This is interesting
Submitted by oncidiumfan on Sun, 2013/01/20 - 13:24.
http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Nicaragua/United-States/Crime
Found while engaged in a handgun argument elsewhere with Tron Guy, Jay Maynard. Kids don't appear to kill kids here at the same rate that they do in the US. And the US has more reported rapes than the US (the accuracy of this stat depends on whether all rapes are reported).
This one is fun, too -- http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Costa-Rica/Nicaragua/Crime
Costa Rica wins on most counts but not on reported robberies or unpaid diplomatic parking fines. The stats are relatively old and the murder rates seem to be converging since.
Registration?
Oops... I apologize! The post below is supposed to be in response to KeyWestPirate and Billy Bob. Don't seem able to remove and/or move this one, though.
don't understand this registration thing. I just read through the entire White House's proposal, and I didn't see anything about registration. Here's exactly what the White House put down on paper:
http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2013/01/politics/obama-gun-control-pl...
Also, it looks like the guns that were banned from 1994-2004 are being used more often in crimes now than they were during the ban according to a survey of police departments. How reliable that is, I don't know, but most police I know are pro gun rights, for the most part. Also, it was mentioned in the document above -- and I remember this to be the case -- that gun manufacturers found a lot of loopholes in the assault rifle ban, which could explain why it didn't have that much of an effect.
Not to mention... if people who already had these guns were allowed to keep them, it would take a fairly substantial amount of time before you saw really statistically significant changes in how often these guns were being used in crimes.
All that said, I wouldn't proceed on gun control in the exact same way the Obama administration is, but I just don't see some sort of quiet conspiracy to grab everyone's guns here.
Also, imprisoning people is a lot more expensive than food stamps... like 20 times more expensive per year... so I'm not sure the "more jail time" idea is a great one financially. What's more, already super strict laws related to firearms used in commission of a felony and felon possession and use of firearms -- both federal and in many states -- don't seem to have had any sort of major effect. Just like the death penalty doesn't seem to work as a deterrent for murderers and long sentences don't seem to deter child molesters, etc.
bill clinton
told obama to take the heat off himself by letting Feinstein take the lead on repressive gun legislation. One of obama`s tricks was to pull out of the UN Small Arms Treaty talks just before the election so it wouldn`t be an election issue and then he restarted the talks the day after he was reelected.
"Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor
Also
Can you provide a source for what Bill Clinton said?
I did find this quote from Politico when Bill Clinton was asked about gun control and Obama by a reporter: "Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them."
And yes... Bill Clinton was such a horror, so anything he said must be part of some grand conspiracy. The country literally fell apart under his watch, everyone had their guns stolen, we turned into a social nation, and only God's Grace managed to stave off complete collapse. I remember when coservatives heralded the end of the world under his watch. Though, let's not mention he brought us such conservative policies as welfare reform and NAFTA (trust the markets!).
Can you provide a source ???
Sheesh - Are you joking?
RobertW you have a lot to learn about arguments with right wingnuts! They ARE the source and holder of all paranoiac knowledge!
You forgot to mention that liberal Willy was the only guy in recent history who taught the conservatives how to balance the budget.
The meta question is why do so many of the right wingers
...end up in Nicaragua, which isn't actually a right wing hotbed of much of anything even when the FSLN was a minority party from 1990 to 2006.
I find it funny that these guys are afraid blacks will do to them what the Klan and various Confederates (Fort Pillow) did to blacks, but hey.
Rebecca Brown
...
The timing is political gamesmanship, Billy Boy, there's no doubt about that. But the reason it happened is illustrated exactly by what you just said "gun grab." The UN treaty has nothing to do with domestic gun sales, rights, or policies. It's a treaty to regulate illicit gun trade.
What in the world does that have to do with US citizens' right to bear arms? Unless you're trading guns with the Russian mafia (for example) you don't have anything to worry about.
From the first reuters news article that everyone else used as a source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/07/us-arms-treaty-un-idUSBRE8A627...
"We seek a treaty that contributes to international security by fighting illicit arms trafficking and proliferation, protects the sovereign right of states to conduct legitimate arms trade, and meets the concerns that we have been articulating throughout," the official said.
"We will not accept any treaty that infringes on the constitutional rights of our citizens to bear arms," he said.
U.S. officials have acknowledged privately that the treaty under discussion would have no effect on domestic gun sales and ownership because it would apply only to exports.
It`s a battle in progress.
