This article fails to communicate any of the details which make Bangladeshi
(and other third world) factories so dangerous.
In the recent fire, employees were ordered to remain at their stations even
as the factory floor filled with smoke.
In the building collapse, garment workers were ordered to return to work
the day after the crack appeared or be fined a month's pay. Bank clerks
and retailers in the building were not ordered to do so.
Its wrong to imply that "Things Fall Apart" is primarily concerned with
European colonialism, or that the novel's protagonist Okonkwo succumbs to
colonialism. Okonkwo falls to his own demons. This master novelist uses
Christian missionaries only as a convenience to show how thouroughly Okonkwo
has alienated his son.
gunther24 stated:
--
"The 25,000 death by guns in the US get little publicity."
--
This number is completely wrong. The US had only 8775 firearm murders in 2010, out of 12996 murder total, according to this anti-gun web site:
-- http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/firearm-murders-equiv.html
--
Note that the above web site itself completely fails to demonstrate its point:
it doesn't mention Switzerland, in which assault weapons are almost ubiquituous
but the murder rate about half that of the UK, and it doesn't mention the fact
that the US has seen a 35% decline in homicice since 1996 (twice as much of
a decline as Australia, which banned assault weapons in 1996). Here is an
article which describes the uselessness of Australia's assault weapon ban:
-- http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1736501,00.html
I don't know for sure which group you're referring to when you say rednecks, but I'm going to guess you mean rural white people. Those people commit very very few murders. Fewer than Europeans. Look at the murderer total in ref 1 below (ignoring unknowns), then normalize by population given in ref 2), and you get a murderer rate of 0.022% for whites, and 0.095% for non-whites.
Please note that I don't for a second believe that non-white commit more murders because of their race. They commit more murders primary because their financial situations cause them to end up doing highly dangerous work servicing *everybody's* lust for illegal drugs. But whatever the reason, someone has badly misled you about which gun-owning groups end up committing the murders.
They are comparable at least in the sense that the US example nicely illustrates the foolishness or knavery of attributing declining violence in Australia to a particular 1996 gun ban (not to mention the 1996 looks TOTALLY FLAT to me in the Australian homicide graph). The truth is considerably more complicated and not nearly so conducive to TEs habitual agitation on this issue.
I grabbed the US stats are from here (but they are widely known and reported everywhere, except of course in this article where one might have expected to see them):
Would TE care to explain, in light of their understanding of the fall-out of the Iraq invasion, why they have worked so hard to convince everyone to shell out to achieve probably the same sort of outcome in Syria?
And how do you explain Switzerland having a murder rate about half of the UK? I guess you left them out of your statistics as an inconvenient outlier.
--
You also left out the US, which hasn't outlawed anything and has seen a 35% reduction in the homicide rate in the last 15% (about twice the reduction seen in Australia, which banned guns at the beginning of that period).
--
The fact is that a whole club of European countries with highly similar policies and low levels of violence have banned guns. As other countries (notably the Baltic states) have adopted the same policy package, their violence rates have declined. There is thus a correlation between low levels of violence and low levels of gun ownership, but this doesn't demonstrate causality, because there are many confounding effects in the form of other policies in the package. The presence of the swiss datapoint more or less destroys any attempt to impose a causal interpretation on the data.
--
Many parts of South America have gun bans, and stratospheric levels of violence. As in the US, the genuinely likely culprit is a poisoness combination of black markets and inequality.
"Australian gun-murder rates fell sharply too, with no offsetting rise in other homicides" (after Australia instituted a gun ban following a mass shooting in 1996).
What TE doesn't mention is that the US murder rate between 1996 and 2011 declined by about 35%, which is a much larger decrease than the Australian one (which according to http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html looks to be about 15%). In general, the declines in violence in western countries that have banned guns recently have been very small, and usually smaller than the general declines in criminal violence that western countries have experienced on the average.
--
So despite the disgusting, almost criminally irresponsible orgies of media coverage that school shootings receive, you really don't have much to be afraid of. As this terrible article notes, fear is potent stuff. Be sure to take note of who is trying to use it to manipulate you.
It might be easy if people agreed, but its currently 75-25 against. Referendums intended to ban guns have failed recently in places as violent as Brazil, for understandable reasons: many South American countries have both strict gun laws and some of the worst criminal violence in the world (while still having functional governments).
