Those Dumb Democrats

[Lydiot]

Lydiot, it was not a "study", it was an the New York Times publishing the list and the crime reports of NYPD.

You claimed results based on that listing. Someone posted the results of it. Who did? I'd like to read about it. Just give me a source.

And otherwise, God may preserves your naivité.

I'm the naive one? Ok....

Remember James Holmes? He had rigged his apartment, so he was obviously able. The Columbine shooters set up explosives, but didn't ignite them because they got already what they wanted. The San Bernadino shooters had faked pipe bombs which proves, they already thought about it, but didn't pull it off (I wonder why, you can get schemata from every Islamic Terrorist website). The German train bombers had one little design error, that prevented that they succeeded and that one was based on a little translation glitch from the schemata. The Times Sqaure Bobmer had a vehicle full of explosives parked at Times Square.
Now, most of those attacks failed ... but then schematas and recipes you find in the Internet are perpetually updated. The pressure cooker bombs of the Boston Bombers worked.

Ok, so there goes the argument that terrorists would use explosives if they didn't have guns, because apparently they already had explosives despite having guns.

Now, here is an ethical corundum for you: A liberal who by rolling things up in the wrong order opens the door for more and more lethal attacks while lives in a primary target area is either stupid or stupid and honest ... but what is a liberal who opens the door and takes the protection from other places and other people because he doesn't live there? Now what do you call a person playing poker with other people's lives?

I don't know. What do you call them? You've already apparently distilled political views into either "liberal" or "other" ("conservative" one presumes), so there's a fair chance you have some equally great and simplistic terms for those "liberals". What are they?

[Lydiot]

Lydiot, it was not a "study", it was an the New York Times publishing the list and the crime reports of NYPD.

You claimed results based on that listing. Someone posted the results of it. Who did? I'd like to read about it. Just give me a source.

And otherwise, God may preserves your naivité.

I'm the naive one? Ok....

Remember James Holmes? He had rigged his apartment, so he was obviously able. The Columbine shooters set up explosives, but didn't ignite them because they got already what they wanted. The San Bernadino shooters had faked pipe bombs which proves, they already thought about it, but didn't pull it off (I wonder why, you can get schemata from every Islamic Terrorist website). The German train bombers had one little design error, that prevented that they succeeded and that one was based on a little translation glitch from the schemata. The Times Sqaure Bobmer had a vehicle full of explosives parked at Times Square.
Now, most of those attacks failed ... but then schematas and recipes you find in the Internet are perpetually updated. The pressure cooker bombs of the Boston Bombers worked.

Ok, so there goes the argument that terrorists would use explosives if they didn't have guns, because apparently they already had explosives despite having guns.

The US has a tremendous amount of weapons owned by its residents, yet it has seen a fair amount of terrorist attacks using NOT guns. Airplanes, rice cookers, fire bombs...

Now, here is an ethical corundum for you: A liberal who by rolling things up in the wrong order opens the door for more and more lethal attacks while lives in a primary target area is either stupid or stupid and honest ... but what is a liberal who opens the door and takes the protection from other places and other people because he doesn't live there? Now what do you call a person playing poker with other people's lives?

I don't know. What do you call them? You've already apparently distilled political views into either "liberal" or "other" ("conservative" one presumes), so there's a fair chance you have some equally great and simplistic terms for those "liberals". What are they?

[SkyBoat]

@Jwocky-- My good friend, you know well that I am among those Dumb Democrats who believes in gun control. First let me thank you for the blessing:

And otherwise, God may preserves your naivité.

Well, maybe not so much.