It`s a battle in progress. US civil rights groups have been participating to try to keep civilian arms out of the treaty. Prince Barack also knows he has to get the treaty through the Senate.
Nobody I know of is particularly bothered by controlling the flow of military arms, subject to the sovereign rights of nations. I`m talking about real military arms like machine guns, grenade launchers and up. But the tendency of any bureaucracy is to pass broad laws giving itself more powers, in this case over common handguns and rifles that have civilian as well as secondary military applications.
Case in point, if some army gives its officers Berreta 9mm pistols with 15 round magazines, that does not make it a military arm because it is the same gun used by police and civilians. There is nothing inherently military about this arm. This is even more-so the case with semi-auto carbines such as the AR15. They do not have a selector switch and cannot fire full auto. They were specifically designed this way for the civilian market and are not military arms even if they look like military arms to un-knowledgeable people or knowledgeable politicians trying to fool the news media (not hard) and the public (more difficult).
"Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor
Ah, yeah, you're talking to guys who don't get their news
...from reality-based sources.
Countries that have banned guns may also have saner citizens, too.
Rebecca Brown
reality based statistics
to follow?
"Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'sir' without adding, 'you're making a scene." -Homer J. Simpson
See my reply to KWP
The reality is that crime is down in the US even in the higher crime cities. Plenty of stats on that. I think the high peak was from teenaged boys hearing stories from returning vets about about raping killing people in Vietnam, and all that's aged once since. Or it's that the average age is older and older people do seem to age out of crime. Key West Pirate no longer smokes pot.
Rebecca Brown
I saw less ``killing and
I saw less ``killing and raping`` in Vietnam than is the norm in American ghettos, especially obama`s Chicago.
"Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor
So when and where did you live in Chicago?
I lived on on the 500 block of Riverside Drive for two years (in a neighborhood where the local subway stop was Broadway and 124th, which most people considered to be Harlem) and then on the 300 block of Mott Street when it was predominantly black and HIspanic (though it became whiter and more Chinese as time went by). Dates 1968 to 1975, and then back in NYC for several months in the late 70s (in time for one of the blackouts while again living on Riverside Drive in the 120s).
We had some guy in Philadelphia out and out lie about having a car and not being able to find a place to park it at the train station because of the community garden people. I assume that things that don't match my experience coming from people who I don't know are as suspect without some details.
(Very rarely were there more than one other person at the garden at any time I was there tending my own plot, and most of us were walking distance from the gardens and didn't drive to it).
Never heard of a massacre in Chicago like the one we know about in Vietnam.
Rebecca Brown
Look up the stats-- the
Look up the stats-- the murder rate in Chicago is an ongoing daily thing.
"Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor
Hmm..
I'm pretty sure killing in Vietnam was too....
I looked at the crime stats for both Philly and Chicago
The crime in Philly was actually a bit worse on the non-violent side, but as with many things, it's not evenly distributed in either city. The fantasy that the bad guys are going to come in to middle class homes and do several different crime specialties on people seems a bit weird. And when it's racially codes, a bit funny -- the fantasy isn't that queer hillbillies are going to break in, rob the wife, and rape the husband -- that's James Dickie's regionally specific bigotry showing in DELIVERANCE. Nor is it that a boy and girl team of burglars will get you. It's OMG, I would be able to kill black people if that happened (my own fantasy involves body parts and cleavers, but I'm not proud of it) because if I didn't, they'd rape my wife, castrate me, and rob the house, just like the Klan and the slavers used to do to uppity blacks.
The people who get killed in robberies are generally store owners or clerks in very bad neighborhoods, not average householders. The people who get raped are generally a whole other class of people, raped by a whole different sort of offender. And the people who have their houses burglarized generally weren't home. The cases where murders occurred in home invasions make the news; the average burglaries don't.
As for Vietnam, both sides were fairly nasty, but the South Koreans seemed to have been the brutal unjustified killing specialists. Wikipedia has details. Turks were also brought in to be particularly nasty.
A New Yorker article of several years back: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/23/050523fa_fact4 -- just how stupid all that was. I don't want military people making policy for all sorts of reasons. One of them is that they tend to see disagreement as insubordination and react more aggressively toward that, but I wish the military wasn't so terribly misused as it has been since the Korean War. The documentary with McNamara, THE FOG OF WAR, is also worth seeing in the context of Vietnam.
Just a war to get the round-eyes to go home, with some punishment of people believed to be collaborators (some NVA massacres, too). The commies just were better organized but if the country had had free elections when scheduled in the fifties, Ho would have won. So much for putting a puppet in power, then letting other people kill him because he wasn't a good enough puppet. The Soviets apparently did the same thing in Afghanistan, but the left government there had more staying power, more actual in Kabul legitimacy than the US puppets had in Saigon.
