Van Dam

[edew]

Look folks, it's not as though I'm the only person on the planet who has never had a close one die. Both parents have died. All grandparents have died. I had a cousin die after lingering in a vegetative state for about 14 years (and that occurred at the prime of his life, just after college). I've had friends and acquaintances die in auto accidents, alcohol poisoning, being gunned down, and suicides (being a math grad students -- and in Philly gets you a couple of those latter ones easily).

Death happens. Because it happens, I don't ***** and moan about it. It's a certainty. In the realm of all possible outcomes, death has probability 1. I think that's one of the very few future outcomes with such a secure probability evaluation. Maybe because of that, my views of death (and I'm quite sure that this view is not shared by many, if any) are quite nonchalant.

As I have analogized before. Psychos like Westerfield (well, I don't know how psychotic he is, so say, Stayner or Davis) are just aberrations in life. It's like a tornado ripping through a town. Boom, a life or two is (are) taken away.

You do things to prevent it in the future, so you build more secure buildings. You don't live in mobile homes . You don't drive without a seatbelt on, and so on. They can only minimize the effect.

But hey, we don't go about trying to scream and yell a tornados, try to hang an earthquake slowly, or fry an apartment fire. We just deal with it in a rational way: assess the damage, clean it up, make reparations if possible, and determine how to prevent it from occurring again.

Why do we make an exception when the killer is another human being? Why do some of us have this urge to throttle the guy? We don't throttle (or even have that urge) when the killer is a tornado or an earthquake. What's the rationale? The outcome is the same: someone is dead. And even more amazingly, people die all the time. They all do, one day or another.

Why the difference?

[epeefencer74]

Originally posted by edew

Why do we make an exception when the killer is another human being? Why do some of us have this urge to throttle the guy? We don't throttle (or even have that urge) when the killer is a tornado or an earthquake. What's the rationale? The outcome is the same: someone is dead. And even more amazingly, people die all the time. They all do, one day or another.

Why the difference?

IMHO, the difference is that very fact that they are human. A creature with choice and free will. They in fact chose to commit those acts and thus society has a responsibilty to effect punisment. I do not advocate the death penalty, however some reparation must be made to society for the damge they have caused. The natural disasters you mentioned are just that natural. They have no will, no choice, they occur because the enviromental conditions and physics dictate that they should and must occur.

Yes we all die eventually and you are correct in that it is the one surety in life. But that does not mean that those who cause the wrongful death of others in accordance with the rules of the society that they live in should not be punished. If they were let off, that means those rules are rendered null and void, then there would be no society to speak off.

[edew]

Originally posted by HilandDoug
Eric, you're slipping there.

"He made just how many people suffer? Three, I'd say. How about some perspective?"

How's this for perspective: You are forgetting about 2 grandmothers and 2 grandfathers who can no longer claim that title. You are forgetting about uncles and aunts who aren't uncles and aunts anymore. The parents of this little girl will carry the memory of the BRUTAL RAPE AND MURDER of their child for the rest of their life. Could YOU deal with that as cavalierly as you've written that statement? What about the neighbors of the killer, who's parents might have left their child with him unsupervised for any length of time and wonder if anything happened that has permanently scarred their child? Childhood friends of the victim who now cannot look at any man over 25 with facial hair and not want to run screaming from him in fear that they are the next rape and murder victims? Who cannot sleep because of constant nightmares? Only three, you say? Remarkably short sighted.

Yeah, let's include the fellow students in her class, all of San Diego, heck all of California. The number, really: one. Her. Callous? No, just realistic.

...
No one in the cigarette industry ever put a gun to anyone's head and said, "Smoke this or I shoot." No one in the cigarette industry ever kidnapped anyone from the safety of their home, stuffed a carton of cigarettes in their mouth, lit said carton, and dumped the nicotine-stained body in the middle of a desert road....Using this logic, the maker of the kitchen knife bears responsibility for the death of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson because OJ chose to use a knife to kill them.

