Sandy Hook Elementary School Victims Relief Fund

It is very good that your burglars include virtually no folks inclined towards rape, abduction, drug-intoxication-fueled mayhem, or simply don't want to leave any witnesses. The same cannot be said of the U.S. The majority most intent on just profit here are much more careful to perform their thefts when occupants are absent. The minority more willing to risk occupant encounters, or even actively seeking them, are biased towards greater violence. Even absent any guns.

You are free to chose to allow an intruder to take them, but that is your choice, not a requirement here. As for liklihood of it happening, your expressed fears seem embellished (possibly from Hollywood fiction, such as below?). Security arrangements are readily available to prevent an intruder from taking your gun if you can't get it first, and are even legally required in numerous jurisdictions. As for what happens once it is in your hands, weapons retention training is readily available. I recommend it.

My (then-future) spouse has first-hand experience in occupied-dwelling burglaries, cowering in terror for more than two hours during the first. (That community's conventional wisdom was that the second event was likely the same perp, returning after a period to allow insurance replacements. But he quickly left after discovering that the overnight occupant count had quadrupled.) While no actual violence occurred during her cases, violence in similar cases here is common, even absent guns.

Her actual experience is very different than your hypotheticals. During that first event, she had plenty of time of unlock and prepare various measures, had they been available. Considering the victimization that does happen too frequently here, I don't recall hearing of a jurisdiction that would fault a female for actively terminating such incidents when they might possibly have survived unharmed by cowering in terror in a corner for 2+ hours.

The PTSD can last decades. The perp undoubtedly continued victimizing others.

Men are usually a different matter, drawing greater scrutiny into whether their actions were reasonable. In an earlier era, I even heard of distant cases where male occupants were charged with homicide when they had an option to escape by jumping out their bedroom window. The backlash to such prosecutions formed the impetus to extend Castle Doctrine to places that didn't then observe it.

Yes, I agree that that whole genre is loaded with factual errors. As previously expressed in this thread, I believe them to be toxic contributors to our gun abuse and to other violence. I quit watching them long very ago, before that particular series began.

There are plenty of celebrities lobbying for very restrictive or prohibitive gun controls for ordinary civilians, but very happy to collect large profits from portraying and glorifying gun violence. See also Alex Baldwin's current troubles.

Darn, I had intended to warn you of the risk of getting caught in an inversion between what is portrayed as vanishingly rare, and what is portrayed as common. This is one of them.

If these were vanishingly rare, then my semi-local region would be accounting for all the cases in this whole nation.

 

I won't defend Wayne LaPierre. He and his leadership team can swim or sink on their own. Unfortunately they are taking down the nation's top proponent and provider of gun safety education, which that organization was doing long before these personalities took the helm.

As for the interpretation of tis FBI report, the normal pro-gun response would be to point out the high concentration of those incidents in 'gun-free zones', where law or employment rules preclude most or all potential 'good guy' civilians from being armed. So it isn't the least bit surprising that so many of the civilians who did stop mass shooters, were unarmed, as they were the only 'good guys' allowed to be present.

70% happened in educational or commerce/business environments, 10% in government. However this report doesn't allow us to adequately figure the real 'gun-free zone' vs 'guns allowed zone' portion when we don't have a breakdown between areas that are fully gun-free vs just employees are gun-free (i.e. not posted as customers must also be gun-free) vs both employees and customers may be (legally) armed.

Separately, this report is also known to suffer from recency bias, artificially causing an apparent x-axis intercept at about year 2000 (see trend line on graph on page 9). This apparent zero crossing is an artifact of its data collection and selection process. Other collections going back much earlier show no such intercept.

Giffords is just one of many affinity groups, and all the affinity groups come to the debate bringing their own axes to grind, carefully curated to support their particular viewpoint. One cannot honestly present most of their products as solid unimpeachable sources, or that any of them definitive settle the debate, while reflexively shitting on all products from competing affinity groups.


Just one example from one of the links therein:

"We assembled a panel of annual data for 1981 to 2010 for each of the 50 states." [emphasis added]

CHERRY_PICKING ALERT! The U.S. is effectively not 50, but really 52 "states". The FBI UCR state-by-state tables do indeed show 52 "states". Gun studies looking at just 50 states are universally biasing their data by excluding 2 quasi-states that have both the very strongest gun control (full handgun bans until Supreme Court decisions in 2008-10, then the most stringent controls since), AND the highest homicide rates of all states, much worse than even the most poverty-ridden and violent Confederate states.