Rebecca Brown
which one?
or repost stats here:
What?
"Just like the death penalty doesn't seem to work as a deterrent for murderers"
Sure the hell does for the ones that get fried!!
I'm Very Much
in favor in getting a handle on the gun violence, and to do that we have to identify what the true nature of the violence is. I'm not sure that we will ever eliminate the splashy instances of Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, and Newtown; these were all perpetrated by mentally ill persons. I think that we could make good headway against the MAJORITY of gun homicides. Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, and Newtown really hurt, but they are far from the majority of gun homicides.
We have two extremes: Some who would like to see all guns banned, irregardless. The other extreme would like to have access to machine guns and grenade launchers.
Somewhere in the middle there has to be some measures that can be taken to help solve the problem. Closing background check loopholes would be a good start. Gun shows could have a booth that charged a modest fee for the check; the gun couldn't be delivered to the buyer without a background check chit. Private sales could go through a similar process: buyer provides a background check chit to the seller. Reasonable limitations on magazine size (but I think the recent New York 7 number might be too small; ten might be a fairer number). What if a potential victim is confronted with multiple perps ?
Anyone of fair mind has to acknowledge that the majority of gun homicides are committed by criminals, many of them repeat offenders. Perhaps life in prison is too extreme (and economically impractical) for a first gun crime, but certainly a second or third gun related offense should remove the perp permanently.
Turf wars eventually end.
The usual stupid pulling of a handgun that's available when arguing with the wife or husband or child will continue. That's most of the killings (and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the drug turf war killings weren't as stupid -- the gangs in Honduras are trying to get that sort of stupid shooting to stop).
These don't even make the news in places like NYC, and don't make big news unless there's something flashy about the killing, like the white guy killing his black girlfriend and claiming she was killed by black power people or something as ridiculous (his little helper squealed on him). Historically, that's what the majority of murders are -- someone went for the weapon in a hot moment. Transient things like fighting for liquor or drug turf generally sort themselves out -- zero killings now over liquor distribution but it's still being made illegally in the US. It's a mature illegal industry.
Long run, the kids in the drug trade now will want to get into legal businesses in the future -- and will be more law-abiding and pro-cop than most because they will come to appreciate having legitimate protection for what they've worked to earn.
Rebecca Brown
I Don't Know
anything about street crime and have always been fortunate enough to live where crime wasn't a problem. I've never been mugged or assaulted. You're right, I've never experienced this life or mingled with this person. I've commonly lived in places where it wasn't necessary to lock my door -and there are a lot of those places still left in the US. Even in the best neighborhoods there is still a small chance of being a crime victim, and a prudent person would take measures to protect himself: An alarm system, a barking dog (and there's a barking dog radar alarm on Amazon that doesn't have to be fed or walked, and doesn't shed); these might be as effective as a firearm in preventing the incident in the first place.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/connecticut_doctor_whose_family_eWPz3...
The closest I've been to the reality of crime was during the time I lived in Ft Lauderdale. Until "Stand Your Ground" was passed street robberies and carjackings were common. After the law passed, and law abiding citizens had some firm direction as to what was acceptable in terms of defending themselves, these crimes, and residential burglaries, decreased substantially. Prior to "Stand Your Ground" some liberal prosecutors would prosecute any self defense shooting. Shooters would be acquitted, but victimized again by the notoriety and cost of their defense. I really don't see the line as being that easily crossed by a reasonable person.
Stand Your Ground also precludes the nuisance suits by the perp's' families that attempt to extort a lottery win from the victim. This was also very common before Stand Your Ground.
I obtained a concealed weapon permit, but rarely carried the firearm. I just didn't feel the need .. .There was one stretch I would walk, from Sailor's Bend to a restaurant section of Lauderdale on the New River, and at night the firearm was an assurance. I would have had no hesitation in using it, and I would have used it early in the encounter, and would have emptied the weapon if I were robbed.
Florida's law insists that the firearm stay concealed, and casually brandishing the weapon to settle an argument (or for any other reason) can be a felony. The female sheriff's deputy who conducted my concealed weapon class was clear: Remove your weapon from concealment ONLY if you are certain you are going to use it; if you use it, shoot to kill (the "Should I shoot him in the leg?" must come up in every class).