OJ didn't use the knife in its intended way. The knife manufacturer is blameless for unintended use.

As for the cigarette manufacturers, I am surprised that you say what you did. The cig manufacturers didn't have to put a gun to your head. They played with your mind, then had you put a gun to your head. Then, they obfuscate and "don't recall" or fabricate tests to say they're completely innocent capitalists. Who's more devilish and heinous, a Westerfield killer you can see straight in the eyes, or some shifty lawyer dude who washes his hands of his dirty deed by saying, "Oops, not my fault. I just sell them, I have no idea that they're bad." What a crock. They don't spend $2Billion a year in world-wide advertising to say, "hey, we're not trying to influence people to use this product."

"How about those greedy little chumps from WorldCom, stealing bundles of money, on the backs of the stockholders and employees. Those employees are now suffering. Any chance Ebbers and Sullivan et al., will get the chair, for your entertainment?"

Anyone investing in the stock market is told ahead of time that nothing is guaranteed, investments involve risk, and that past performance is no guarantee of future results. ...If you were a WorldCom employee and put all your retirement money in WorldCom stock, suck up your pride, look yourself in the mirror, and take responsibility for your actions rather than trying to point a finger at your boss, who is definately guilty of a crime, but not the crime of putting all YOUR eggs in the same basket. That's YOUR fault (hypothetically speaking, of course), and you should admit it.

Look, I understand the uncertainty inherent in stocks. But, the uncertainty is based on the uncertainties in delivering the product, the acceptance by the market, the ability for the leadership to move in a changing economic environment. But to BS through a wholesale robbery of the company, that's not the uncertainty we expect.

In a post above, I say that death is inevitable. It has probability 1. However, during your life, being bilked out of your hard-earned money is not inevitable. And after the perpetrators are caught, you'd expect a quick reparation for your loss, considering how easy it is to tally up the losses. But when something like a WorldCom happens, you still have to live your life after that. You suffer as in really suffering. You did your darnedest and someone played you for a fool. You get nada for reparations. The guy gets 20 months (if that much) and returns to his $20 million mansion in Florida. You still suffer because you have to work harder and trust less.

Van Dam's parents are no longer suffering. Not in any real sense of suffering. Oh, they certainly suffered for a while. Grief is natural. But that chapter is closed. A person (or a family) who is burned by a WorldCom don't get to close that chapter. Their money gone means they have creditors they can't pay. They have expenses they can't meet. Those creditors and such don't "suffer" and so the person or family goes on a continued downward spiral. No, their chapter is just beginning.

...

Please tell me that the life of one arbitrary little girl every year is not "virtually meaningless." ...

I have a stepdaughter, niece and nephew, as well as a stepson and several cousins' worth of their sons and daughters (what are they called, niece once-removed or something?). Maybe you're right: I have no progeny of my own (that I know of ), nor do I intend to. My reasons are more mundane that the belief that this world is full of killers.

And I do mean that her death is statistically irrelevant. There are about 115 cases (child abductions) every year. Most, not all, end in death. If I have to prioritize safety for my kids, my neighbors' kids, my nieces and nephews, preventing such incidences is way down there next to cholera or yellow fever.

You have to look at this in a cold, number-driven way. Being emotional doesn't bring back a Van Dam, and won't prevent another one. Not if that 115 number keeps cropping up. (And, really, we should see a gradual increase in the absolute number, although a sharp decrease in per capita ratios.) Being savage and barbaric in our thoughts won't change that number. It's so low that virtually no effective policing can drop that number down. I believe that about 5000 people die by lightning every year (in the US). About 6000 by drowning. About 20K by gun-fire, about 40K in auto accidents. Then, we go to the big ones: cancer at around 500K, heart disease at around 1.5M.

As a society (globally, too), we are better off than ever before, despite the sad admonishments of 135711. Most killers like contagious diseases, natural disasters, and war have pretty much been contained (although given the relative world peace we've had for the last few decades, I'm guessing we're due for another one). It's nice, I guess, that we're worrying about such irrelevant things like a Westerfield or a Stayner. Fifty years ago, maybe 100, one in four children don't live past the age of five. Malnutrition and hygiene were the main culprits. We stopped those pretty much now.