I suppose since I am going to remain a Dumb Democrat, and therefore hopelessly naive, that assigns me to a category of being dumber than a rock when it comes to looking at the world's problems. In my naivite', I am going to continue to look for solutions to the culture of killings that exists here in the United States. Not other places, who have their own cultures of killings. I can't do anything about them. I guess that makes me just a tiny bit less naive because I understand one size does not fit all. I also understand that no other nation has a Constitution with a Second Amendment written like we do that has the implications that it does. So, I think that makes me a tiny bit less naive, there, too. I also understand that there is a powerful industry that has an enormous stake in manufacturing guns of all kinds and that, using a very literal and particular interpretation of the Second Amendment of the U.S. is willing to push the edge of that envelope to the advantage of their ability to maximize their profits. I assume at this time, they are doing quite well, as are all the downstream companies that exist to support the maintenance of those guns post-purchase According to the advocate National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the economic impact of the firearms and ammunitions industry is a significant producer in the American economy:



Along with the jobs, wages, and income, there is also the tax revenue the industry pays to the various levels of government:


Statistics courtesy National Shooting Sports Foundation http://www.nssf.org/impact/

Since I'm dumber than a rock, I fail to see the value of this economic impact, nearly $43 billion a year assuming the NSSF wouldn't fudge their numbers (now they wouldn't do that as a Trade Association, would they?) Well, actually their numbers are pretty good. The Christian Science Monitor, known for it very reliable reporting, put the gun industry total at $31.8 billion at the end of 2012 http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/1217/US-gun-industry-is-thriving.-Seven-key-figures/31.8-billion, so that with everything that has happened since, the NSSF number is probably in the ball park. Oh, sorry, I just said the value of their economic impact. So, I'll just be hopelessly naive and point out that any serious attempt to structure a systemic change in the United States' gun culture and economics is going to have to look how to get the industry on-board with those ideas. Oh, dang. That was supposed to be hopelessly naive about gun control.

Okay. Naive. Naive. Okay...wait...nope that won't work. Not naive enough. Dang. Ya know, being a Dumb Democrat is really hard because I keep coming up with stuff that is less than stupid as a rock.

You see, here is the down to the foundation problem with the whole premise of the "Dumb Democrat" faulty logic. It assumes that, and my dear friend, has shown, that all ideas for solving the the problem of the number of killings with guns in the United States suggested by Democrats, therefore, the dumb ones, are either

(1) wrong because they are hopelessly naive and can never find a solution, or (2) wrong because they are suggested by a dumb Democrat and therefore are hopelessly naive and can never find a solution, or (3) wrong, because, whoever is smart and tuned into all the relevant factors is sitting on the solutions. Since we are dumber than a rock, when we say either/or we can mean 1+1 = 3.

So, if you are to believe JWocky, there is someone out there, not the Dumb Democrats (of which I am one), none of you who are in the category of needing God's blessings of being hopelessly naive, who knows the way to stop the killings, only that person, or persons is not speaking up.

If you were to believe the National Rifle Association here in the U.S. and many of our politicians who receive millions in political contributions from them, as well as the lobbying of a shadowy group called A.L.E.C. that, though they deny it, is well known to write many of the bills submitted by Republican legislators (now not all get passed, by any means), the solution to the killings is the overwhelming arming of the American populace. They even have a nice slogan for it: The only way to take out a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Or something close to that. Now, I happen to know that JWocky has some strong opinions on that and why it is even dumber than me, the Democrat.

But, in the end, what we who are the Dumb Democrats have been waiting for a good 40 years and especially the past 20 is for a Smart Republican to step up with an idea for ending the killings (since we're dumber than a rock and hopelessly naive and therefore, pathologically incapable of even imagining a solution, or so we've been told) that we all in one voice yell "YOU'RE RIGHT! THAT'S IT! LET'S PASS THAT BILL RIGHT NOW AND END THE KILLINGS NOW!" We've been waiting for that Smart Republican, because, by inference, they are all very smart and none of them have a naive bone in their bodies, so what the heck are they waiting for? People are dying. Kids are dying. Lives are being cut short. Families are enduring tragedies that stay with them for generations.

Now, even those of us who are dumber than a rock and twice as naive as the most naive person who needs JWocky's prayers, know that the most seemingly perfect solution, the most brilliantly written piece of Smart Republican legislation (although, if it is truly from a Smart Republican, it should) will not reduce the killings to zero.