--
We could also try to be like Switzerland, which has lots of assault rifles and only 50% and 70% the homicide rate of the UK and Australia respectively (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate). The US has a terrible violence problem compared to Switzerland even if you count only non-firearm murders. The root causes are black markets and high inequality.
"The stats you quote are misleading. It would be easy for me to draw up a long
list of civilised countries that restrict gun ownership to benefit of their
citizens (like the UK and Australia) and a similar chart showing how free
gun ownership leads to anarchy, civil war, and injustice (Somalia, Russia,
a significant number of African countries, anywhere it is easy to get hold
of an AK-47, half of the middle east etc)"
I don't think this is as easy as you think.
The countries you cite as positive examples have indeed experienced declining
violence, but so has the US over the same time period and accross many racial
and ethnic groups.
The countries you cite as negative examples have myriad negative confounding
factors that make it difficult to pin the blame on any single cause.
Finally, though Somalia is indeed an unhappy place, its neven seen anything
like what happened in Rwanda, where so few citizens own guns (0.6 guns/100
population) that is was possible to carry out a genocide of about 10%
of the population with a rag-tag militia and incited civilians armed
mainly with machettes. Somalis on the other hand are fairly heavily armed
(9.1 guns / 100 population). This is an example of a general pattern in
which the economic value of guns is greater the fewer people have them.
Since you stand essentially no chance of getting every last gun, making sure
everyone has one is probably a better strategy. The $45 AK-47s that the US
media likes to babble about are, of course, beyond the means of many poorer
Africans living on tight budgets.
Over the course of the 20th century, a world citizen was several times
more likely to be murdered by his government than by a petty criminal,
and private gun ownership does appear to affect government's calculations,
so the point of the above articles is valid.
If you still want to try to demonstrate that banning guns is a good idea,
you have to try to make the case that the world has changed fundamentally.
That's a much harder than most gun control proponents seem to recognize.
I'd suggest you start with Steven Pinker's "The Better Angles of our Nature".
The bad new for your case is that even as state violence has declined, so
too has common criminal violence. The catastrophes against which reasonable
people should look to insure themselves are less likely, but the insurance
policies are cheaper.
TE gun articles are depressing -- such pitiful and obvious attempts at opinion-forming are quite pathetic. At least TE still manages a bit of schizophrenia now and then though: they recently cited the Gallup poll which found 75% of US citizens in favor of private handgun ownership, up from 40% in favor in 1960. Its pretty clear which way the wind is blowing. Unless you write for TE. But nevermind, democratic accountability may indeed win out in the end. In fact, it already is :)
Its a nice thought you have, but if you try talking privately with an anti-gun campaigner here in the US you will quickly come to understand why it can't work: anti-gun folks don't really think any of their modest ideas will have much effect, and regard them as mere political stepping stones. Pro-gun people know this.
When did we start calling the people who are about to tax the bejeebers out of us (again) "doves"?
--
Inflation via loose monetary policy is in effect a tax, but one that does not have to be legislated and that tends to hurt ordinary people more than elites with real rather than monetary assets.
-- Francis Fukuyama
--
If I recall correctly this quote comes from a section in which Mr. Fukuyama describes how various nations have eventually confronted or failed to confront their elites, and some of the consequences.
Calling them riverboat gamblers is very generous -- it implicitly exonerates them of the charge of casually spending other people's lives in the hope of producing outcomes they believe would be desireable. If things don't work out, oh well. Riverboat gamblers at least have their own money on the table.
--
Its particularly disgusting to hear Economist still arguing for supporting rebels here. They could have noticed in the first place that Assad is in fact
much much less bad than his daddy and it would have been better to just support hime and avoid the horrific mess. It probably still would be better. But nooooo
Pleaes dont be so condescending. You're asking a somewhat simplistic and wrong question.
Its not 'can civs fight the military' but 'does civilian armament drive up the price of mass murder enough that killing costs more than compromising in at least some cases'. Take a look at these pages:
This article fails to communicate any of the details which make Bangladeshi
(and other third world) factories so dangerous.
In the recent fire, employees were ordered to remain at their stations even
as the factory floor filled with smoke.
In the building collapse, garment workers were ordered to return to work
the day after the crack appeared or be fined a month's pay. Bank clerks
and retailers in the building were not ordered to do so.
Wouldn't be the first time CIA has shipped funds to outfits with a stated goal of killing US citizens.