How did we overcome those problems? With rational thought and a cold-calculating program. We didn't go about it with emotion and seething savagery. Still, it's not perfect. I believe the ratio now is around one in twenty births don't live past five.

And lastly, I have no affinity for people like Stayner or Westerfield. Lock them up if you can't see some creative way to prevent their future intolerable acts. I am just stunned by your (and others) brutal desires to not just remove them from among the living, but in such vicious and sadistic means.

I don't want to serve up little girls to them. That's the emotional, irrational ways no different that your "kill them slowly so they can suffer more" irrational rants. It would be nice to do something to alleviate such pathological desires from these people. Would legalizing brothels that offer simulated S/M acts (under supervision, of course) give these weirdos an outlet for their sick desires? Hey, we have shooting ranges where people can blow away effigies of humans. Let's them let off some steam (so they don't do it in the post office or something). And no, I'm not claiming that gun-users are potential killers. But even inquartata will agree that killers are predominantly gun-users (at the time of the killing).

It took a while to advocate and teach the germ theory. It took a while to explain the negative effects of cigarettes and driving without seat belts (and some people still don't listen). If you think child abduction-rape-murder is a social ill (which I don't think it is), then provide a social solution to mitigate it. Can't completely stop it, but can certainly mitigate it. Maybe from 115 acts per year to 75 or 25.

Where's the "how do we prevent this in the future" part of the thought? Mostly drowned out by the noise of "kill these M-F SOBs!"

Oh, and I am amazed at your vivid imaginations.

[Inquartata]

Thanks, Philistine.

I disregard the figures from the advocacy sites---I saw one mischaracterization of the Duke findings in the second link right off the bat.

I just read the conclusions of the Duke study, the last four pages or so, but even there a couple of things made me uneasy---omission of capital costs, for instance, in calculating imprisonment figures, and the fact that I didn't see any calculation of costs of appeals for noncapital cases: it seems that it is assumed that a life sentence, for example, is never appealed, while a capital case always is, and this is clearly not the case. However, maybe that is factored in and it just wasn't mentioned in the conclusion. I will have to find the time to read the whole study, tiny Acrobat Reader lettering and all, I guess.

Hah, just found the enlarge-text button!

[epeemike81]

Originally posted by Inquartata:

Posit three countries which, unlike the US, have very strict gun control. ... In fact, their homicide rates are between 100% and 150% higher than that of the US. The countries exist: Russia, Taiwan and South Africa.

Again, you are comparing countries with DIFFERENT Socio-economic backgrounds. try to find two similar countries, like UK and the US, and compare them. guess which one has lower crime rate.

After gun control, their rates began to increase faster than in the US.

If this is true, you should be able to produce the numbers. if you recall, that is exactly the numbers I requested: a comparison of the UK and US Rate of Change of crime levels.

I do not claim that gun control CAUSED crime to go up, but there is some factor at work in the rise that is not apparent---gun control could scarcely have caused lower crime before it existed.

True, which is why I am looking for the rates of change.

Further, the incidence of homicide in other countries such as the UK is also much lower in all categories. It rather stretches credulity to claim that gun control reduces homicides with other weapons, does it not?

Yes it would be wrong to claim that, but reducing gun related murders would be enough. It is my contention that many murders in the US would turn into attempted murders or assaults with gun control. It is much more difficult to use other weapons, and the victim is more likely to survive.

Much less that it reduces arson, burglarly, strongarm robbery, kidnapping, and so on. Yet these countries also have lower rates of those crimes, which are not even vestigially gun related...

true, which implies that we should pick up more of their policies than just gun control.