I need to see all such studies re-run to include these excluded states. Many appear to have results weak enough to become indistinguishable from a null result once this data selection bias is rectified, but we won't know for certain until they do so. Which they don't. Or at least, they don't publicize the updated results, often because they won't fit the agenda of the principals or sponsors. See also "Publication Bias".

Yes, there is a huge amount of published material on this overall issue. The links I've seen posted here are just a tiny drop in a very large bucket.

But while the material's results fall all around the issue, most people are looking only at a portion that fits within their confirmation bias blinders, and sometimes denying that there even is anything else. And overlooking the very many problems contained within. Some time back, when the Task Force on Community Preventive Services reviewed and scrutinized the available research around a certain facet of this issue and had their report published in the CDC's MMWR, they had to declare "The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes." I had to read it as effectively goring the oxes of all the affinity groups all around the topic. I haven't noticed that the situation as having changed significantly since.

 

you watched the video, but dismissed it as fantasy...

you read etc's post, but couldn't comprehend it...

you're right, there's nothing i can say it do to discuss this with you like adults.

continue on with the condescending tone and dismissals, and good luck.

 

Earlier I responded:

To our UK native, what have you understood about the history of guns and gun control in the UK? It seems likely you were taught from a different perspective than we were.

Here is an old piece I just re-located, written from your native side of the pond:

House of Commons - Home Affairs - Appendices to the Minutes of Evidence

"Memorandum by Mr Colin Greenwood

FIREARM CONTROLS IN BRITAIN PART I THE HISTORY OF FIREARMS CONTROLS IN GREAT BRITAIN

EARLY LEGISLATION

1. Early English legislation relating to firearms was concerned only with the duty of the citizen to arm himself for the defence of the realm and for the maintenance of order. Restrictions on the use of firearms were concerned only with the maintenance of compulsory practice with the longbow or with the preservation of game. There was a clear and recognised right, as well as a duty for the subject to have arms for his own protection and to discharge his duty to the state, though those arms would not necessarily have been firearms.

2. The Bill of Rights of 1688 made it clear that Parliament considered that there was a right for citizens to have arms and by the mid 18th century the Common Law was very clear in recognising a constitutional right to have arms which Parliament had no authority to breach in general terms. In the early 19th century, perceived dangers of major disorder resulted in the "Six Acts" amongst which was the Seizure of Arms Act 1820 which appeared to abrogate the right to keep arms. Debates in Parliament made it clear that the Government accepted that there was indeed a right to keep arms but their view was that the Constitution allowed for qualification of that right for a limited period and in specific areas. The Seizure of Arms Act automatically lapsed after two years and was applied only to specified areas of the country. Until the start of the 20th century, therefore, the right to keep arms was vigorously upheld by Parliament and all attempts at legislation to restrict arms generally or firearms in particular failed completely.

3. That aspect of the American Constitution which relates to the right to keep arms is, in fact, no more than a modification of the English Common Law at the time of the American Revolution, the major difference being that the Americans created a written constitution largely because the British has ignored the rights of the colonists, not least in respect of their keeping of arms. " [emphasis added] ...

Essentially, when the U.S. expelled King George III's rule and emerged as a nation, it began with essentially the same individual arms rights as Mother England, but codified (along with other civil rights) to be more difficult for simple legislative repeal. The similarity didn't diverge much until post-WWI, when Red scares arose and the UK began its modern gun control path in 1920, possibly modeled on NYC's 1911 Sullivan gun control law which was also driven by fears of "those people".

Note that this gun control was imposed after the UK had reduced its homicide rate to modern low levels, reached in the 19th Century, making it difficult to claim the former is responsible for the later. Note also that U.S. homicide rates, as reconstructed and estimated by researchers, were never similarly low as Mother England even when their gun laws were similar.

The U.S. began its own nation gun controls in 1934, but taking a different path that was more a response to the organized crime established during Prohibition.

 

learning things... interesting.

 

Is this really the case?

And yet the stats strongly suggest otherwise. As I stated to our semi-literate friend who I think didn't understand it, your having a gun in the house doubles the chance of you or a family member being a victim of homicide.

