Obama to unveil gun violence measures
fifeboy @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:40 am
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
Actually, DD did not say this well.
The gun control laws being proposed are not 'legitimate' except in the eyes of those who support them. If the laws pass then they will wind up being fought in the courts and the US Supreme Court will be the final arbiter of their legitimacy.
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
DD also comes from a culture that utterly rejects the American philosophy of representative government, freedom, and liberty in favor of autocratic and theocratic rule.
I get it, DD bad, Bart good. OK. You forgot to say "and he is one of those evil Muslims. BartSimpson BartSimpson:
He is also representative of so many people around the world who foolishly believe that their rights are not rights at all, but instead are mere privileges granted to them by their rulers. And those privileges can be revoked or restricted as it suits those rulers.
Don't you think DD should answer that or do you always answer for other people. For myself, don't count me in on this. I don't think any of my rights are restricted here. And if for some reason they are, I have an election I can vote in. BartSimpson BartSimpson:
The American experience is that government rules at the consent of the governed and that we, The People, are the fount of rights and that the government obtains its rights from The People, not the reverse.
Ahh, so that's why the Patriot act is still going, The People called for it. OK.BartSimpson BartSimpson:
That is not going to change and the glib words of someone who lives in a country where human rights are what the government says they are are not going to change that.
Edit: And Jon Stewart can kiss my ass.
Bla bla blah
Edit: And Jon Stewart can kiss my ass.
andyt @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:44 am
commanderkai commanderkai:
But that's the thing, they're rare, and they're generally lacking any understandable motivation. People can understand murder and violence because of a drug deal going bad, or gang violence, or a robbery gone wrong, or crime of passion (so on and so forth) but what justification or understanding can there be for a man to shoot up a movie theater or a school? The reason they have a huge impact (much like terrorism has) is because it impacts a huge amount of people that you would not generally see as victims of such violence.
To put it lightly, if 24 gangsters (Crips, Bloods, Aryan Brotherhood, MS13, etc) were murdered at a house party, most of us frankly wouldn't give a shit. As harsh as this might be, Detroit in 2012 had 375-386 murders (saw two different numbers), in a population of less than a million. A majority of those murders happen to people most of us frankly don't give a fuck about, like drug users, dealers, gangsters, etc. We only really care about are the innocent victims killed by a thief or from being in the cross fire, or the police officers who have to deal with this shit.
Can't disagree with anything you wrote here. But as you say, we do care about innocents killed. So dismissing mass shootings as rare isn't helpful - it's common enough to scar the psyche of the nation. Mabye more than all the gang crime, because few people are exposed ot it and as you say, don't care that much about the victims
fifeboy @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:48 am
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
commanderkai commanderkai:
The issue with the United States is that a huge chunk (probably 15% or so) of their population basically was forced to be second class citizens up until the 1960s. Something I don't think Canada(other than maybe Quebec), or New Zealand, or Australia or the United Kingdom can claim.
I'm isolating my comment here to this part. New Zealand's Maori community was subjected to what are best called apartheid policies well into the 1990's. Queen Elizabeth II protested the situation on one of her first visits to New Zealand by going against the wishes of the NZ government and making a point of visiting with Maoris and enjoying their hospitality.
Australia had restrictive laws against the Aborigines well into the 1970's that prevented them from owning guns, prevented them from travel, prevented them from access to education, and also involved taking children away from their families - not unlike what Canada did to her Natives with the Residence Schools.
Is the US innoncent? Not at all. But don't go rewriting history to pretend that Commonwealth countries were so much better because they were not.
And here, Bart, I agree with you 100% The scars of Canada's policy against aboriginal peoples are still with us and at the moment of my writing this, worthy of a 77 page debate on CKA.
fifeboy @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:57 am
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
That's good news on the crime front because Asians are even more law abiding than European folks.
Dude, you don't watch enough Jackie Chan movies 
BartSimpson @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 12:25 pm
fifeboy fifeboy:
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
That's good news on the crime front because Asians are even more law abiding than European folks.
Dude, you don't watch enough Jackie Chan movies 
andyt @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 12:31 pm
They may do less robberies and such, but corruption and white collar crime is just as much or more of a problem for a society.