This is a passage from a March 2000 article from Salon.com:

" In 1990, the murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate in the US was 9.3 per 100,000 people, and firearms were used in about 2/3 of these killings. Even if we had somehow gotten rid not only of handguns but of all guns, and even if, improbably, none of the killers who used guns would have substituted some other weapon, we still would have been left with 3.1 murders for every 100,000 people---higher than the homicide rate in Canada ( 2.1 per 100,000 ), Sweden ( 1.4 ) or Japan (0.5 ). Obviously, something is going on here other than access to guns."

True, gun control would not completely solve our crime problem, but if all it would do is to reduce the gun related crimes by 25-50%, I would CERTAINLY settle for that. Just because we have other problems is NOT a reason to ignore this one.

Are we to believe that the mere existence of guns in a country causes more criminals of every sort to arise?

No, we are to believe that existence of guns raises the number of gun related deaths, which as YOU pointed out is the majority of murders/manslaughters in this country, and are thus involved in many of the more violent crimes. we are thus to believe that by removing guns from the equation, it would prevent many, though not nearly all, of these crimes, though it would have little to no effect on the rates of theft, pickpockets, etc.

The premise is that, for instance, the Sullivan law in New York is ineffective because New Yorkers need only take a leisurely drive across the state line and buy a gun in a more permissive jurisdiction, and take it back. Or buy one from someone else who does.

So, where are the guns behind the increases in gun crime in the UK coming from? The neighboring state of the North Sea? The nearby country of the Atlantic Ocean? France, which also has strict gun control?

As you have noted, there ARE a lower percentage of gun crimes in the UK. here, most murders are gun related. there, few are. will nationwide gun control fully eliminate gun crime? of course not! will it severely curtail it? YES.

You've lost me. If gun control works, it should have made New York a low-crime city, yes?

first of all, see straw-buying. second of all, NYC DOES have a lower crime rate now than it has in decades. is it still worse than Phoenix? of course. that has nothing to do with gun control, but rather with the fact that it always HAS been worse than Phoenix. Again, compare similar cities.

Conversely, the lack of gun control should make Dallas a HIGH crime city, according to your initial argument above: we "would expect crime rates to be lower in societies with gun control".

First of all, though slightly flawed, my initial argument is not applicable to this case, since Dallas and NYC are NOT societies unto themselves, but rather part of America. new statement: we "would expect crime rates to be lower in societies with gun control, assuming similar socio-economic background."

So if New York had high crime BEFORE it had gun control, and still has it now, gun control helped...how?

Again, I have stated that GC is a futile effort for a city to undertake and must be taken at AT LEAST the state level, and probably the Federal level. Second of all, it had highER crime before gun control.

If Dallas had low crime before, and it's still low without gun control, gun control is needed...why?

Its not needed, within those individual cities, which is why it is an issue which has not come to the fore there. As I said before, most large cities with gun control have it as a reaction to, not a prevention of, high crime rates.

In any event---which cities ( one with gun control, one without ) would you suggest constitute a fair comparison? I'll try to find that data, too.

again, I believe that we must speak on a nation by nation level, due to bleedover effects.

Do you mean vs. the US' crime rate? I'm not sure how comparing England to the world helps, inasmuch as the world contains countries with and without gun control, and every point in between---an average would be useless from that standpoint.

Well, both statistics would be useful. the above would tell whether England has been doing a better or worse job of retarding crime than the world, while the other would show the same v. the US. NOTE: On those crime rate v. time line graphs, we are not interested in the level of crime (i.e. height of the line) but rather in the rate of change of crime rates (i.e. the slope of the line), and even then, any drastic shifts in slope should have attention given to try to determine the cause. It is probably a more complex analysis than you want to do here.

Yes, exactly, alas. I am by no means arguing that England would be a better place with widespread gun ownership, nor am I suggesting that it's a more dangerous place to live than the US. Clearly that's not so.

I might go so far as to say that gun control is one of the factors keeping viloent crimes rates low in certain countries. But only one of the factors, I think, and every country is a different mix.

hey, look! we agree on something! Of COURSE its not the ONLY factor, speaking in such global terms is foolish. It is, however, a significant factor, and I don't see a drawback to it. thus, its worth doing.