For those you who live do not live in the United States,this may stun you, but this is a situation not unique to this forum thread. In fact, it is the current status quo in the debate (not that it is a debate; it's more like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the NRA, plus Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Laura SomebodyICan'tRemember and a number of conservative websites, plus the Republican caucuses in both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate ("Caucus" is the fancy word for "club" we use referring to the political parties) and whole bunches of states with Republican governors and state legislators...well the list goes on, who, oh yeah, and sometimes the United States Supreme Court, except this past week when they kinda weren't so much...These tend to be the biggest players who don't want to change the status quo versus the rest of the country--the polls be damned). Now, do they like the killings. No, they don't. But they are, how shall I say it? They have created a philosophical and political wall around the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and interpreted it in the way they want it to read (it doesn't have to be read that way at all). When they do the math to change the status quo, there is nothing they can do to change the status quo because they, and here is the assessment of this really dumb as a rock Democrat: they believe their own mythology about the Second Amendment more than they value the lives of those who have been and will be killed by firearms. And so as long as that belief system remains immutable, the slaughter in the United States will continue. But then, I'm far too naive to have any actual insight into the structure of the problem, doubly so being a dumb as rock Democrat.

[jwocky]

Well, I know some stories about crime in Canada as well. It's like in the Netherlands. It happens and it happens in numbers, but the media don't report it as much as in the US. And I really love those idealistic views, like Vincent posted them. Unfortunately, I know too much families who once had beloved ones with such idealistic ideas. I have seen too much crime scene photos with the remains of idealists in them, I have seen too many outlines that represented where the kids of those idealist were found. And, to make the point clear here, those images are not exclusively from the US.
Now, I wasn't in Malaysia for more than a decade. But in the US, people don't live in bunkers and they don't usually have a gun behind every window. That is a wrong picture that is fed by those who want to ban guns in a malignant attempt to paint every gun owner a cretin. Politics is about mud-slinging and unfortunately, the left has highly paid specialists for that (greetings Mr. Axelrod, how are you today?).
Another problem is the change of news on the way cross the Atlantic. For a not gun-related example ... it's already a few years, and it was summer. Summers here in the Midwest have some quite hot days. And out of the blue, I got a phone call from a friend in Germany. She was very anxious and totally riled up and wanted to know whether Diane and me are okay. I was totally surprised, why wouldn't we be okay? And she told me in Germany in the news, she saw how terrible hot it is and the A/Cs fail and people die like the flies. Okay, more surprise, I didn't know anything about that and I was sure, our A/C as undersized as it is, it worked. So, I asked her for more details of those news. What happened really was, tzhat in a retirement home the A/C, one of those big fat aggregates, failed. The fire fighters had brought in a mobile one, semi-truck-size (the biggest I ever saw and I guess, some people got a cold when it ran in arctic mode). It took some hours till the A/C technicians had the built-in one up an running again and after that, the fire fighters took the moster mobile A/C back to their barn. Nobody died, nobody had a heat stroke, and that someone got the cold from a too big A/C is only my personal guess.
When this news hit the East Coast papers, it was already a disaster in a retirement home in the Midwest.
When the news hit Europe, it was already a general heat disaster and all people around here were dying
So maybe, you want to take those extreme news with a grain of salt ... oh wait, one of the last news from the Midwest is that children die here because someone used some spray salt (you know for icey roads) in food. What actually happened is, two kids found one of those big chest full of road salt unlocked while playing and took some grains of salt and were, when the parents discovered it, brought to a hospital to check them out. So, better take no grain of salt, you can't predict what the media will make out of it. And thus, back to the subject at hand ... if someone would live here in a bunker, it would still be considered as a sign of some mental problems. Except for this crazy architect, I don't come on his name now, who refurbished an abandoned Minuteman bunker as architectural show-piece. Well, or maybe not.