I still believe that if handgun use during a crime were punished appropriately, handgun use would fall dramatically. It's not, and I believe the reasons are racially motivated. With 25% of black males already enjoying prison records -for whatever reason- this is seen as putting more behind bars. It would probably be the best thing to happen to the black community in the long run, even as the short term pain would be very real.
The reality is that most of the people don't face this
I also am suspicious about people feeling that having a gun gives them a right to walk in dangerous neighborhoods. I took cabs in those situations, even for distances I could have walked otherwise.
Handguns are rarely used in the common sorts of crime that make life miserable in cities. Neither of my burglaries were things that a handgun would have prevented. I think several of us have mentioned that you're wrong about handgun use in crimes not being punished more drastically than other forms of intimidation in the committing of street crime. The jury I was on was predominantly black and they put a black man in prison for life for being part of a robbery that ended in a murder. The actual shooter ended up dead when he pulled his gun on the cops who'd come to arrest him (most of the multiple guns against one shooter are cops against a guy who's shooting back at them which is why cops might prefer that the shooters have fewer, not more, bullets).
I knew a number of people who were mugged. The kid who asked me to give him a dollar bill for coin change was probably running one of the typical games -- get the mark to open his wallet and grab and run. This mark had about a dollar and change on her and was wondering why the kid was so nervous. Kid was just a kid doing a dumb kid thing. Other games are sticking your finger in the lady's back and telling her it's a handgun (my roommate wasn't buying it and ran). Mugging either involve threats or trickery and running faster than the victim.
Most of the people so threatened either ran (one guy tossed a New York Times in the faces of the people trying to mug him) or handed the money over. This may seem dreadful and awful and all that to you, but honestly, that's the advice police anywhere and the State Department here give to people who are confronted with someone who's trying to rob them.
I know one woman who shot the person who was holding her up in Texas -- and while she was crazy for other reasons, that hadn't actually helped her. Everyone who fantasizes about emptying a gun into a would-be robber hasn't been there.
For women and possibly for young gay guys, there's another rule -- do anything, including taking a bullet, to avoid being forced into a car. Whole different scenario is going down. Since you're a older guy, that's not part of your reality.
I recommend reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog on the Atlantic Monthly site for some insights into inner city black culture in Baltimore (he's also written a book about it).
Rebecca Brown
I Do Have
the the right to walk unperturbed anywhere I want. It might be really STUPID to walk in some neighborhoods, but to cede control of our country to black street gangs is to go the way of Iran, Iraq and Afganistan. Where does it end ? It ends when they are on your doorstep.
We need to take out streets back from the thugs.
My enjoyment of a warm Florida evening as I stroll along the river to a favorite restaurant should not be tempered with the thought that my wife might be raped, and I might be robbed and killed.
This is the US of A, and from you post , I suddenly realized why people don't want to give up their assault rifles. I have never had any fascination for the hardware, but I understand now that this is the way our country is going. It's not just an economic change, where slackers are equal to those who work for their money, it's about their right to "redistribute" my money at the point of a gun. We may very well need assault rifles before this is all over. Four more years is a long time, but maybe we'll get a break in 2014.
You friend who put his finger in the back of necks to simulate a gun would not last long in Florida; as he turned and ran with his money the Florida robbery victim has every right to empty his handgun into the perp's back, recover his money, and go on about his business.
Not so in the PRK; or New Yor,k, or many other liberal NE states. Your friend would be a "victim" ---in an odd twist of liberal logic. And the robbery victim would go to jail.
Not my friend -- my friend figured out it wasn't a handgun
And in East Falls, the street gangs were Irish. One of my former employers said of the Philadelphia problems, "The black kids will hurt you; the Gray's Ferry Irish will kill you."
Basically, there are no black thugs taking over our streets -- there are some black criminals in predominantly black neighborhoods, some white trash criminals in predominantly lower class white neighborhoods, and some integrated kid gangs in integrated neighborhoods (they've got a system -- knowing white racism, the black members of the gang distract the shop owners while the white gang members steal the stuff.
To cede control of the US to racists...yadayada. The whole country would have been much improved if Lee and the rest of the traitors had been hanged.
The guys who tried to take me off my bicycle were not black, by the way, and I have no idea what the race was of the guy who burglarized my house in Philadelphia (here he was Hispanic who denied that he had any indigenous blood in him at all or that his father was FSLN, but since his middle name was Lenin, I know he was lying about his dad). For that matter, two young Puerto Ricans caught a white would-be burglar in my Mott Street building before I moved in. They broke his arms. Again, white bad guy.