Its wrong to imply that "Things Fall Apart" is primarily concerned with
European colonialism, or that the novel's protagonist Okonkwo succumbs to
colonialism. Okonkwo falls to his own demons. This master novelist uses
Christian missionaries only as a convenience to show how thouroughly Okonkwo
has alienated his son.
This article cont
gunther24 stated:
--
"The 25,000 death by guns in the US get little publicity."
--
This number is completely wrong. The US had only 8775 firearm murders in 2010, out of 12996 murder total, according to this anti-gun web site:
--
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/firearm-murders-equiv.html
--
Note that the above web site itself completely fails to demonstrate its point:
it doesn't mention Switzerland, in which assault weapons are almost ubiquituous
but the murder rate about half that of the UK, and it doesn't mention the fact
that the US has seen a 35% decline in homicice since 1996 (twice as much of
a decline as Australia, which banned assault weapons in 1996). Here is an
article which describes the uselessness of Australia's assault weapon ban:
--
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1736501,00.html
I don't know for sure which group you're referring to when you say rednecks, but I'm going to guess you mean rural white people. Those people commit very very few murders. Fewer than Europeans. Look at the murderer total in ref 1 below (ignoring unknowns), then normalize by population given in ref 2), and you get a murderer rate of 0.022% for whites, and 0.095% for non-whites.
--
Ref 1: http://projects.wsj.com/murderdata/#view=all
Ref 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
--
Please note that I don't for a second believe that non-white commit more murders because of their race. They commit more murders primary because their financial situations cause them to end up doing highly dangerous work servicing *everybody's* lust for illegal drugs. But whatever the reason, someone has badly misled you about which gun-owning groups end up committing the murders.
They are comparable at least in the sense that the US example nicely illustrates the foolishness or knavery of attributing declining violence in Australia to a particular 1996 gun ban (not to mention the 1996 looks TOTALLY FLAT to me in the Australian homicide graph). The truth is considerably more complicated and not nearly so conducive to TEs habitual agitation on this issue.
I grabbed the US stats are from here (but they are widely known and reported everywhere, except of course in this article where one might have expected to see them):
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Would TE care to explain, in light of their understanding of the fall-out of the Iraq invasion, why they have worked so hard to convince everyone to shell out to achieve probably the same sort of outcome in Syria?
And how do you explain Switzerland having a murder rate about half of the UK? I guess you left them out of your statistics as an inconvenient outlier.
--
You also left out the US, which hasn't outlawed anything and has seen a 35% reduction in the homicide rate in the last 15% (about twice the reduction seen in Australia, which banned guns at the beginning of that period).
--
The fact is that a whole club of European countries with highly similar policies and low levels of violence have banned guns. As other countries (notably the Baltic states) have adopted the same policy package, their violence rates have declined. There is thus a correlation between low levels of violence and low levels of gun ownership, but this doesn't demonstrate causality, because there are many confounding effects in the form of other policies in the package. The presence of the swiss datapoint more or less destroys any attempt to impose a causal interpretation on the data.
--
Many parts of South America have gun bans, and stratospheric levels of violence. As in the US, the genuinely likely culprit is a poisoness combination of black markets and inequality.
--
http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
"Australian gun-murder rates fell sharply too, with no offsetting rise in other homicides" (after Australia instituted a gun ban following a mass shooting in 1996).
What TE doesn't mention is that the US murder rate between 1996 and 2011 declined by about 35%, which is a much larger decrease than the Australian one (which according to http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html looks to be about 15%). In general, the declines in violence in western countries that have banned guns recently have been very small, and usually smaller than the general declines in criminal violence that western countries have experienced on the average.
--
So despite the disgusting, almost criminally irresponsible orgies of media coverage that school shootings receive, you really don't have much to be afraid of. As this terrible article notes, fear is potent stuff. Be sure to take note of who is trying to use it to manipulate you.
It might be easy if people agreed, but its currently 75-25 against. Referendums intended to ban guns have failed recently in places as violent as Brazil, for understandable reasons: many South American countries have both strict gun laws and some of the worst criminal violence in the world (while still having functional governments).
--
We could also try to be like Switzerland, which has lots of assault rifles and only 50% and 70% the homicide rate of the UK and Australia respectively (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate). The US has a terrible violence problem compared to Switzerland even if you count only non-firearm murders. The root causes are black markets and high inequality.