Yes, I know. Weapons training. You've had it. So you know better. It wouldn't happen to you. As I said before:

Here's one that's much the same. Statistics show that drink driving is really very dangerous. But Dave knows he's a good driver. Dave has been on an advanced driving course. Dave knows what he's doing. And Dave can handle his drink. So he's OK to drive after a couple of six-packs, because he's had training and knows what he's doing. He's not like those idiots that get drunk and drive when they don't know what they're doing, and die, or kill other people. Those are statistics, and he's not like those people. He knows better.​

I am glad no actual violence occurred in her case.

But what if she'd pulled a gun on the intruder, and hadn't taken the shot when she needed to, and hadn't got it exactly right. Then she'd have escalated the situation.

Cowering in terror is by far the better option here.

Here's my actual experience. I've been a potential victim of face-to-face crime twice. On both occasions, a swift punch to the face was all that was necessary to end it. Both times, I was in crowded areas, and, had I had a gun and been the sort of person who would use one, many people could have been collateral damage.

Yeah. Not like the 14-year-old who shot someone.

Given your previous, admirable, comments on racial inequality, I'd have expected you to be the last person to invoke the Castle Doctrine.

We all know what the Castle Doctrine is, but more importantly, we all know how it's applied.

And yet gun violence has always been even more extreme in Hong Kong cinema than in US cinema. This must explain the huge amount of gun violence in Hong Kong. Wait, what? Their firearm homicide rate per 100,000 of population is 0.03, even though their films are more shooty than American films and America's firearm homicide rate per 100,000 of population is 12.21? More than 400 times as high? With similar cinema cultures? Noooooooo.

In the rest of the world, we know that Die Hard (among many others) is a ridiculous fantasy, no more realistic than Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland.

Die Hard doesn't make us shoot each other any more than Alice in Wonderland makes us take drugs, or Star Wars makes us illegally do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Honestly, see above. This is the most absurd straw-man argument.

What's next? All the gun crime in America is because of the violent video games that are made and widely used in..... oh, Britain, Korea, China and Japan. No, that doesn't work either.

You've said before that your semi-local region shows that it is possible to have high levels of gun ownership with low levels of crime. And yet now we're finding that so many crimes take place in that region that just the ones that are foiled by good guys with guns would be enough to not count as vanishingly rare.

Which is it? It can't be both.

 

Right.

So in the past you've said (I'm paraphrasing), "We must have guns because they are one of our Civil Rights" and "We must have guns because of the Second Amendment. If it's in there, it's a fundamental right." And now you're generously crediting we Brits with the basis of that law.

Fair enough. Keep your guns. We told you to, more than 200 years ago.

Am I to assume that your position is similar on the many former British colonies that retain the anti-homosexuality laws that the British imposed in the 19th Century? "They must imprison the gays because it's the law, and it's the law because the British gave them the law. There is no reason to change it."

I'm pretty confident that that isn't your position: I know you're a much better person than that.

Honestly, I don't see the relevance of this post, other than the final bit about Britain imposing gun laws after its homicide rate had fallen. And even that.... If your argument is that America has a naturally higher homicide rate, surely that makes the need for restricting access to the most commonly-used means of murder even more pressing?

 

No, I said that the article fuelled your fantasies - the ones you have about being John McClane.

I didn't at any point say the article was a fantasy. When you say this, you are choosing to say something that is not true. That's unfortunate, but it's hardly unprecedented in your posts.

I never questioned the veracity of the article. In fact, I addressed what was said in the article - something you completely failed to do. You implied that the robbers were somehow planning to rape their victims, whereas the article said nothing of the sort, and in fact showed a pattern of straight robbery. You didn't mention the 14-year-old struggling with the holster, or the fact that it was pure luck that he hit the guy.

So there was a fantasy there, but it was in your post, not in the article.

Did you not read the post? Or did you just see the word "fantasy" and infer everything else that might be in my post from that one word? That would kind of fit the pattern we've seen elsewhere in this thread.

No, I didn't read it. I looked at it, saw it was one of those ETC(SS) posts - the ones in his own unique language - and didn't read it.