The one case, in SC, where I knew the details of a black on white rape attempt, the victim had been giving the retarded black kid water (he was on the garbage collection crew) and he probably thought that she was flirting with him. No, she didn't deserved to be attacked, but that one was a bit more confused than the "OMG, the n****** are out to rape the white women." I've worked in a black neighborhood in Charlotte, with black coworkers in Philadelphia, lived for a month in a majority black neighborhood in DC (doing research), and lived in that mixed neighborhood on Mott Street for five years. People are raped by people they know quite a lot more than they're raped by strangers grabbing them off the streets. My sister's would-be rapist was white. The guy who wouldn't leave me along at St. Marks Church was white. Some black guys sometimes would step toward white women, basically because they thought we were all racist bitches with sticks up our asses. When I didn't react to that, that stopped.
Rape has a five percent chance of creating a pregnancy -- if black on white rape was as common as white on black rape, more of us would be like them. And they have a whole lot of mulattos in their communities.
The bad guys are a minority in any community. All it takes is one kid (white in this case) with a drug problem to cause a major crime wave in whatever neighborhood he's targeted (Raleigh Court).
Crime is down in the US, so you're not tracking reality all that well. My brother thinks it's the ubiquity of cell phones; I think it's a range of factors.
My friend was a white woman banker who shared an apartment with me and another woman on Riverside and 124th Street. She had been mugged in the neighborhood once before and decided to ignore that finger in her back. The only time she was nearly run over by someone apparently trying to kill her at random, the guy in the car was white, and her black neighbors were concerned for her. The one time I thought I might be assaulted by someone for no reason other than his anger at the world involved a white guy. The only person in Manhattan who ever grabbed my tit was a white kid (who looked back over his shoulder utterly terrified as I chased him -- don't know what I'd have done if I'd caught him).
In that era, those of us living in Manhattan traded a certain security for the outstanding pleasures of the city. And the crime rate has gone down since.
The only cases of robbery ending up in killing that I ever heard about in NYC was a German Columbia University professor who had beaten up muggers earlier and thought he could do it again, and was wrong. I knew of two people who were beaten -- neither was about robbery and in one case, black women testified against the black kids who'd done the beating, and the person who was beaten was the step father of a mulatto boy who just got back from Iraq (beating was about two decades ago).
Robbery and getting killed -- most of the time, people get killed because they're in the wrong bed, metaphorically or physically. The first person I knew who was murdered (and only one of two) was killed by the estranged husband of the woman he was sleeping with. They were all white. The cop who shot him got off for "crime of passion," but lost his job.
And I was in Albany, NY, when the Atlanta murders were happening -- and everyone who'd never actually been in a Southern urban black neighborhood was so sure it was racially motivated -- and everyone who had knew that the killer was black, since white visitors to those neighborhoods can be counted on the fingers of one finger most of the time.
Florida has always been a very racist state, very strongly sexist, and very corrupt. Believing what Florida people tell you about things is like believing everything racists gringos tell you about Nicaraguans. Yes, there are bad guys of every race; no, they're not the majority of any race and you're far more likely to be hurt or killed by someone who is your race than by someone who isn't.
Bernard Goetz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Goetz)-- and a number of stories "I took the gun away from...." in NYC and Philadelphia. Life tends to be a bit different in reality than in paranoid racist fantasies. I was told in NYC, after the kids tried to take me off my bicycle when I was riding back from West Point, that the cops would accept that if I had had a gun and had used it. Have no idea whether it's true or not.
The whole Wilding thing in NYC turned out to be utterly a lie -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Jogger_case And we have seen the SC case where a woman murdered her children and tried to blame it on black men.
Our country is doing fine. Crime is down except in the fantasies of the racists.
Best way to reduce crime -- stop racism. And put the bankers who promoted toxic derivatives in prison.
From the article on Goetz: "After reaching an all-time peak in 1990, crime in New York City dropped dramatically through the rest of the 1990s.[68] As of 2006, New York City had statistically become one of the safest large cities in the U.S., with its crime rate being ranked 194th of the 210 American cities with populations over 100,000. New York City crime rates in the years 2000–2005 were comparable to those of the early 1960s."
http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/neighborhoods/crime-rates/top100dangero... I think America's violence is due to the residual legacies of being able to beat a living out of other human beings. Florida doesn't appear from that list to be all that safe.
Safest cities for a comparison: http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/neighborhoods/crime-rates/top100safest/ A high percentage of them are in Massachusetts. Second safest city in the US is one quarter Hispanic and in New Jersey. Safest is in Massachusetts.