I doubt that grafting England's gun control by itself onto American society would make US crime rates any lower, any more than putting military weapons into every home in America a la Switzerland would make it safer.

here's where I disagree. It would, at the very least, lower the number of successful murders, due to ease of use of a gun.

You can't make Coke by putting one ingredient---caramel coloring, say---into water. You need all the ingredients, and in the right proportions. And we don't even know what all the ingredients are...

true, but you gotta start somewhere.

I didn't say they weren't germane. I merely asserted that from a cursory examination of them gun control didn't seem to be quelling crime in the three nations I cited, in every one of which it was rising rapidly. Which was the only premise I was trying to disprove.

ah! so you were, as usual, responding to a point I didn't make. I only noted that it CONTRIBUTES to retarding crime. if sufficient other factors exist, clearly crime can still go up.

if gun control can be forwarded as a reason for lowering crime in a country, it can be shown that that is not the case by either showing that crime is NOT lowered, or that other countries can achieve the same result without gun control...

but, if gun control can be forwarded as a FACTOR in lowering crime in a country, showing that crime is NOT lowered or that other countries lower crime without gun control is necessary but NOT sufficient to disprove the original assumption.

That's what the statistics were showing: increases ( upward rate of change ) ... with decreases ( downward rate of change ) in the US.

Increase != upward rate of change
Increase = upward change.
again: rate of change is the SLOPE of the graph. what you gave me was f(x). what I am looking for is df/dx.

In addition, as for your list of warlords we didn't create: Farrah Adid we did back. Grenada (a Cuban ally) can be filed under meddling in other countries internal politics. you are correct that we didn't back Milosevic. we actually stayed neutral in that one (after all, there weren't natural resources at stake, and neither side was socialist. why get involved over a "niggling detail" like human rights?

sorry for the late posting.

Craig, this character limit is rather annoying.... is it new?

-m

[135711]

[Inquartata]

I wrote this lengthy reply, only to be informed that it was too long by some 4,000 characters. I tried to make two posts of it, but instead lost the whole thing!

WTF????

I am NOT going to do it all over again.

This limit is BS. Expect no more substantive arguments from me on any subject when I can expect to have all my labor put to naught. Period.

Sorry, Mike. I would have loved to continue this. But I will NOT waste THREE HOURS of my time and ONLY AFTER THE FACT be told to "reduce your words". Grrrr!

[edew]

Originally posted by Inquartata
I wrote this lengthy reply, only to be informed that it was too long by some 4,000 characters. I tried to make two posts of it, but instead lost the whole thing!

WTF????

I am NOT going to do it all over again.

This limit is BS. Expect no more substantive arguments from me on any subject when I can expect to have all my labor put to naught. Period.

Sorry, Mike. I would have loved to continue this. But I will NOT waste THREE HOURS of my time and ONLY AFTER THE FACT be told to "reduce your words". Grrrr!

I believe you can recover your text if you just hit the back button (to get to your posting text).

I got hit with that, too. But I was just 310 over, so I made some minor changes. I, too, think the limit is arbitrary and too brief. 10,000 characters is not that many characters. Maybe a limit on the number of words.

If so, make the quoting easier to do. For example, instead of showing ALL posts to the thread below the entry text field, just show the post that the person is quoting from, and then let the writer pick and choose the portion of the text. A lot of the other person's post is not germane to the reply I have in mind (not that it's drivel, just not germane), and I'd snip it if it was easy to do. Right now, a quote takes the whole post in its entirety.

[edew]

On a related thread, has anyone seen "One-Hour Photo"? Robin Williams' character, Sy, certainly gave me the creepozoids. I couldn't help fidget throughout the whole movie. And, his character is probably very much resembling your typical Stayner or Westerfield.

