they were also shot off during times of public celebrations and religious festivities.
A single entry from March 1600 states St. Augustine's residents gathered together and processed through the streets in honor of the feast day of San Patricio, or St. Patrick. As they made their way through the town, cannons fired from the wooden fort in celebration of the Irish saint.
"It was certainly a surprise," said historian J. Michael Francis, PhD, University of South Florida-St. Petersburg, who uncovered the document. "It did not register the first time I saw the name "San Patricio," the Spanish name for St. Patrick. After a few seconds it actually hit me that there was a St. Patrick's Day parade/procession in St. Augustine in 1601. Even more surprising was that the document identified St. Patrick as the patron saint of the city's maize fields."
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-truth-st-patrick-day-celebrations.html
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:26PM (7 children)
I am not sure what you mean by "commie pinko" but I take it from context to mean a term of opprobrium. In such case, like any good practical libertarian, I agree that too many things are abrogated by interfering laws.
But the objectionable element among our government isn't the only (nor here, maybe the main) problem. We have lots of overly restrictive laws in large part because stupid people did something that anyone with common sense would not have done, and messed it up for everyone else.
It's possible--easy, even--to safely fire a weapon in a celebratory manner. Witness these fine Spanish Floridians doing that very thing with cannon, and recall the concept of the twenty-one gun salute.
But people doing that thing in an unsafe manner have created problems: They have shot people inadvertently through walls, or had their bullets harm or kill people on the way back down after firing them into the air.
It's not really possible to outlaw "being a moron at large" because of our good and right freedoms from discrimination. So instead, we get "you can't shoot your guns off here because it we let you do it then we will have to let the unsafe idiots do it too and we can't have that." Tragedy of the commons.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:38PM (6 children)
"Think of the stupid people" doesn't quite have the same ring as "Think of the children", but it's a massive source of bad law.
And most of the behavior that can be criminalized is already criminalized. Accidentally shooting people because you waved a gun around in your bedroom? Criminal negligence. Can't prove that, the victims can still sue for gross negligence.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:55PM (3 children)
Absolutely true. The additional law (not only illegal to shoot someone in a fit of stupidity, but also illegal to have fired the gun at all within boundaries of this fine city) is, however, not without effect. Its intent (and probably, its effect) is to make the fits of stupidity that result in a gunshot would *less common* so that the folks in $CITY don't have to deal with them as often.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:03AM (2 children)
Well that is the theory. Practice is a different matter. Making everything worse for everyone because there are stupid people is not a good response.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday March 19 2018, @04:33PM (1 child)
Completely agreed. Unfortunately, however, that puts the burden on the stupid people* to stop messing it up for the rest of us to the extent that cities pass laws against things that stupid people "might" mess up.
-------------------------
* Stupid is as stupid does. I have been the "stupid people" at times, and so, most likely, have you. One tends (only a tendency) to grow out of it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 19 2018, @05:49PM
No, it puts the burden on us to stop those laws.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:46AM (1 child)
Just needed to insert this into this conversation, but I assume you are aware that loads of people are seriously injured or even killed every year by people shooting guns into the air [wikipedia.org] in celebration?
This may not be a reason to disallow ALL discharges of firearms within a city. But there is certainly a good reason to discourage people from randomly shooting bullets into the air. Those bullets come back down, frequently at a velocity that can seriously harm other people or damage property. Even a hardcore libertarian usually recognizes that individual rights generally do not extend to things that seriously injure others or their property.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday March 18 2018, @02:36PM
What does that have to do with regulation on firearms? There's fairly general regulations already on reckless activities that endanger other peoples' lives whether the activity used a firearm or something normally thought of as innocuous like a photocopier.
The problem here is that stupid people will find creative ways to do stupid things. If we then pass a new law every time that happens (or create regulation that allow stupid acts to be rewarded in court lawsuits), we end up with a massive amount of regulation that is only intended to deal with rare acts of stupidity while of course, not doing anything about the stupidity in the first place.