See, here are some things "from the front lines". People think often, for example serial killers are a specific American problem. It isn't. Statistically the main factor determining is simply population size.
The US, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, China, Australia and whatever other country you pick has about the same number of serial killers per capita. Weapons or no weapons, Christian, Buddhist or Muslim. It doesn't really matter, it's mostly a function of population size. However, the way, media and societies deal with it are differently. Her in the US you read about every case in the news. In Europe, the names of the killers and what they did is usually protected. It is harder to get information and often, there is no press article at all allowed to write about a case or they have to be very careful. Freedom of press makes a difference, right? So usually, people in European countries live in that "certainty", their countries are safe from that problem. And in most cases, they are. Serial killers are also here in the US quite rare, only due to the population size, rare means still a considerable number of perpetrators and victims.
Now, here is another thing, that maybe surprises you, but burglaries in general are also a function of population size and certain economical parameters. Which means, in comparison between countries with approximately the same economic conditions, it boils down to population size. And the number of violent burglars and home invaders (as two subgroups of burglaries in general) are basically functions of the same parameters. But see, there is a difference nevertheless. In the US a bloody home invasion like the Petit case some years ago make the national news on the front page. In European countries it would be mostly page three and a short notice.
The same can be said for domestic violence.
The differences that really make the numbers are in the ways, how police deals with those crimes. The European police authorities are often a lot faster on the scene. Europe has fewer remote areas for body dumps and thus, if someone tries, he is faster detected. Most European police agencies have, despite their official claims there is no such thing as offender profiling, some of the top profilers in the world on speed dial. And, that is a factor that can hardly overestimated, they leanred how to use the public. While an FBI spokesperson maybe say "I am not at liberty to discuss details ... we have promising leads ..." and more of those empty word bubbles, European agencies either say nothing or they hit with details like "Who saw a male, between 35 and 45 years old at the subway station xxx around the time of xx:xx and saw in which direction he went." They often don't even tell you why they look for this guy, but they get still hints. Because the public has millions of eyes. The funny thing is, there have been cases in the US which were handled the same way and with the same results. After Philadelphia PD went public, they just needed nine days to get the Philadelphia Corpse Collector, Harrison Graham. That beats even the PD in Mannheim, who needed 17 days to catch their man. Too short for the media to even give him a nickname. So, nine days is short, right? Well, it is not the record. Robert Ressler and the Sacramento PD needed three days after they went public, to catch the Sacramento Vampire, Richard Trenton Chase.
However, nowadays it's all secrecy, all about "protecting their investigation" in the US. So the unsubs are not apprehended and kill happily along while others already start their career. And the longer the average career time of serial killers is, the more you have active at any given time and the more, the number of victims in total climbs. So, bottom line, Europe has less serial killer victims per capita because you have smaller countries and smarter police agencies (take that as an average, there are always exceptions from the rule. At this times, greetings to Belgium).

Now, I skipped one danger usually included in this mess: Terrorism. And, oh surprise, mathematically, the number of potential terrorists is the sum of functions over the size of certain risk groups. Not the population size. I know, it is politically incorrect to mention it, but the more white rural militia men you have in a population, the more the probability increases to get an attack from that side of the spectrum. The more Muslims you have in a country, the higher the probability some of them get radicalized to the point of actually acting as terrorists. The more treehuggers you have, the higher the probability to have some eco-terrorists becoming active and so on and so on. The availability of inhibition-suppressing chemicals (aka drugs, alcohol) participates in lowering the threshold (not only for terrorists by the way, also sex-killers) which is maybe the reason for the unusual high number of garden variety strangler-rape victims in the Netherlands, but there are no thorough enough studies in the Netherlands yet.
But back to terrorists. Lukcy for the Dutch, most fo those wannabe terrorists are quite inept on the technical level. So, they had one terrorist style assassination and now the people think, it's quite safe there. They never hear about plots that were stopped early or didn't work out. It is a cheating and false impression of safety.

Now, to make the point clear here. Guns or no guns will not really contribute to the solution of all those problems. Even if a registered gun owner shoots a terrorist before he can blow people up, it would prove only, that he had to face a guy who shouldn't have been there in the first place. The point to solve those problems is long before you see black clad guys with suicide vests running wild in your streets. But as of yet, all police agencies failed in pre-emptive measures.

So, if you want really to discuss about gun bans or not, about self-defence or not, please, at least consider reality as a base of this discussion, not what you just got spoon-fed by a limited choice of media outlets with their own political agendas.

[jwocky]

And since SkyBoat and me posted parallel, let me also make clear, I didn't chose the title of this thread.