When I said "Sorry - it was too incoherent", I realise that that could be read to mean either that I read it and couldn't understand it, or that I looked at it, saw it was incoherent, and didn't bother reading it. That's on me: it was poor writing and I apologise for the ambiguity. You can be forgiven for not understanding what I was trying to say there. I hope you can forgive me for the lapse in judgement.

Yes, you have made this very clear. You don't seem to understand any of my posts. Perhaps I write as incoherently as ETC(SS) does, and my posts are incomprehensible. Certainly, I have written things which have been unclear, as I mention above.

But in this case, I suspect the problem is with the reader rather than the writer. I mean, that news article that you linked to was made my people whose job it is to tell a coherent story, and you didn't understand that. And you didn't even have to read that: there was talking and pictures, but you still didn't understand it.

At best, you don't understand posts. At worst, you are deliberately misinterpreting them, and lying. So, yes, there's really very little that you can do to contribute to the adult conversation that others are having on this thread. For once, we agree.

As I said a while ago, if you're inferring condescension, have a think about why that might be.

And if your arguments are so easily dismissed, is that the fault of the person who's doing the dismissing?

 

To be clear, when I say that Die Hard is a ridiculous fantasy, that's not a negative criticism of the film. I really like it, precisely because it is so silly.

 

reminder....
like i said, the condescending stuff will get zero response. please try to stay in the conversation.

1 did the kid shoot the river and end the robbery ?

2 how would you end that robbery without the use of firearms ?

if you stay on topic, there's a possibility of learning something about your reasoning and your personal perspective.

 

A Christmas classic.....
Actually?
I've only seen it more than once because entertainment options aboard a submerged submarine are sometimes limited, but hey.....Hollywood's gotta Hollywood, right?

Guns used more for self-defense than crimes - Washington Times.

Makes sense to me.
I've drawn a weapon in anger once, drilled holes into a front lawn once (helping out a neighbor, and perhaps a would-be burglar) AND at least once I "printed on purpose." to discourage what is tolerated in some communities as "aggressive panhandling."

 

Like I said, any condescension is being inferred by you. I'm not putting in anything that's deliberately condescending.

If you have an inferiority complex (one for which your most valued possession might be compensating?), that's not my problem.

And here's another reminder. Try to add something to the conversation. You've added two tenths of bugger all since your first post.

I assume you mean robber. But he could just as easily have shot a river, given his clear lack of experience.

Yes, he shot the robber. And as I said, it is pure luck that he did so. If the same incident were to happen again, there is every chance that he would have shot his mother, himself or a customer. Or that he would have missed everyone, escalated the situation, and got himself and his mother killed. What he did worked because he happened to throw a six this time. It was also profoundly stupid.

I would let them take the money. The robbery would then end, with no-one killed or injured, as happened in the other incident to which your news report refers. I have said this before. Every time you've asked it. In every scenario. What part of this do you not understand?

What would you do? Get yourself killed? Get your mother killed? Or - in what's clearly the best possible outcome in your view - kill someone to protect, what, $500 in takings? $1000 maybe? Yeah, that's worth a life.

How much money would it take for you to kill someone, privilege? Or would you go with the old Castle Doctrine and just kill someone for looking at you funny? (Subject to the usual Castle Doctine Pantone restrictions, of course.)

I've stayed on topic THE WHOLE F---ING TIME. You have just chosen not to understand anything.

I answer your questions; you don't understand or don't acknowledge the answers.

I ask questions; you rarely answer mine and just repeat the same shouty demands.

This is stupid.

 

On that we agree.

 

i cleaned up the opinionated parts, again. you're welcome

1 ok good, you did watch. i wasn't sure.

2 it's fine to speculate.

3 oops, you're drifting away from the reality part of this scenario we watched, again.

4 i think that speculation happened in 2, but anyway....

5 thank you for your opinion.

6 hmm, i thought the goal was to deter robberies, or maybe we've changed back to the movies where "if we give them what they want they'll leave us safe and go away" thing ? please, be precise if possible.