Still, on my way home, I couldn't stop imagining the outtakes from the movie when Robin Williams would make some off-the-wall wisecrack that he's wont to do. Imagine that scene in the hotel room. She's on top of the guy, and he's yelling at her to do nasty things, and then he'll throw in some oddball wisecrack (as he always does, he's well known for doing that on the set), and everyone would bust up laughing.

I wish there would be an outtakes feature from the making of the movie. That would be just hilarious.

[Inquartata]

I already waste a lot of time painstakingly trimming out the parts of quotes that I'm not addressing, and bracketing them with the proper HTML tags....and I daresay every [quote][b] accounts for another ten characters toward that pesky limit. Gah! It gets you coming or going.

[epeemike81]

Originally posted by Inquartata
I wrote this lengthy reply, only to be informed that it was too long by some 4,000 characters. I tried to make two posts of it, but instead lost the whole thing!

WTF????

I am NOT going to do it all over again.

This limit is BS. Expect no more substantive arguments from me on any subject when I can expect to have all my labor put to naught. Period.

Sorry, Mike. I would have loved to continue this. But I will NOT waste THREE HOURS of my time and ONLY AFTER THE FACT be told to "reduce your words". Grrrr!

That's your story and you're sticking to it, huh?

Well, I suppose if I couldn't come up with a reply, I would come up with a lame excuse too.

Craig, there is a limit on smilies too??????????

WTF!

-m

[epeemike81]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Inquartata
[B]I daresay every

accounts for another ten characters toward that pesky limit. Gah! It gets you coming or going.

Well, sure, if you want your ENTIRE message to be quotes.... if you want to to end the codes as well, that'll cost you another 12 characters.

-m

[edew]

Originally posted by epeemike81
Well, sure, if you want your ENTIRE message to be quotes.... if you want to to end the codes as well, that'll cost you another 12 characters.

-m

Well, I think the forum moderator ought to be hanged. And slowly, while someone (maybe HilandDoug, as that seems to be his interest) disembowels him with a box-cutter knife.

Or maybe we can get a Pakistani tribal court to decide in our favor to gang-rape ShyHeidi for her impudence by putting such frivolous constraints to our freedoms.

Where's Dubya "Hangin's too good" Bush when ya need 'em?

[Inquartata]

Originally posted by epeemike81
Well, sure, if you want your ENTIRE message to be quotes.... if you want to to end the codes as well, that'll cost you another 12 characters.

-m

Exactly ( smartyknickers! ).

I might essay another reply if Craig manages to fix the, er, difficulty.

I will say this: the search for a precise statistic is very vexing! I posted what I could find, but it seems that for instance there are large disparities between how crime is defined in the UK vs the US. The website of the British Home Office Bureau of Justice Statistics, for instance, yielded a long, verbiage-dense report with stats scattered throughout but in a very diffuse way and not a useful order, together with much hedging and self-exculpatory remarks ( ie every decrease in a type of crime was accompanied by the statement that it was "statistically significant" while every increase was either "not statistically significant" or else qualified with comments such as "should not be compared to previous year's figures due to changes in the reporting method" or "largely attributable to improvements in police recording techniques" and other such blatherskite ). Moreover, they use different time periods ( 2000/2001 to 2001/2002 instead of 2000 to 2001, etc ). And there is a category called "woundings" (?) that the US doesn't seem to measure...

Our statistics aren't organized or reported much better, either. Both the CDC and the FBI sites are morasses of information about everything BUT what I was looking for. Finding individual numbers lending themselves to direct comparisons was like looking for needles in a haystack ( or maybe I just didn't know what to look for ).

I begin to wonder if this isn't intentional obfuscation on the part of government bureaucracies, designed to let them make whatever claims suit them at the moment---"Crime is down! Look what a great job we're doing!" or "Crime is up! We need more funding/manpower/power/laws!"

Lying with statistics? How about deluging with statistics...other than the ones you want!