[jwocky]

ON a second thought, SkyBoat ... aside of pointing out, that the gun industry produces revenue and jobs, I found very little in your post that fits the facts, whether it's your buzzline about "culture of killing" nor you ideas about weapons in other countries. So my first impulse was, to take your post apart, step by step. But then, we had this dance a few times before and I doubt, it wouldn't be any different this time. So, instead, I drink another coffee and let your post stand there as a glowing example for another generic liberal posting misinformation in a way so clumsy even a school child can see what is wrong there.

[Lydiot]

let your post stand there as a glowing example for another generic liberal posting misinformation in a way so clumsy even a school child can see what is wrong there.

Wow. Sounds almost like you're saying something really bad about the content of the post. And calling it childish too. Or the author, which is in line with the accusation of naivite. I guess it is appropriate after all.

[KL-666]

Wow, America is deeply divided over such issue as guns. Such deep division may deliver some very nasty effects when some people go berserk over it. Republicans and Democrats really need to learn again to talk with each other and find some common ground, before it goes too far.

In the meantime Jwocky can come up with as many serial killers and terrorists he likes, but it can not raise my state of fear. I do not have a gene for more fear. All those genes went to the conservatives. Nice fun fact in the link (there are more of such studies done):

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201104/conservatives-big-fear-brain-study-finds

Another fun fact is that the dutch conservative party calls itself liberal of all things.

Kind regards, Vincent

[Lydiot]

Vincent,

I think people in general - not you it seems - just like to make things into binary concepts: Either you're a conservative, or you're a liberal. European politics and US politics are quite different in that respect, and was even more different a few decades ago.

[jwocky]

See, here is my problem. Personally, I am quite fear resitant (which brought me occasionally in trouble, I know, I know), but I have seen too much. Yes, you can do funny links to psychology today and yes, I actually enjoy such little ironiws of nature probably as much as anybody else. Now, I could of course counter, what have liberals if they don't have such an overdeveloped fear center in the brain sizewise ... the answer would be nothing ... but that is all off the point.
The point why I hate this gun debate is, it blocks the view at the real problems and if people would go through the pains to read posts to the end, they would know that (I pointed it out already two times and do now for the third time):
Whether John Smith has a gun or not will not change anything in the number of terrorist attacks, now will it change the number of victims killed by serial killers, spree shooters or violent burglars in general. The gun in the house is merely the last option after a lot of things went already wrong. Alas, a lot of those things go wrong, every day and everywhere and I would rather like to discuss options how to solve that problem than being jumped for being a conservative by someone who considers himself educated and informed but still got a number of things wrong because of lack of detailed knowledge (and this didn't go your way Vincent).
On a very general level, I can only repeat my wish, that God, Fate or whatever you all believe in, protects your naivity, and honestly, I mean it. And it is not to denigrate anybody, it is not to tell anybody he is stupid, it is a honest wish. Because once you did because you saw too much, you can't make things unseen. So lets be honest here, it is enough that some hard boiled mentally congested bastard assholes like me and a lot like me are around to clean up the mess when the "we are all nice to each other" approach failed once more. You have no fear ... well, that is good man! I was the last weeks in permanent contact with profilers working still on Paris and San Bernadino. Talking about people who need days to get the smell of blood, ripped to pieces guts and blood out of their noses. So yes, I lost my illusions about "humanity" a long time ago. See, one gun at the right time in the right time could have reduced the number of dead and injured in that concert hall significantly. That's simple math. And still, it isn't the point. The point is, where did those terrorists come from, what drove them, how can we detect them before they strike? But, there is the rub ... we can't even talk about that ... because then people paint me as the bad conservative and all they ever want is to talk gun bans and they don't want to hear about the nastier realities of life ... because if they let that in, they will have fear. And all too often, even someone like me don't dare to tell them the whole truth because that would be ... lets just call it "not nice". And so, when I say again, God or whoever, may keep your naivety, take it as an offer, take it as a gift, because that's the way you have to understand it. Alas, the moment, you can really appreciate it, you lost it already.