7 this is a very difficult thing to answer, but I'll try.

first i would be very careful to try and get my children and wife as far away from the strong arm robbers as possible, and empty the register or whatever thing if value they were attempting to aquire.

hopefully training would prevent adrenaline from taking over. hopefully i could hand them the cash/wallets/whatever and not appear to be a threat to their escape. I've seen what can happen when a person sticks their head out a doorway to try and record a tag number, good men have died doing that. whether i am or not, i do not want to join that league of remembered folks.

once the robbers we're satisfied with the proceeds i would step back.

hopefully the joy of the cash and the urgency of escape would take over and they would leave. hopefully the family would be out of sight.

unfortunately this is not always the case, and the reality of hardened criminals plays on the situation. they value of life is probably much lower than mine. as nasty as it sounds, my family is more important to me than any of the robbers problems or beliefs, and they are very easily expendable at this point. ya, that's the ugly part nobody wants to happen.

but it can happen, and will happen, for the family's protection.

8 i hope 7 answered this part already. this has nothing to do with the money in the till. if you'll notice, the earlier 3 scenarios i didn't ask about your car, your wallet, or your possessions. i asked only about protecting yourself and your family.

9 I've never felt that way about money.

10 i think you've misplaced the difference between defending ones self vs

just killing people

11 "this is stupid" ... fits pretty good, for the answer to the latter half of 10 "just killing people"

like i said, adults discussing things with each other is always productive, from the friends i know and love. different perspectives are always usable.

the more you exhibit self control and tact, the more people around you will value your input.

 

I did see a long TV segment on Portugal's drug approach in the last year or so. As portrayed, it seemed to be vastly better than our War On Drugs, and well worth trying out here too. But on our path so far, just add it to the long list of programs that have been demonstrated to work somewhere (often as test projects in American communities), but can't gain political traction for expansion to state or national levels.

Those "about the same" figures are very dependent on careful selection of countries and timeframe. Right now, yes for those named countries. But when I started looking at this several decades ago, not at all, the U.S. non-gun murder rate was over double the rates of those named countries. Your claim is very dependent on time frame selection, which usually means it is driven by other factors not under current discussion.

When our rates declined from the early 1990s into the first decade of this century, all sorts of crimes were falling together: gun murders, non-gun murders, other gun violence, other non-gun violence, and even property crimes. Many crime categories, both gun and non-gun, were linked and decreasing together, due to factors orthogonal to the gun issue.

I should expand on that. I don't claim, and don't defend the claims, that guns make people safer, because there are far too many problems in the research and materials presented by the supporters of these claims, rendering most of their results biased or inconclusive or unconvincing. It is essentially the same situation as I find in most of the competing research and materials from the opposing groups, e.g. what you have been linking.

That is very dependent on just which "elsewheres" you chose to consider, or allow to be considered. More cherry picking.

That characterization applies to only a portion of the field. Applying it to the entire field is -- using fear and hate.

 

Your response avoided any mention of Christchurch. The Christchurch massacre was also abroad, yet received enormous coverage in the U.S., far more than did Kyoto, far more than even a couple arson mass murders in or connected to my state. The disparity is very difficult to explain by anything except American gun control politics.

Then came Osaka, another example of no guns, almost no coverage, this time orders of magnitude less than Christchurch. My point was to show a new illustration of a pattern pointed out by one of our leading criminologists some years ago.

I've never seen Russia or any of the 'Stans included in any list of 'advanced Western democracies' suitable for gun violence comparisons against the U.S. It is even more removed than our southern neighbors that you refuse to allow me to include in comparisons.

That said, I do recall some coverage of it. For reference, here are Kazan story links from the 3 specific outlets that I sampled and mentioned as omiting any mention of Osaka on their main nightly newscasts (ABC, NBC) or main top-level U.S. webpage (CNN) that day:
Putin says school shooting in Kazan 'has shaken all of us' - ABC News
Shooting at Russian school kills at least 9 people, including 7 children
Russia school shooting: At least 7 children killed in city of Kazan - CNN

Unfortunately, I am not able recall or find how they placed these stories, or if I saw this news only on lesser outlets, so can't make a direct comparison.

I thought it was clear this is an Op-Ed, not a story. For those unfamiliar with U.S. lingo, it is an editorial written by someone outside the publication's Editorial Board, thus not the official opinion of the publication itself.

Though he is a principal in The AP/USATODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killing database.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Alan_Fox

I brought it up because he is among our leading and well known criminologists. Anyone who has been a serious student of American violence issues over the past several decades, or any significant fraction thereof, should have at least heard his name. Those who haven't, must be viewing this issue with tunnel vision, or haven't yet been around the block.