Rebecca Brown
Hmm...
I think leaping to "this is the way our country is going" based on Rebecca's comments is an awfully big stretch. Violent crime has been trending downward for quite a long time, and property crimes are far off their historical highs.
Also, two interesting stats from the DOJ... 94% of black killings are black on black and 86% of white ones are white on white. If you don't feel safe, I don't think attributing that feeling to black street gangs is grounded in reality. You're a lot more likely to get killed by a white guy (unless I'm wrong in assuming you're white).
A few more thoughts...
If someone's going to steal money from you or randomly attack you, it's probably going to happen on the street. Are people really advocating that folks should take a pleasant evening walk to their favorite restaurant toting an AR-15? What happens when the restaurant says you can't bring it in? If we're going to go that route, I think we should seriously think about wearing swords. Much more elegant.
And if you're worried about someone breaking into your house to "redistribute" your property, get a shotgun (or two). An AR-15 being used by a recently woken and surprised individual shooting in the dark isn't probably the ideal solution for stopping what's only one person 90%+ of the time and no more than two people 99%+ of the time.
And, like you said earlier, a loud dog is probably the most effective thing of all. Frankly, I don't care if people have AR-15 semi-automatics (though I do think limits on magazines and no armor-piercing bullets are a good idea). But realistically, they're not really good for anything other than 1) nursing right-wing conspiracy theories, 2) target shooting (which is fun, I grant), and 3) killing people who are bunched together.
Handguns have certain advantage over long guns
The barrel is harder to get inside of and lever away. If someone grabs a barrel that's three inches or shorter, he's going to get shot in the hand. Grab a long barrel and you can get it away from the person holding it.
The hypothetical shoot out over stuff is more a fantasy of being able to legally kill people than anything any real human being faced in the US even in the most crime-ridden times in the big cities. I know people who were burglarized multiple times while living on one of the Alphabet City avenues (Avenue C), but never when they were home.
People who rape tend to be a different sort of beastie than people who mug (who tend to go for guys as targets because women have less money). People who break into houses tend to know the schedules of the people they're stealing from and very rarely, in the US, break into occupied buildings.
None of the targets I knew personally (and I was a target twice in NYC and evaded both times) suffered any retribution for evading the muggers/bike thieves.
Average Nicaraguan burglaries, like those in the US, are non-confrontational. Some aren't, but that tend to be fairly localized. If someone lives in a part of Nicaragua that does have home invasions while people are in the house, then, yes, that is a situation where being armed makes sense.
Rebecca Brown
Stand Your Ground
Apparently there's not clear cut evidence one way or another on the beneficial (or negative) effect of Stand Your Ground laws. Wikipedia link that covers the larger studies on the issue (which aren't much) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law#Effect_on_crime_rates
Also, I'm not sure looking at percentages of large categories is especially helpful. If petty theft or simple assault went down but killings went up, is that good? Open for debate.
I wouldn't have a problem with long sentences for using guns in the commission of crimes as long as
(Interesting to compare Nicaragua's take on criminal penalties. They're fairly moderate.)
I took a tour once of a prison. I forget the exact designator -- it wasn't minimum security, but it was on the lower end -- and I was really disappointed even with what they showed the public. Most of the people I saw weren't doing anything. Of those that were, most were doing next to use things like raking rocks. Apparently, a small number of people were involved in a pilot program to make some sort of metal plate for a private company. Whoopy! Sounds like corporate welfare to me.
If prisons forced people to learn life skills -- so they didn't turn to crime immediately after getting released for lack of any better options -- and forced people to get an education, then I'd be a lot more pro locking folks up. And guys with guns seriously can't stop incarcerated guys (and women) without guns from being in institutional prison gangs? Seriously? I call bull shit.
Interest graphic...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/15/graphic-31-days-later-u-s-gun-de...
"If We Don't
ban guns, my second cousin twice removed is going to be shot someday by some cowboy defending his T-Mobile Store . . . . THAT's not fair "
http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Armed-Robbery-at-Coral-Springs-T-Mobi...
One man's take on the Inaugural Address . . . ----and just another form of income redistribution. Get ready for it.
I just posted a stat..
You went on the tangent...
If it was just the right to own guns there should be a mountain of dead Finns to contrast the mountain of Dead USanos..