N_Fiddledog @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:20 pm
andyt andyt:
They may do less robberies and such, but corruption and white collar crime is just as much or more of a problem for a society.
You know what else they do? This one got buried by the Sandy Hook story.
$1:
By the end of the man's rampage, at least 23 elementary students were wounded, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The knife attack at Chenpeng Village Primary School in China's Henan province took place on December 14, the same day an American gunman killed 20 student and six educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The knife attack at Chenpeng Village Primary School in China's Henan province took place on December 14, the same day an American gunman killed 20 student and six educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/24/world/asi ... index.html
andyt @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:26 pm
per capita, the US is by far the champeen of mass murders like this.
BartSimpson @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:35 pm
andyt andyt:
per capita, the US is by far the champeen of mass murders like this.
Nope. Mexico owns that crown. Mexico makes places like Iraq and Afghanistan look relatively safe.
Over the past six years the total homicide rate in the US has dropped from 5.7 per 100,000 to 4.7 per 100,000.
In Mexico it has gone up by 37% in the same time frame.
While Honduras has the highest murder ate in the world at 78 per 100,000 this past year, Mexico has the highest number of mass murders.
Their mass murders are particularly gruesome, too.
In 2012 the mass murders in Mexico included:
Forty-nine people who were beheaded and had their heads dumped in a city intersection.
One killer who went on a spree and murdered seventy-five people in Ciudad Juarez.
A cultist in Jalisco who murdered eighty to possibly two hundred young people.
A single shooting in Acapulco that included thirty-eight dead.
Eighteen people in Mexico City beheaded and who had their hands cut off while they were still alive.
Fifteen high school students murdered in Tijuana at a restaurant.
A bombing in Nogales killed twenty-four.
Thirty-one bus passengers slaughtered in Chihuahua by Zetas cartel members on a road checkpoint. Among the dead were at least three infants.
But most of this was commited by drug cartels and because the media doesn't like presenting Mexico in a bad light these stories got as little as 49 words worth of coverage in the USA - if they were covered at all.
You can find them on Google (takes some looking) and I'm sure there are more that were only reported in the Spanish language press.
I'm not saying that the USA is all that, I just object to the knee-jerk condemnation you dished out here.
andyt @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:41 pm
weak again. We're talking about the kind of killings like Sandy Hook. Mexico doesn't rate there. You want to go to mass killings in general, pick a war zone. The US is exceptionally good at those too.
N_Fiddledog @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:42 pm
Actually my points were notice how the China attacks didn't require a gun, and most people didn't hear about that one even though it happened at the same time as Sandy Hook. Why not, I wonder.
There was another buried news story that week where a mass shooting tragedy was halted by a legal gun owner. Another one where somebody knocked on a family's door, and fried them with a home made flame thrower showing you don't need guns. Stories like that are being buried lately and there's more than just those.
andyt @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:43 pm
N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:
Actually my points were notice how the China attacks didn't require a gun, and most people didn't hear about that one. Why not, I wonder.
Swimming pools kill way more children than guns too. What's your point? Actually the knifing in China have been discussed ad nauseum. How many kids died in those?
N_Fiddledog @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:53 pm
andyt andyt:
N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:
Actually my points were notice how the China attacks didn't require a gun, and most people didn't hear about that one. Why not, I wonder.
Swimming pools kill way more children than guns too. What's your point? Actually the knifing in China have been discussed ad nauseum. How many kids died in those?
None, but people often forget the biggest school mass killing in American history didn't involve guns. It was explosives. The Sandy Hook tragedy is being politicized with false fear tactics so Obama can disarm America. Did you notice how he was standing behind kids when he gave his address last night? I found that kind of sneaky and gutless.
Brenda @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:58 pm
I read as much about Sandy Hook as the Chinese stabbing in the Dutch papers. Guess North America thinks the USA is the center of the universe. Poor Toronto 
Zipperfish @ Thu Jan 17, 2013 3:08 pm
‘Like Saddam Hussein’: Obama faces furious Republican backlash on gun control
The Republican backlash gets underway. This Republican congressman from Texas likens Obama to Saddam Hussein for his use of kids. When the FOX correspondent asks how many Republicnas will stand with him, the congressman replies to her that "I know you'll be on my side, so that makes two od us." Ha ha. FOX News.