It is always interesting to watch the partisan extremists start drawing their knives against someone who, though tending to lean in their own direction, isn't sufficiently loyal to the orthodoxy. Similar to how loyal Trumpists have turned against many establishment Republicans and whatever is left of the former centrists.

 

Ummmm...... Opinions are a thing. You certainly seem to have them.

Did you? You posted it and then banged on about protecting your family from rapists. I'm assuming you didn't.

This again would suggest you didn't watch it. Any observation makes it obvious that it is pure luck that he hit the robber and not his mum or an innocent party or no-one.

See 2. Again, it seems you didn't watch the video that you're making so much of.

See 2. Once again, it seems you didn't watch it.

I thought you removed the opinionated parts?

No, the goal is to prevent injury or loss of life. It's the police's job - those people who you seem to alternately idolise and hold in contempt - whose job is to deter robberies.

OK....

OK. And you need a gun for that why? Are you holding your family at gunpoint to force them to move?

What, when they're already there?

Again, I'm not seeing a gun in your hand here.

And I'm definitely not seeing a gun in your hand here. In fact, you're showing more restraint than I would. (But of course I wouldn't be in a position where I was likely to get shot by the fleeing robbers: they'd have to lean out of the car window and throw a baseball bat at me. Or a knife, like one of those magicians with the girl on the spinning disc. But now I am getting distracted.)

Again no gun....

....and still no gun.

"Hardened criminals" are not the ones you have to worry about here. They are after the cash. The scenario will play out as above unless you pull a gun on them. If you do, you and your family are suddenly likely to die, when you weren't before.

Where I concede you might need a gun is not with the "hardened criminals", but with the losers and f---wits. The ones who are on their first robbery, or their first crime spree. They're twitchy, and angry, and confused, and in that situation, they may well attack you or your family.

But in most normal developed countries, only the most hardcore of the hardened criminals - the ones least likely to resort to shooting - are able, through complex criminal networks, to access guns. The losers and f---wits can't get guns. And that's where the idiotic single-minded dependence on the one weapon - the knife, the baseball bat, etc - comes into play to the shopkeeper's advantage. The loser/f---wit is easily disarmed and disabled. This is what tends to happen on the rare occasion that a raid on a store ends in violence in Australia.

So, with the hardened criminals, your possession of a gun is the primary thing that could put you and your family at risk. You're not protecting them by having a gun and "hoping training would prevent adrenaline from taking over"; you're actively endangering them and you may get them killed.

And with the losers and f--wits, it's your insistence on allowing everyone to have a gun that has meant that they're likely to shoot you and your family.

Yes, it actually did.

You asked about protecting myself and my family in the situation in the news report, in which my family and I would not be at risk unless we chose to pull a gun and escalate the situation. I told you how I would protect myself and my family in this situation.

Good.

11 "this is stupid" ... fits pretty good, for the answer to the latter half of 10 "just killing people"[/quote]

I'm glad, I think. It was actually fuzzy who brought up Castle Doctrine. Which, in many cases, is "just killing people" (with, of course, aggravating factors relating to melanin).

Yeah, that's not what I was saying "this is stupid" about.

However, the post I'm responding to now is less stupid. It has given me some insight into what you're thinking and why, to a degree that your previous posts did not. And I thank you for that.

 

Yes, it's a real shame. Portugal had a huge drug problem, and the situation has improved dramatically. I wish more countries would follow its example. There've been pockets of decriminalisation, but far too few around the world. I think it's just very hard to get public support for it.

Indeed. I acknowledged this.

....and I acknowledge this. But none of it takes away from the really simple, blindingly-obvious fact that many, many, many (the three "manys" chosen quite deliberately) more people are killed in the US directly because so many of you have guns.

Honestly, the variables are clutching at straws.

This is a car forum, so let's draw a car parallel.

My premise, to start with, is that a Volvo XC90 is fundamentally safer than a motorbike.

Your argument is that XC90s are driven in places like Sweden and urban Australia, with good driving (because you haven't seen the M4 out of Sydney, but that's a whole nother story....) and strong traffic policing and high-quality roads, whereas motorbikes are driven in places like India and Vietnam and that's why people keep dying on motorbikes.

