Monsters

Well, the title certainly applies to the San Bernadino shooters, but in this particular case, it doesn't.

You may or may not be surprised to find that it in fact applies to me.  Apparently, I am a "cold-hearted monster" "indifferent to loss of life".  What could I have done to earn these appellation?  I objected to the President's proposal to strip citizens of their Fifth Amendment rights to due process because they're on a "No Fly List".  After asserting what it is that I object to (the arbitrary removal of civil rights on the say so of an unelected bureaucrat), I was told that I must come up with an alternative solution then.  Otherwise I am... I am unsure... wrong?  Bad?  Irresponsible?  It was never made clear to me.  So I gave my response.  "Nothing" would be a better solution than this.  And to borrow from an old joke, "that's when the fight started".*

I was told, "no, what is your proposal".  I reiterated, "changing nothing, doing nothing, passing no new laws" is my solution.  "We need an answer" was the response.  So I made a third swing at it, backed up with facts.  The US has, by far and away, more guns per capita than any other nation on earth (about 112 per 100 people).  And yet, contrary to what the pundits will tell you, we are only 111th among nations in homicides (and for the record, that's ALL homicides, not just gun related homicides) at approximately 4.6 per 100,000.  So on average, we have 4.6 deaths per 112,000 guns.  That's 4.11x10^-5 deaths per gun.  When you must put your answer in scientific notation, you know that it's either REALLY big, or really small (0.00000411 per gun).  And again, that assumes that each homicide is committed with a gun (which they are certainly not).  Furthermore, this number is on the decline.

Given the already low number of deaths, and the declining nature of the problem, I would say that doing precisely nothing is a workable "solution" to the problem.  And there you have it.  I am a "cold-hearted monster" and "indifferent to loss of life".  Because I refuse to offer any solution.  So I stand before you, a monster.  And I await your scornful judgment.

* The joke goes:
I walked into a bar, and these three rather fat women were talking by the bartender, and I noticed they had accents.  So I said "Excuse me ladies, are you from England?"  The largest one shouted angrily at me, "Wales, ye daft fool!  It's Wales!"  So I apologized profusely, "I am terribly sorry.  Are you whales from England?"  And that's when the fight started.

6 comments:

Texan99 said...

Denouce yourself, ye daft fool.

Grim said...

Well, we could ban AR/AK style rifles -- except California already did, in 1989.

We could ban the construction of improvised explosive devices like pipe bombs -- except the National Firearms Act did that in the 1930s.

We could ban arms across the country, except France did that and it didn't help (and you would instantly create a vastly larger black market in firearms in America than in Europe by doing so).

We could restrict arms to government employees, except these were government employees.

We could make murder illegal, except...

The President's proposal is a violation of the 2nd Amendment, the 5th Amendment, and the 14th Amendment's privileges and immunities clause as well. That he has proposed it for serious consideration is grounds to question his fitness for office.

Cassandra said...

Mike, you ignorant slut :p

How DARE you combat "The Fierce Urgency of NOW, Dangitall!!!" with your largely irrelevant observation that the statistical likelihood of any particular person dying in a mass shooting is far less than the danger from 90 gazillion other hazards we gladly tolerate every single day.

The two dominant memes this administration constantly invokes are:

1. "We can't afford to wait" (for Congress to act, for the legal system to work, for public opinion to change, for unicorns and Skittle-dispensing fairies to fly out of our collective butts).

Nossir, we demand EXECUTIVE ACTION!!!! (a term used to describe what, during the Evil Bu$Hitler Era was once called Presidential Overreach).

2. "We must END [insert condition that has existed since the dawn of time and which no entity, anywhere, has the power to entirely prevent]"!!!!!11!

Example: we must end poverty. Never mind that even if we paid every soul in the U.S. a guaranteed living wage for doing absolutely nothing, there are still fools who would squander it all on wants and have no money left for rent/food/etc. And there would still be hungry children because some parents would spend all their money on booze or drugs instead of feeding their own progeny.

Making things slightly better is never enough. We must END Bad Things that make us feel icky. But we can't limit freedom to accomplish this because....

Oh, nevermind.

Anonymous said...

Today's front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune has the headline for an article on page A7: "Mass shootings are a daily occurrence in the United States."

The article itself, however, states near the end that a recent report from the Congressional News Service "found a slight uptick in shootings in which four or more victims die. The report found an average of 22.4 mass shootings a year from 2009 to 2013, compared with 20.2 in the previous five years."

Then it notes that James Alan Fox, a criminologist Northeastern University had pointed out that the average number of shootings had declined slightly from 2011 to 2014.

The article does not clearly say it, but it appears from the quotes from Mr. Fox that the New York Times reporters were fishing for ways to frame the data to get an uptick, and finally settled by on changing the meaning of "mass shooting" to include additional incidents.

Here is what a USA Today had to say about the same information,without the numbers from 2014:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/09/17/navy-yard-aaron-alexis-mass-shooting-column/2827015/
Mass murders less frequent than we think:
Despite tragic Navy Yard shooting, number of mass killings each year remain static.

NewYork Times writers Sharon LaFraniere, Sarah Cohen and Richard J. Oppel, Jr. did the same thing that the NYT recently did to Donald Trump: The NYT called Trump a liar based on shoddy, incomplete research of the wrong TV coverage in a very limited time frame. Then, it came out that the local CBS affiliate, not to mention many other outlets, carried the stories of Muslims celebrating the 9/11 incident after news was released that Osama bin Laden had been involved.

Valerie

raven said...

When "poverty" is defined by a percentage of the whole, there IS no way to eliminate it.

Facts mean nothing to the left. They will distort anything to try to achieve their end. Most of their "successes" come on the heels of an emotional tragedy when folks put their brains on the high shelf next to the canned peas.

The left is salivating over the idea that a Fed. bureaucrat, with no oversight , review or appeal, can deny someone their rights, by putting them on a list. Remember all that talk about the NRA being a "terrorist" organization?

This may simply be an attempt to get what they want by pushing- they push hard enough and one of two things happens- either they meet resistance and can then use the resulting event as "proof" , and escalate the war on western civilization, or people do not do not resist and the push continues forever. This is not about guns or violence- it is about total control of the person-
What the left intends is to re-introduce the institution of slavery, with the State as master. every action Will be Mandatory, or Forbidden.

MikeD said...

Today's front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune has the headline for an article on page A7: "Mass shootings are a daily occurrence in the United States."

One of the people who called me a "cold-hearted monster" cited this statistic as well. I asked him for proof of 332 mass shootings in the US since January 1. He linked this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/the-san-bernardino-mass-shooting-is-the-second-today-and-the-355th-this-year/

But apparently missed the point of this:
The Mass Shooting Tracker is different from other shooting databases in that it uses a broader definition of mass shooting — the old FBI definition focused on four or more people killed as part of a single shooting.

The fact is, they made up their own definition of mass shootings in order to inflate the numbers. It's like the claim that 1 in 5 women at colleges have been raped... as long as you count "unwanted advances" as rape, that is.