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Comments
yep, that's the south
Tax dollars, yo.
Speaking of tax dollars, CISPA just passed in the House with right on the bleeding edge of enough votes to override a veto.
Well.
Fuck.
Should I start packing...?
Well the Senate still has to ratify it and there is talk about the President possibly vetoing it. So I guess right now make a fuss to your senators and bug other people to do the same.
Why hello there, jerkface.
TL;DR, this tweet from Arkansas state representative Nate Bell (R):
To be fair, I most certainly would have.
Doesn't make him any less of a prick for putting it that way, but I can't say he's wrong. The two guys could've done a hell of a lot more damage if they went for civilians instead of high-profile stuff like MIT.
I'm not sure what they were going for; I presume the MIT policeman may have confronted them, and they were spooked anyway so they decided to just kill everyone in their path.
They were going for civilians, but it seems their plans had a monkey wrench thrown into them; if they had grenades they could have caused far more carnage than they ended up doing.
That said I have no idea why they robbed a 7-11. Maybe one of them got cocky and figured no one could get a hold of them after they pretty much escaped identification in the course of about three days.
From everything I'm seeing about this, the bombers were incredibly disorganized. They didn't seem to have an escape route planned.
Potentially, that makes them more dangerous to bystanders in their homes while they're fleeing than if they did.
But would heavily-armed civilians be particularly effective to deal with them?
Only takes one lucky bullet. Which is better than zero lucky bullets if you're cornered in your own home.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I'd hole up in the house just like everyone else who's been ordered to, but with a gun in case the guy broke in to try and cool his trail.
Oh I see what you mean. That makes more sense.
Also to be fair, I would expect an Arkansas rep to be fully playing into the Mad Max delusion of grandeur rather than giving him that benefit of the doubt.
yeah sure let's just make this about gun control while you're at it.
that's all conservatives do anyway, make tragedies about their personal agendas.
seriously how full of yourself do you have to be to go "well, a bunch of people died or were injured, but at least I can make a witty quip that supports my position on the surface as a result!"
Liberals did exactly the same thing using Sandy Hook to push agendas for feel-good bans that wouldn't actually have done much to stop or even mitigate it.
Are conservatives worse and more idiotic about it? Yes. But your side's hands aren't clean either.
Me? I'm just glad they've got a bead on the guy and are bringing him down.
Insofar as "sides" are concerned, I don't think the gun ownership thing has that much to do with it outside the USA. A lot of Europe, for instance, is significantly to the left of the USA politically, but many countries there also have legal civilian gun ownership with far fewer issues concerning violence. To me, the weapons ownership thing in the USA is more a question of whether the broader US culture can be trusted with firearms. It does take a human will to make a weapon lethal, after all.
Why this is relevant in the case of the bombings is the element of will. The amount of high-profile violence that's happened in the USA recently is staggering -- a cinema massacre, school shootings, a rogue police officer, and now a bombing. The legality of weapons alone can't be cause for this, and removing weapons alone wouldn't solve the issue, because there'd still be a bunch of people out there who simply want to enact significant amounts of violence. I daresay the core of the issues surrounding both the recent wave of highly publicised violent gun crimes and this bombing are cultural and psychological. US laws concerning weapons ownership are too lax and open towards abuse, to be sure, but the root of the violence here is that people want to cause it.
I'm not at all against the USA reviewing its weapon ownership policies. In fact, I'd support that. As I said, though, that's peripheral to the rawest, most baseline part of the USA's problems concerning violence. Weapons ownership debates are essentially about the capacity to do violence, and as long as we continue to fixate on the surface elements (not that we should ignore gun ownership specifically), no ground will ever be covered. Given that the extreme right-wing elements of the USA won the gun ownership debate some time ago, too, it's probably better to focus on what can be done more broadly to mitigate the problems -- and what will also help prevent things like the Boston bombing.
Before I'm (maybe) accused of taking sides, I consider myself a centrist on this matter and am almost 100% happy with existing Australian policy on gun ownership. Which pretty much boils down to "no". The existing policies suit the Australian social context just fine, and that's really what matters the most. I do not own a gun, and have no particular intentions of acquiring one at any place or time in the near future.
I honestly don't understand how having a gun at the time would have helped anyway, since it wasn't immediately obvious who the culprits were there and then. What if it was just some random panicky tourist or whatever you bumped into? Would somebody have been able to tell if it were the bombers if they tried to hide it?
