Guns, Guns Guns

doug941 wrote:While none of those branches of the family are closely related, I DO have distant cousins who are mixed-race i.e. African Americans.
I reserve personal heartache for those issues I actually can have an effect on.

It is easy to claim inability to make changes if you're not looking too closely at the cause of a given problem.

A thousand people dying from Ebola to the point I can do ANYTHING about are nothing more than statistics. Pray, donate, or ignore it, I CAN DO NOTHING TO ALTER IT. Those things I CAN effect I worry about.

Laws are changeable. Local politics are changeable. More importantly, you yourself are changeable; poverty is not a mystery, and more often than not the result of systemic issues that are the result of decades and centuries of decisions made by people like you. If human decisions got us to this point, human decisions can get us away from it again, it just takes a little bit of awareness. Noone is expecting centuries of entrenched discrimination to disappear overnight, but they certainly won't disappear as long as people decide to be blind to them.

There ONE SINGLE THING that Iosef Stalin is supposed to have said that I can agree with, because frankly it is true. "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic."

And while Stalin was correct in the sense that a million deaths are too abstract to get an emotional handle on, I think that using that statement to diminish an ongoing tragedy is the wrong path to take.

The E wrote:

doug941 wrote:While none of those branches of the family are closely related, I DO have distant cousins who are mixed-race i.e. African Americans.
I reserve personal heartache for those issues I actually can have an effect on.

It is easy to claim inability to make changes if you're not looking too closely at the cause of a given problem.

A thousand people dying from Ebola to the point I can do ANYTHING about are nothing more than statistics. Pray, donate, or ignore it, I CAN DO NOTHING TO ALTER IT. Those things I CAN effect I worry about.

Laws are changeable. Local politics are changeable. More importantly, you yourself are changeable; poverty is not a mystery, and more often than not the result of systemic issues that are the result of decades and centuries of decisions made by people like you. If human decisions got us to this point, human decisions can get us away from it again, it just takes a little bit of awareness. Noone is expecting centuries of entrenched discrimination to disappear overnight, but they certainly won't disappear as long as people decide to be blind to them.

There ONE SINGLE THING that Iosef Stalin is supposed to have said that I can agree with, because frankly it is true. "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic."

And while Stalin was correct in the sense that a million deaths are too abstract to get an emotional handle on, I think that using that statement to diminish an ongoing tragedy is the wrong path to take.

Yes, laws are changeable, but my reach isn't. One of those oh-so-distant cousins, a really, REALLY distant cousin, can snap her fingers and find a million Pounds in the Royal funds to establish a new hospital some place. I don't own stock in Wal-Mart, that's yet another branch of the family, so I personally would have problems funding much more than a few hypodermic needles. As I said, NOTHING I can do has any effect in 99.99999% of the planet. I save my heartache for the areas I CAN effect.

And lest anyone think I have no sympathy for those who are murdered, that problem has already hit my family so I KNOW what it feels like. 35 plus years and still unsolved.

Time to remind people of the Canadian blue eyed experiment.
A large class of school students had approximately 50% with blue eyes. For the experiment the blue eyes were told to act down trodden while the others were to lord it over them.
Within weeks the behaviours became hard wired, and they had great difficulty in getting them to revert.
The old saying of "Give a dog a bad name", comes to mind.

Annachie wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:
US Homicide rate is 5.3 per 100,000
Australia Homicide rate is .8 per 100,000.

About 1/2 of US homicides are committed by Blacks and another 1/4 are committed by illegal alien Hispanics.

<snip>

A valid comparison is about 1.7 vs .8.

Ladies and gentlemen. American racism in all it's glory.

Not racism, realism.

When one very destictive ethnic group has a Homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than the rest of the population, you need to examine what is different about that segment of the population. Guns are not the issue because Blacks are less likely to own guns and tend to own fewer guns. One contributing factor is that African Americans often blame their own behavioral problems on racism.

If you want to experience racism, take a walk through certain neighborhoods that are predominantly African-American. They will not give a damn that you are Eurotrash rather than white American. Your probability of survival will not be good.

Daryl wrote:Sorry fly. I checked out your link, and the statistics are for all homicides by any means, so not relevant in a discussion on guns.
I was marginally unfair though, as the latest figures are -
Intentional homicide by firearms,
US 4.46 per 100,000
Australia 0.18 per 100,000
So only 24.7 times, much better than 29

You ignore the point. It really doesn't matter if a gun is used to commit murder because a murder is still a murder even if a gun isn't used. A similar argument applied to suicide. Historically, the US has had one of the lowest suicide rates among First World countries. (European Homicide rates have decreased in recent years.). Your suicide rates were higher than US rate in spite of having less access to firearms. You people often obfuscated this reality by comparing only gun suicides. It was obviously bdishonest.

Well Hell. This massacre wasn't so horrific after all.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/29/americas ... index.html

8 of the victims died from being burned to death rather than shot, so they really shouldn't be counted as victims.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Well Hell. This massacre wasn't so horrific after all.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/29/americas ... index.html

8 of the victims died from being burned to death rather than shot, so they really shouldn't be counted as victims.

Could you at least *try* to make something resembling a coherent argument?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:When one very destictive ethnic group has a Homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than the rest of the population, you need to examine what is different about that segment of the population. Guns are not the issue because Blacks are less likely to own guns and tend to own fewer guns. One contributing factor is that African Americans often blame their own behavioral problems on racism.

If you want to experience racism, take a walk through certain neighborhoods that are predominantly African-American. They will not give a damn that you are Eurotrash rather than white American. Your probability of survival will not be good.

There is one very distinctive *group* of people that predominately affect homicide statistics, economically disenfranchised people. People who persist in using ethnicity as an explanation for the statistics are indirectly perpetuating the disenfranchisement.

Oh Fly.

It's not the immediate seperation of Blacks from the data that is racist. Well, it is.

Nor is it the seperation of Hispanics. Actually, it is. Not as racist as labeling them all illegals.


The really big, flare lit, tip off that you are being racist as fuck was your assertion that they don't really count. That they don't matter.

The real point I was trying to make is that the most efficient individual way for a person to kill another person is with a gun. That's why soldiers, police and some criminals use them.
The Australian overall murder statistics are still markedly less than those in the USA. If we had the same instant access to guns as you do, the overall rate would be much closer again, as more murderous impulses would have been successfully acted upon.
Compounding this is something that you have mentioned previously. Our police are generally on top of serious crime. If we read a headline saying that someone somewhere in the country has been shot dead, there is a likelihood that tomorrow's headline will be "Shooter caught, in custody."

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

Daryl wrote:Sorry fly. I checked out your link, and the statistics are for all homicides by any means, so not relevant in a discussion on guns.
I was marginally unfair though, as the latest figures are -
Intentional homicide by firearms,
US 4.46 per 100,000
Australia 0.18 per 100,000
So only 24.7 times, much better than 29

You ignore the point. It really doesn't matter if a gun is used to commit murder because a murder is still a murder even if a gun isn't used. A similar argument applied to suicide. Historically, the US has had one of the lowest suicide rates among First World countries. (European Homicide rates have decreased in recent years.). Your suicide rates were higher than US rate in spite of having less access to firearms. You people often obfuscated this reality by comparing only gun suicides. It was obviously bdishonest.