Don't forget I had a concealed weapons permit and handgun
... at the advice of my sheriff. Guns are tools, but anyone who has imaginary, magical thinking beliefs about what they can and can't do embarrasses me as someone who sees them as regrettable tools for very specific problems (like a neighbor who pulled a knife on a deputy and another neighbor who killed his wife and was out on parole and wanted to get to know me).
The trouble I saw and still see was that for every me, there were rather larger numbers of people who had handguns they'd never trained with, who thought just waving a handgun at someone (generally another race) who scared them was preventing a crime rather than terrorizing someone who probably just wanted to ask for directions, who thought a .357 magnum could stand off government troops armed with chemical and biological weapons and high altitude bombs, and the rest of the insane basruda.
We had some kids scuffling over the Malcolm X movie and I decided to leave my handgun in the house (with my dog) when I went to work in a mall that night. A friend who was generally a responsible handgunner bitched at that decision. Other people were working to calm things down (and were successful). I'd read about a British officer who pulled a handgun on an Indian mob -- he was torn to shreds. I'd also read about people who were rescued from riots by bystanders and even some of the rioters themselves. They wouldn't have been if they'd been waving handguns in the air.
Guns are useful in very specific situations. I never had those situations occur in seven years of living in Manhattan or in twelve years of living in Philadelphia. In Virginia, I showed my training target to the biggest gossip in the village, and the next door neighbors did stop throwing firecrackers at my dog, so I guess having a handgun did something there.
Handgun ownership might make more sense for the situations where it is actually a potentially useful tool.
I'm more interested in perceptions and realities of real dangers than in US gun nut magical thinking.
Rebecca Brown
Most of this is basically racist hysterics
I think one reason so many of the kids from elite schools went leftist is that the colleges didn't build enough dorm space and we lived in poor communities and saw how corrupt police protected the neighborhood bad guys that most of our neighbors passionately hated. So, we got to know the neighbors and saw the lies about them for what they were.
Nothing Obama is proposing is an absolute ban on firearms. But he is still half-black and that gripes the hell out of a lot of basically mediocre white men.
Rebecca Brown
He's Also Half-White
and that's the half that got him where he is today. These facts are hard to swallow for liberals, the African American community just ignores the reality.
His rather was a drunk, a philanderer, and a communist. I see nothing racist in factual information. I also see nothing racist in putting criminals who use guns in commission of a crime in prison for life. Eventually the reduction in the cost of the food stamp program would cover the increased prison costs.
In a few generations our streets would be safe, for black and white alike, and the self defense need for guns would be eliminated or at least greatly reduced.
Basically, I'm all for executing corrupt cops for treason
...but that's not going to happen either.
Race is an artificial construct used to justify enslaving people based on a trivial pigmentation difference. The people south of the Sahara are the most genetically diverse human population on the planet.
I'm also in favor of criminal penalties for people who tell wannabe writers that getting published by a commercial house that would pay them is impossible without connections, but that also isn't going to happen.
Rebecca Brown
in favor....
of capital punishment?
Complicated
Most aspects of the comparison are "complicated": youth does not have an accepted international crime definition, and the non-official ranges from 15-19 to 12-30, depending on country. The results might not be comparable and can easily be manipulated. Handgun stats are exponentially more complicated due to prevalence, rate of ownership, and choice as a crime tool. There is also the classic, and brilliant, "Archie Bunker" retort, when pressed by his son-in-law, Meathead, then later his daughter, Gloria, on the number of gun deaths due to easy access to guns: would it make you feel any better little girl if they's was pushed out of windows? - implying if not stating there are other ways to accomplish the same end. Cross-country comparisons are not as useful as they might seem...
It's not always about gun control or not.
I was more amused that Costa Rica wasn't showing as safer for the average crime that's more likely. Murder is a rare crime; getting stuff stolen isn't. Twelve US citizens were whacked in Costa Rica in three years or so out of how many US travelers and expats there. How many truly random killings of expats have happened here? Or there?
Rebecca Brown
Stats?
In the last 3 years C.R. has had 13 U.S. citizen homicides, 14 drownings, 17 suicides and 14 deaths by motor vehicle accidents; per Nicaragua, the same categories are: 3, 4, 7 & 4; and per neighboring Honduras, they are 24, 1, 9 & 2 -- though without stats on the numbers of people there and some sort of measure of whether or not they represent "average people", the numbers may be meaningless in the abstract. Is "truly random" significant (to the deceased it would not seem so)? Many stats via NationMaster are old, often 6-12 years old. That said, I don't see that Nicaragua is safer per average crime, unless by that one means just robberies - though that is likely not a measure people want singled out Nica vs. U.S.