Sorry, that just sounded oddly hilarious, even though I don't watch any of James Rolfe's stuff.
Pretty much. Our problems with violence largely stem from localized areas of extreme economic disparity, coupled with insular cultural enclaves that have been ostracized for long periods of time and never really had a chance to reach prosperity. Nothing particularly alien to any first-world country, but rarely to this scale, extremity, and duration.
Gun bans have been statistically proven to help. If you don't trust the statistics; that's your problem, not mine.
And at least gun control was then relevant to the situation at hand. It is not hard to make a logical conclusion like "if there were less guns, there'd probably be less gun crime". It's much harder to make one like "Ha! I bet those sissy tree-hugging liberals wish they had fifty AKs NOW!"
Assault weapon bans aren't statistically proven to do anything. They have a tremendously small effect if any, because most gun crimes were never committed with them in the first place. For any effect they had, we could likely have done more good taking the lobbying costs to get them passed and dumping them directly into schools.
When talking about broader blanket bans, results are still mixed and ambiguous enough to be a legitimate debate. It's associated with lower rates of suicide by guns, but drops in wider violence tend to be associated more with preexisting rates of violence that were already very low and still going down. Historically, countries that ban guns tend to see a temporary increase in violence before going back down to status quo.
What this tells me is that, like I just agreed with Alex, the cause of our unusually high rate of gun violence is likely due to other overwhelming factors -- especially when compared to other countries that have similar gun laws already. The conclusion I draw is that if we know that, throwing feel-good bans at it probably isn't going to solve anything except to unnecessarily restrict something.
And while I'm happy to condemn an idiot from Arkansas for an exceptionally stupid attitude about guns, most of our violence with them doesn't come from rural areas (though the weapons used may well be bought there from lax vendors).
Does this mean Bee is the "rebellious pseudo-conservative railing against popular opinion" now? (Nyuk nyuk nyuk.)
I'm inclined to agree with Bee's analysis, based on the little I know of the issue.
I think that new regulations on guns will solve the problem by a little. It won't solve the problem of violence in general, though. People will still find ways to hurt and kill each other; it'll just reduce fatalities (probably significantly), and reduce violence by a little bit (probably not very significantly).
I've read an article somewhere that actually blames the rise of violent incidents such as mass shootings on a decrease in the amount of social safety net resources over the years, since roughly the Reagan administration. This kind of explanation seems to make the most sense, because people are more stressed when they are asked, for financial and social reasons, to depend only on themselves and have no recourse to fall on when the bottom falls out beneath them (frequently not even of their own fault).
^^ Eh, I've been that for a long time. It's kind of a default in Western Oregon that you're either a consummate arch-hippie, or a pseudo-conservative that didn't drink the punch but hasn't been immersed enough in Heartland crazy to drink that punch. There's rather little in between.
Cross the Cascades and you're into a mix of Heartland crazy and pseudo-liberals that are big on environmental issues and social freedom but are turned off by the neighboring hippies.
^ Sociologists are actually surprised our rate of violence is as low it is given the severity of our economic issues. Typically a recession as big as the one we're going through right now will spike crime rates, but ours are still going down (albeit a bit slower than previous).
It's because we still have hope. As in, we still feel hopeful about our own futures.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/25/1919381/postal-services-defazio/
TL;DR: Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-OR-04) has proposed a bill to end the requirement of the U.S. Postal Service to pre-fund employee health benefits for 75 years. The likely effect of this is to remove a large cost burden on the USPS.
So, a Democrat is depriving postal workers of healthcare benefits. Tell me please a Republican is opposing that.
^^ As person whose father's hand got severely injured in a postal accident, I say fuck no.
Postal machinery is no joke; it's every bit as industrial and dangerous as any other sort of factory.
Guys, this isn't no health benefits. It's not pre-funding them an entire lifetime in advance in a way that eclipses all other expenses and that no other business in the country has to do, thereby sitting on funds that any sane service would be using for running costs.
The way the Postal Service handles healthcare right now puts even the most fucked up caricature of Social Security to shame.
Biden calls out victim-blaming in rape cases. Not much else, but I guess it's a step in the right direction.
If you're in South Carolina's 1st district, please don't embarrass your state tomorrow, so please, don't vote for Mark Sanford.