Friday, July 27, 2012

Misc Notes to Self

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Paul, first, the nutcase du jour did not have an "automatic rifle", and to my knowledge, none of the 300,000 or so automatic weapons legally owned by civilians in the US have ever found to have been used in a crime.
The first line of defence against nutcases is friends, family, schools and workplaces who know the nutcases in question. If I recall correctly, one local nutcase who shot a few folks even had a close relative in law enforcement who knew he was having mental problems and owned guns.
Second, I made no claim about Japan's firearms deaths, only their violent deaths by any intentional means, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. The point was and is that, when people want to kill, they will figure out how. In Japan they even have sword controls, but that doesn't stop people from jumping off buildings and bridges, or wandering into the surf carrying their children.
Japan's suicide rate plus murder rate has historically been higher than ours, and I'm not sure I'd prefer living in a society that places such a burden on their people as to drive them to kill themselves at such a rate. The US murder rate is 4.7 per 100000 per year, while men in Japan kill themselves at a rate of 40 per year per 100000. In short, it isn't the guns.
Ben Emery
Here is the statistics on Japan's violent deaths.
http://violentdeathproject.com/countries/japan
Gregory
Ben, the "Brady Center" has about 28 thousand members and a budget of $4 million. The NRA (I'm not a member, too Republican for me) has 4 million members and a budget that dwarfs the former Handgun Control, Inc.
Sorry, but semi-automatic rifles and pistols have been in civilian hands for the ~120 years they've been around. In fact, the iconic Colt Model 1911 had it's 100 year anniversary last year and is still being made in large numbers by several companies.
Paul Emery
So Gregory thanks for confirming that Japans intentional homicide rate is the lowest in the world. Perhaps all that gun control does have an effect
Your link s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Gregory
Paul, Japan's overall suicide rate is something like five times our murder rate. Perhaps all that gun control doesn't have an effect.
Japan has fewer murders because they have fewer people who want to murderer. I can't find a current citation, but I have seen a credible claim that Japanese nationals who move to the US have an even lower murder rate than the population they leave behind, despite having access to guns.
Ben Emery
Greg,
How regulation works against banks screwing people over.
http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=US3604990420120720
"Capital One is not quite "No Hassle" according to federal charges that the credit card company violated consumer protection requirements.
Capital One will pay $210 million to settle charges raised by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The majority of that money will go to consumers but $60 million will be paid out in fines."
Paul Emery

So Gregory aside from family counseling and taging suspicious friends as possible psycho terrorists do you have any other ideas to stop this epidemic?

Gregory
Paul E, to partially answer your own question, you might want to earn those extra credit points and identify the state university that agonised over whether or not an incoming student should be allowed to choose whether their roomie would be keeping a handgun in the room, and describe the carnage that resulted.

Michael Anderson

YAI = Yachting Association of India?
Gregory
Mike... was that supposed to be meaningful? Perhaps meant for a different blog?