Well, in Jinotega, the expats kill more
...per capita than the Jinoteganos, but that's another game with numbers (very small samples give bad statistics). I think there are around 10 expats of any nationality living in Jinotega proper, but maybe as many as 20. Not more. I have about four of them as friends in town or just outside. I learned the hard way to avoid anyone who is sentimental about rescuing other human beings.
Theft rates in the US vary tremendously by neighborhood.
Stable middle class or working class neighborhoods can absorb a few newcomers every year -- if the turnover is too high, it's harder to know who is reasonable and who isn't.
The higher the GINI index, the more crime goes up, too, locally, regionally, or nationally.
Rebecca Brown
Humor Alert...
I got it this time...
Its like the "build one bridge and you are known as Jimmy the bridge builder" joke, right?
Yeah, more or less
...but I found that I had fewer problems in my life if I avoided people who made pets of problematic people, expat or Nicaraguan.
Rebecca Brown
Maybe I am misreading something but...
Nicaragua had over 650 deaths by motor vehicle accidents last year alone.
Maybe the stats are per a certain number of the population. (Usually per 100,000)
U.S. Citizen numbers
I am unsure stats for Nicaraguans; my post above dealt with the number of U.S. citizens in the three countries, including Nicaragua - as that category was mentioned above. Unless a place is dangerous and/or the foreigners are engaged in questionable activities there, the motor vehicle deaths and suicide numbers are often the same or higher than the homicide number. That in itself is rarely considered or listed in "danger stats", but it is revealing of how likely some things really are.
They are too poor to shoot
They are too poor to shoot each other! Machetes will have to do.
Actually, as the number of guns have gone up in the US, especially under the reign of Prince Barack, the murder and accident rates with guns have gone down.
"Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor
Prince ? I Thought
he was King Barak I . .
.or perhaps more appropriately, Supreme Leader and Esteemed Father.
If our debt continues to soar, we might have to borrow money from North Korea. By then we'll all be working for the government; there won't be a private sector left. Food Stamps and an ObamaPhone for everyone.
I hope people will still be able to afford coffee . . . .I can grow enough to eat, but some cash money would be nice.
What's with the Obama theatrics?
Where were the debt hawks when Ronald Reagan and George W Bush were president? Heck, as recently as George Bush Sr., Republicans were raising taxes (to higher levels than they are now) to cover the deficit. Why are they so opposed to it now?
I don't understand what Obama has done that's so horrible, so different than any other president that's come before. Both spending and revenue as a percentage of GDP are within historical norms.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history
Coffee is the drug of choice
of the Protestant work ethic. Destroy the Protestant work ethic and you might just as well step back and watch people sell marijuana...
"Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor
But has the suicide rates of the gun nuts gone up?
I was just thinking recently that the US's Military Industrial Complex needs wars it loses or plays to a draw because if the US actually could control the world, the need for weapons would diminish. So, picking on small countries and pulling out before definitive victories works very well.
Likewise the domestic gun industry needs crime to sell guns.
More seriously, I suspect that the reasons for crime rates going up or down have a lot more to do with a range of factors than whether people own guns or not. And almost everyone massages the data. Someone was trying to use Luxembourg as proof that banning handguns causes the murder rate to go up. The population of Luxembourg is so small that the rate per 100,000 will vary wildly if the rate goes from six murders a year to twelve. That difference in many larger countries would just be noise.
Rebecca Brown
No, to sell more guns the US
No, to sell more guns the US needs Barack Hussein Obama.
Crime rates vary by country. In the US, for example, every year more people are killed by hammers and blunt instruments than by rifles. That`s all rifles, not just the ones singled out by liberal gun bigots for legal suppression. Total violent assaults are another thing to look at-- with Central America and G.B. being way up there despite the lack of guns compared to the US. (yeah, I know, the English say its the Scots that drive up the crime rate).
Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor
Sheesh.
Once again, why the theatrics? Obama isn't proposing anything new with the "assault rifle ban". Whether you agree with it or not, he's proposed renewing a law that was already on the books. And it's not going to pass anyway.
Yes he is. The proposed ban
Yes he is. The proposed ban is permanent and includes deferred confiscation (when you die the govmint gets your gun). They are also proposing national registration which is a prelude to confiscation. Incidently, the so-called assault weapon ban is not the law--it grandfathered out in around 2004 because there was no data to prove it had anything to do with crime prevention.
"Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple. This has been my whole life's motto."
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian inventor