A lot of the numbers I have are from old newspaper clippings and magazine article tearsheets and the like ( I am a packrat for papers ). These give figures from past years, which are no longer to be found in their original form from their original sources...and second-hand reports by journalists are not the best choice. I ended up giving US stats from 1998, but the earliest I could find from the UK were for 2000...and the CDC gives only "preliminary" numbers for 2000. ( There was one British number for 1998, from a "London Times" article via a US paper---third hand, in other words---that was hard to compare to individual numbers for various crimes in the US. )

Anyway, like I said, I may try writing it all up again next week---but IF I do it will be on Word and then cut and pasted here henceforth, believe me! ( I am going to desist for now, I am beginning to seethe again just remembering last night's debacle... )

[Philistine]

Originally posted by Inquartata
{snip}

I will say this: the search for a precise statistic is very vexing! I posted what I could find, but it seems that for instance there are large disparities between how crime is defined in the UK vs the US.
{snip}

Here's a website prepared by the Canadian Firearms Center indicating the difference between Canadian and U.S. Firearms homicides and other crimes. It seems that Canada might be a better comparison for the US than the UK.

Firearms Crimes--Canada vs. U.S.

For a very good nonpartisan clearinghouse of links to sites covering the gamut of gun contro/gun rights--from statistics to caselaw, I like the University of Pittsburgh School of Law's site:

Gun Laws, Gun Control & Gun Rights

--Philistine

[135711]

[epeemike81]

Originally posted by 135711
gentlemen, gentlemen, rhetoric, rhetoric, to be or not to be that is the question, but here something that may help you to make a better informed decision. about 20 years ago, a person was set free in california [sorry california, but you guys have the very most of them!!] who had nearly murdered a young girl. she is alive today, and i saw her speak. she was found nearly dead at the side of a road, because she was somehow able to get away from him and started walking down a road until she dropped. the people that found her, were saints. they brought her to a hospital and she sort of recovered, but she doesn't have her arms. now men, if it were you, and as fencers, what would you have done with him?

I would have him imprisoned, as was the POINT of this discussion. Mango, let me save you some time: there is not a story you can tell me which would convince me that we should grant our government the right to take the life of ANY citizen.

-m

[edew]

I think epeemike and I pretty much agree on this. In one of my earlier posts here, I offered to not go into the debate about gun control, and frankly, I think I should have kept out of it, because this thread is not a debate on gun control.

The point is, the government is not only NOT infalliable, it is highly falliable. And pernicious. And political. And lazy. And stupid. And ignorant. And emotional. And irrational. And operated by hundreds of people, each with his or her own little personal goals, none of which could really be described as the main goal of the government: to serve the public. Each little government worker is there to serve himself or herself. Make a name for himself or herself.

Look at the recent Florida case against the two boys who killed their father with a baseball bat. The prosecutor had the balls to put two different defendants on trial, two (almost) mutually exclusive defendants on trial. Why not round up the whole neighborhood and put each one up on trial? Just say, "Well, Mr. Finch there. We don't know what he was doing on the night of June 13th, but he lives two doors down...." and when Mrs Johnson comes on trial, it's "Well, Mrs Johnson has made it known in the neighborhood that she doesn't particularly fancy Mr. King (the victim). She's probably as guilty as anything."

When the courts actually allow a prosecutor to charge two separate defendants for the same crime (and not charge them as accomplices), what can we say about the falliability of the government?

Check off the qualifiers I listed above: lazy, stupid, political, ignorant, what else?

And you wish to let the government do your killing for you? Shame on all of us. In matters of law, the dictum, "that government which governs least, governs best" is indeed true.

Last year, soon after the 9/11 incident, we had a debate in this very forum about the utility of having air marshalls. Well, a recent USA Today article spoke about hundreds of air marshalls leaving because of the long work hours (sometimes, 16 hours straight as they board one flight after another), inconsequentialness of their work (just how many skyjacking have there been since 9/11/2001?), and total lack of skills at the security checkpoints. I guess their only credit, under my predictions, was that no one has been accidentally shot yet.

[Inquartata]

Philistine, thanks very much for those links...especially the first, as it also yields other links to sources.

Sigh, more reading...

[135711]