Of course in the USA we may not count single car accidents while drunk as violent self inflicted deaths:
In 2006, there were 16,005 drunk driving deaths (.01% of our population) in the U.S. There are eight drunk driving fatalities involving teens every day. Driving while intoxicated is extremely dangerous. It can be lethal. Something must be done to stem the tide of drunk driving deaths. We sometime do suicide differently.
YAI = Yippee Avionics International?
Perhaps suicide is much more a part of their culture, and murder is much more a part of ours. In any event, requiring the return of spent shell casings to purchase one more than two boxes of ammo at a time, would slow down the stockpiling process, and requires no restrictions on guns bought, or types of gun bought. Bring back the spent shell casings from two boxes, and you get to buy four boxes, bring back the spent shell casings from four boxes, and you get to buy five boxes, and so on. It would mean numerous trips to the range using ever increasing amounts of ammo to ever get to 6,000 rounds. I'm sure you can write the iterations needed and figure it out in a hurry. In any event it would make such an individual fairly conspicuous on a range, after they got to the 1,000 rounds per session, point.
At 50 rounds of .38 per box, that would be twenty boxes back to the store to get to box 21, and that would be only 1,000 rounds, 50 x 20. To reach 3,000, how many rounds would our psycho have already had to have purchased, and then shot, and then returned to the store for? Is that calc too difficult for you? Stores could easily weigh the casings, by pulling out 10 at random, weighing them, and then weighing the whole pile, and doing the math. Be a good boy and write, Psychos, Terrorists, and Mathematics, filled with similar story problems, and a teachers guide. I'm sure it would sell.
"One and only one of the magnitude of the one in Aurora Colorado"
So the other 27 since Columbine are inconsequential, as is the accelerating rate of incidents?
http://www.newsmax.com/US/mass-shootings-us-colorado/2012/07/20/id/445971
Try telling that to the parents and families of the victims of any of the other 27, what a display of character, I'll let the other readers decide just what kind of character.
BTW, More were killed, fewer were injured over all, in other incidents, so Greg's magical magnitude scale is weighted in favor of wounding, not kills. Odd?
Do you suppose corporate America would ever consider the Amish response?
On October 2, 2006, a shooting occurred at the West Nickel Mines School, an Amish one-room schoolhouse in the Old Order Amish community of Nickel Mines, a village in Bart Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.[1][2][3] Gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV took hostages and shot ten girls (aged 6–13), killing five, before committing suicide in the schoolhouse.[1][2][3][4] The emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation in the response of the Amish community was widely discussed in the national media. The West Nickel Mines School was torn down, and a new one-room schoolhouse, the New Hope School, was built at another location.
Not a chance!
And before Greg gets to go whoopido over the .01% above, I caught it, and forced the spreadsheet to be more precise, as in: 0.005161% which it initially rounded up to .01% Sorry Greg, no candy cane this time.
" none of the 300,000 or so automatic weapons legally owned by civilians in the US have ever found to have been used in a crime."
A perfectly true, and perfectly useless statement.
The moment one of them is stolen, is is most likely going to get used in a crime. You prequalified your pool of guns by saying, legally owned.
And I guess you missed it, the semi automatic weapons, capable of how many rounds per trigger pull (one), and likewise capable of how many rounds per minute (with a good working drum magazine) and good finger control, in the Aurora shootings, were legally owned until the second he killed his first victim.
Or another way of looking at it, how many words can you type per minute, 60 maybe, ten fingers working of course, or how fast can you pluck a banjo or guitar?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdUrg2Cqxdw
Check this out at 1:16, and then around 3: 10, watch out!
****************************************************************************

Now of course an individual can simply go into a store and by two boxes over and over again, but we could offer and incentive to gun store owners, just like we offer incentives to oil companies, like oil depletion allowances. In this case we could call in a nutcase depletion allowance, and it could be given in the form of tax relief to small businesses, for any and all forms of security that they install and maintain, such as multiple cameras, facial recognition software, etc., such that they might be able to detect such a person's activity, regardless of who is at the counter. You could also offer a discount to both the customer and the store owner for shell casing turn-ins, further making the "two boxes only" customer stand out better. And, of course, there should be bounties for both the store owners and the employee that sounds the alarm, and notifies the authorities, if the tip pans out. It may not catch too many folks, but after all, neither does voter registration ID procedures, and if you have to show ID to vote, why not have a "have to show ID for ammo" and let the store make a record of said ID. It would be a discouragement to wannabee copycats. DB Cooper got on board with a parachute, think you could do that today?

As for quibbles about what is or is not an "assault rifle," let's cut to the chase and call stuff "assault firearms" and have different classes of such things, with different restrictions on purchases of both ammo and for the weapons themselves. Apparently some libertarian and other similarly minded willful creatures are defending the term itself "assault rifle" and a strict definition with the tenacity that led to placing the flag on Iwo Jima, to avoid any controls being placed on other weapons, like say the 12 gauge that apparently caused most of the wounds, leading to the one and only incident of such a magnitude, on the Gregory Scale of Gun Violence incidents. Any unidirectional bomb device is made to assault something, be it a beer can or a baby. And all firearms are unidirectional bomb devices, except for one that malfunctions such that it explodes in the user's hands.

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