And you'd be right. Those externalities are a factor, just as they are with crime rates and guns. But they don't take away from the fact that if I hit a wall in an XC90 at 60mph with my seatbelt on, I'm a lot less likely to die than if I hit the same wall (after they've cleared the Volvo away) at 60mph on a motorbike.

I get the externalities. I get the variables. But they ignore the massive, obvious, central fact. They're really just a distraction used to try to get others to ignore the massive, obvious central fact too.

The cherry-picking accusation is the same as the externalities. Just another attempt to ignore all of those deaths, or to pretend that guns were not a factor in all of those gun homicides.

Yes, I can see that argument.

 

I didn't see the point. But I'll do so here if that helps.

Given your love of variables, I can give you a few here.

• The shooter filmed the shootings and broadcast them live. That leads to more media coverage.
  
• It was huge. He killed 51 people in a very small city in a very small country. That leads to more media coverage.
  
• As mentioned in my hierarchy above, IT WAS IN AN ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRY. Yes, it was also abroad. But they speak English (uftur a fushiun) in New Zealand. If something happens in an English-speaking country, that always leads to more coverage in American media. Your news doesn't like witness statements with subtitles.
  
• It was racially-motivated. It was the first incidence of far-right terrorism in New Zealand. That's important, and deserves coverage.
  
• It had strong links to the US, and specifically to people with close ties to your then-President. The shooters "manifesto" contained passages very close to statements by people including Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. That makes it very newsworthy in America.

There's more, of course. But I need to cook dinner soon.

Other things that happened in Osaka:

• The arsonist did not film the arson or broadcast it live.
  
• It killed half as many people as Christchurch, in a very huge city in a very big country.
  
• As mentioned in my hierarchy above, IT WAS NOT IN AN ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRY. Witnesses interviewed by local news journalists spoke Japanese, which doesn't make for good US TV.
  
• It wasn't racially-motivated. And it wasn't terrorism.
  
• The killer did not have a manifesto copied from people with links to the White House.

Again, do you see where I'm going here?

The mention of "orders of magnitude" in the same sentence as "Christchurch" will make Christchurch people very jumpy.

But yes, much less coverage than Christchurch, for all the reasons above. The story simply wasn't as earth-shaking (sorry, Christchurch!), regardless of the method of murder.

Indeed.

Remember this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Karachi_bus_shooting

I don't.

19 more deaths than Osaka. And done with guns! Which always get disproportionate media coverage, I'm told.

And yet I don't have any recollection of it. I don't think it merited more than a passing mention on our news - even SBS, which specialises in foreign news. I'm sure it was on the BBC World Service, but I don't remember it.

Because it happened in a poor country with lots of non-English-speakers, a long way away, that TV viewers don't care about.

Seeing these patterns in whether an incident is reported depending on whether it involves guns is like seeing faces in clouds: you see it because your brain is conditioned to see it.

Do you seriously think they wouldn't have reported Christchurch if he'd used a bomb?

And, if course, if he'd used a knife - which he'd have had to under post-Christchurch gun laws - do you seriously think he'd have killed as many people?

Perhaps the non-gun attacks don't get the same coverage because they don't kill as many people. Because, with the exception of some very effective arson in just the right building, they can't.

Oooh, can anyone smell cherries? Yum. If I'm not allowed to mention Europe without including South America, you're not allowed to mention South America without including the Stans.

This region is no more removed from the US than your Southern neighbours by most metrics. Except, of course, that their guns aren't there as a result of US gun laws.

So not much then.

Cool.

I know what an Op-Ed is. To my great shame, I have written a few for some US newspapers whose political position I strongly dislike.

Yes, it was clear.

It was a dishonest Op-Ed. Written by someone who has media experience and should (and, I believe, does) know better.

That's why it's so surprising that he'd have written something that was, at best, very poorly researched and wrong, and at worst deeply dishonest. I'd expect better.

 

good, my suggestion to try and control the condescending tone helped ! thank you! progress !

1 where are the police , in this strong arm robbery ?

2 not sure about this one.

3 did you see the police succeed in preventing the robbery , in the video ?

4 watch the video and tell me when the robbery ended, please. i think you'll find it was directly and exactly when the bad guy got shot.

5 shrug

6 thank you for your opinion

7 what's this about melanin ? please, tell us exactly what this is supposed to infer.