"The stats you quote are misleading. It would be easy for me to draw up a long
list of civilised countries that restrict gun ownership to benefit of their
citizens (like the UK and Australia) and a similar chart showing how free
gun ownership leads to anarchy, civil war, and injustice (Somalia, Russia,
a significant number of African countries, anywhere it is easy to get hold
of an AK-47, half of the middle east etc)"
I don't think this is as easy as you think.
The countries you cite as positive examples have indeed experienced declining
violence, but so has the US over the same time period and accross many racial
and ethnic groups.
The countries you cite as negative examples have myriad negative confounding
factors that make it difficult to pin the blame on any single cause.
Finally, though Somalia is indeed an unhappy place, its neven seen anything
like what happened in Rwanda, where so few citizens own guns (0.6 guns/100
population) that is was possible to carry out a genocide of about 10%
of the population with a rag-tag militia and incited civilians armed
mainly with machettes. Somalis on the other hand are fairly heavily armed
(9.1 guns / 100 population). This is an example of a general pattern in
which the economic value of guns is greater the fewer people have them.
Since you stand essentially no chance of getting every last gun, making sure
everyone has one is probably a better strategy. The $45 AK-47s that the US
media likes to babble about are, of course, beyond the means of many poorer
Africans living on tight budgets.
First, please accept my apology for picking on grammar. But please don't
call me vile. I don't think its fair at all. Read on...
"Gun owners all contribute to a probability of murder"
This is actually infinitely debatable. Please take a look at these sites:
http://lawreview.wustl.edu/inprint/75-3/753-4.html
http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#chart
Over the course of the 20th century, a world citizen was several times
more likely to be murdered by his government than by a petty criminal,
and private gun ownership does appear to affect government's calculations,
so the point of the above articles is valid.
If you still want to try to demonstrate that banning guns is a good idea,
you have to try to make the case that the world has changed fundamentally.
That's a much harder than most gun control proponents seem to recognize.
I'd suggest you start with Steven Pinker's "The Better Angles of our Nature".
The bad new for your case is that even as state violence has declined, so
too has common criminal violence. The catastrophes against which reasonable
people should look to insure themselves are less likely, but the insurance
policies are cheaper.
I fail to see how gun ownership will be seen as similar to slave ownership, but I think I'll let you debate that with a black person.
The grammar in you last sentence is garbled and I can't tell what you were trying to say, but the poll I mentioned is cited in this article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/01/gun-control-0
That's a good idea. Obama would lose badly and we could be done with this silly issue and focus instead on the root causes of America's violence problem. Take a look at the Gallup poll cited in this article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/01/gun-control-0
TE gun articles are depressing -- such pitiful and obvious attempts at opinion-forming are quite pathetic. At least TE still manages a bit of schizophrenia now and then though: they recently cited the Gallup poll which found 75% of US citizens in favor of private handgun ownership, up from 40% in favor in 1960. Its pretty clear which way the wind is blowing. Unless you write for TE. But nevermind, democratic accountability may indeed win out in the end. In fact, it already is :)
Its a nice thought you have, but if you try talking privately with an anti-gun campaigner here in the US you will quickly come to understand why it can't work: anti-gun folks don't really think any of their modest ideas will have much effect, and regard them as mere political stepping stones. Pro-gun people know this.
When did we start calling the people who are about to tax the bejeebers out of us (again) "doves"?
--
Inflation via loose monetary policy is in effect a tax, but one that does not have to be legislated and that tends to hurt ordinary people more than elites with real rather than monetary assets.
-- Francis Fukuyama
--
If I recall correctly this quote comes from a section in which Mr. Fukuyama describes how various nations have eventually confronted or failed to confront their elites, and some of the consequences.
Calling them riverboat gamblers is very generous -- it implicitly exonerates them of the charge of casually spending other people's lives in the hope of producing outcomes they believe would be desireable. If things don't work out, oh well. Riverboat gamblers at least have their own money on the table.
--
Its particularly disgusting to hear Economist still arguing for supporting rebels here. They could have noticed in the first place that Assad is in fact
much much less bad than his daddy and it would have been better to just support hime and avoid the horrific mess. It probably still would be better. But nooooo
Pleaes dont be so condescending. You're asking a somewhat simplistic and wrong question.
Its not 'can civs fight the military' but 'does civilian armament drive up the price of mass murder enough that killing costs more than compromising in at least some cases'. Take a look at these pages:
http://lawreview.wustl.edu/inprint/75-3/753-4.html
http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#chart