Comments

1
An historical perspective on cop culture and the "Madison Method": http://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/351529409/…
2
May Day 2103
4
Nothing about the woman beheaded by a Muslim in Oklahoma? Or the second woman he stabbed before he was shot?
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everyone talks about volcanoes, but no one ever does anything about them.

basic PNW volcano tip: hot ash, not lava, will burn your face
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It's also the lahar, not the lava that's the real destructive force around here.
7
It's also the lahar, not the lava that's gonna burn/scald/devastate us around here.
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@4 people use religion as an excuse for violence, just like internet commenters use it as an excuse for racism.

What, no update on that group of Christians who beat down a couple of gays in Philadelphia?
10
Gaaaaaaaah for the love of UX change the way Edit Comment / Log In screen works.
11
@9 Islam is a race? BTW I didn't bring up race you did. What are you trying to say?
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@9: That item was posted and followed up on in a second post a day or two later.
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@5, “If there is no solution to the problem then don't waste time worrying about it. If there is a solution to the problem then don't waste time worrying about it.” Dalai Lama
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Leaked SPD memo-i.e., treat demonstrators like black people.
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@4 I imagine we all hope we start cutting off the oil supply to Oklahoma with targeted air strikes soon. Isn't Texas a major supplier?
18
@4,9,11. Second life saved in the Oklahoma beheading because an employee at the workplace was armed with a handgun and shot the suspect. Who knows how many others would have been maimed or died, in the 7 to 10 minutes it takes to call 911 and get police to the scene? If the workplace was "gun free" by policy, or assuming it was, the employee in question and the employee had abided by the policy, more than one woman might have died.

"Gun Free" zones just disarm the law abiding. The non-law abiding don't care.

http://news.yahoo.com/police-woman-behea…
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@18, more guns are making the country less safe. An astroturfer citing anecdotal evidence that won't hold up isn't going to convince Slog readers to ignore the statistics.
20
@19. Here are some stats for you. Norway has nearly the rate of gun ownership as the U.S. without the violent or property crime problems. Israel is not far behind and their citizens can own fully-automatic weapons, with high capacity magazines. Exclude terrorism, and their crime rates are like Norway's not ours.

The problem with focusing on the tool or means of the murders and assaults endemic in our culture, is that it takes our limited public-policy attention span off the real issue, which is why are we so much more criminal as a culture than everyone else? That would actually make a difference. Mexico has a total gun ban and yet it is over-run will gun-violence. Let's focus on what will make us less criminal and violent, not the tools we employ to be that way. Squeezing 100 million firearms back into their particular genie bottle is a fools errand.
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@18 the guy was a reserve deputy. Only in your tiny mind is anyone trying to disarm cops.
22
So if he hadn't been a reserve deputy, nobody else should have a gun and we should wait and see how many people a "grievance killer" can murder in 7 minutes?

I see citizen's outperform cops at the gun range routinely, both is target shooting, and in "active shooter" scenarios. Anyone can learn to use a gun competently if they choose to.

Harper's Magazine, which is reliably liberal, had a cover story during the first part of the year about a guy who carried. One stat he came up with that was that citizens justifiably (i.e. self-defense) commit homicide each year in nearly the same numbers as cops. The rate of justifiable homicides by cops is obviously much higher, but the total numbers are pretty close.

Just for giggles, I would also suggest to anyone here that they Google and read RCW 9A.16.020, .030 and .050. Gives citizens the OPTION to arrest, to offer force in the face of crime, etc., if it is justified and appropriate. It gives cops the OBLIGATION to do so (see .040).
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@22, you're making no sense whatsoever.
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@20, statistics of the increasing US gun violence with increasing ownership of increasingly dangerous weapons. Canada and Norway are not stockpiling AK47s plus they have rules on carrying. You know that very well. Don't fucking bullshit around.
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@20,

Meanwhile, Anders Breivik had to buy the bulk of his arsenal from American suppliers because that shit is heavily regulated in Norway.

Why are gun nuts such unrepentant, filthy liars?
26
... and the folks engaging in gun violence here aren't following the rules we have. They are almost all convicted felons. The rate of violent crime by those with concealed pistol licenses is less than the general population as a whole.

So how are more rules going and regulations going to help, when we can't get people to follow the ones we already have? Unless we are prepared to enforce those rules, like prosecuting the tens of thousands of people a year that make willful false representations on the background check applications required at licensed dealers, rules are worthless.

Again, you didn't address the bigger issue, which is why are we so much more violent and criminal than Norway and Israel when we have similar rates of gun ownership? Even if you take out gun crimes, our rates of violent and property crime are tons higher than theirs. If the correlation is high rates of gun ownership equals high crime, then they should have rates close to ours. They don't.

That is what we should be focused on. Or do we want to go for easy, feel good, while we violently victimize each other?
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@26 The USA has 90 guns per 100 persons. Norway has 31. Stop lying.
28
@27. Don't know where you are getting your numbers from, but most estimates place private gun ownership in the US at about 100,000,000 guns. The population is over 300,000,000. That is 33 per 100 not 90 or just slightly more than 90. As Sen. Moynihan used to say, "You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts."

... and you still haven't engaged on why we are so much more violent and criminal as a population than other industrialized countries and how changing what tool (in theory) we use would change that.
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@28 Small Arms Survey 2007 Chapter 2 Annex 4. 270 million civilian firearms.
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So we have 3 times more guns proportionately than Norway, but proportionately 64 times more homicides. No mathematical correlation. Twice the number of guns per capita as Finland, but 6 times the homicides. So that would suggest that guns and homicides are not correlative. Something else accounts for are much higher rates of violence toward one another.

We have prohibitions against the selling and trading of schedule 1 drugs. How tough is it to get them? Not very. More importantly we have some of the highest addiction rates in the world.

So do you want feckless regulation (like the war on drugs, that gives the appearance of addressing the problem while our addiction rates go merrily on) that does not address the problem or do you want to did deeper into the harder questions so we can actually reduce the rates at which we kill and maim each other?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/spe…

How about we prosecute the 80,000 or 90,000 federal felonies each year when people willfully mis-represent info on the existing federal background check? The actual number of prosecutions is hundreds. I am for prosecuting each and every one, since a law without enforcement is worse than no law at all.

I am also for universal background checks, just no 594 (for technical reasons). Put in the transfer language of Colorado or California and I would vote for it in a heartbeat.

The current debate is about symbolism over substance, validation or impact.

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