guns
gregladen | October 3, 2017First a word about our lovely press. If I hear one more reporter grovel and squirm about how we don't really want to hurt the NRA or take away any gun rights or do anything unreasonable, no, no, we just want to assume there is a solution to the carnage that does not inconvenience any of the gun loving yahoos that watch our networks .... then I'm going to I just don't know what. Reporters: Please leave open the possibility that a double digit percentage of Americans don't care one whit how much restrictions there ends up being on guns. We just want the insanity to end, and if that means…
gregladen | July 8, 2017You've seen this horrid person in this horrid video calling for white people to take up arms and kill black people (and maybe Jews).
In this video, the NRA calls white supremacists to arms against everyone. In so many words.
The ad uses mostly dog whistles, so if your head is stuck deep in the sand, or up some orifice or another, you may be able to block out the message.
But anyone with 2+ neurons to rub together and who has not been living in a cave for the last 30 years knows the exact meaning of "clenched fist" and "I'm freedom's safest place [gasp]" against the propaganda spread by…
mspringer | January 28, 2013This post is political. As always, physics readers who don't care about politics are encouraged to skip it. I've got an actual physics post going up tomorrow.
Mark and I have been conducting a debate/discussion over gun control in the United States. For the first round, here's his post and my response. Here's his second round post, and this post is my response.
First, let me summarize where the debate stands. We have four main topics as set forth in Mark's posts: gun violence in "ordinary" crime, gun violence in the context of mass shootings, suggestions for gun control, and miscellaneous…
mspringer | January 14, 2013Recently a number of ScienceBloggers including Mark Hoofnagle of Denialism and myself have written posts about guns and gun control in the United States. While the internet tends to generate more heat than light, we decided that it might be worth having a discussion and debate about the subject. His opening salvo is here, at his blog. I recommend reading it first. He argues that substantial new gun control is both necessary and helpful, and I will generally disagree. As always, I apologize to my physics readers for yielding to the temptation to wax political. I know I dislike it when my…
lborkowski | January 11, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Amidst discussions of new gun control measures, a study finds that adding new settings where people can bring concealed weapons could increase the risk of some crimes.
The study authors note that while that risk is pretty small, it's still a risk and one that policymakers should take into consideration. Published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined 2001–2009 data from the Texas Department of Public Safety on criminal convictions associated with holders and nonholders of concealed handgun licenses (CHL). It found that concealed…
mspringer | December 17, 2012The shootings in Connecticut are a monstrous act of incomprehensible horror. For all the atrocities visited upon the world in the last hundred years, this is still without doubt among the most appallingly evil acts ever performed by a single person. And he is dead, and beyond the reach of human justice.
Normally I'd wait for the story to wane and passions to cool before commenting on the nakedly political aspects of a catastrophe, but this story is so hideous, so devastating, that many people have been viscerally compelled to speak: How can the permissive laws preferred by people like you…
cmonforton | July 23, 2012A night out for the midnight premiere of the summer blockbuster "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises" turned deadly. Twelve people are dead and at least 59 were wounded. The victims will be mourned, the suspect studied, and the incident relegated to our criminal justice system. In my circle, however, we see gun violence a public health problem. It affects people, it causes death, injury and disability, and it can be addressed with environmental, legal, and behavioral interventions. A classic paper examining violence in a public health frame was published in a 1993 issue of the journal Health…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
sastyk | May 5, 2010"It is funny, but not that funny."
Eric's comment does not stop my uncontrollable giggling. My step-mother comes over to see why I'm hysterical. She agrees with Eric - it is funny, but not funny enough to explain why tears of laughter are literally coming out of my eyes.
I'm reading a passage in Michael Perry's excellent book _Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting_. I gave the book to my step-mother for her birthday, and during a family visit (note blog silence) from which we returned last night, I finally read it.
Now I read a lot of the "How We Done Moved to a Farm and Made Fools…
stoat | April 8, 2010So much to rant about, so little time. Where to start?
How about with that fool Broon, who is now reduced to "it was the wrong sort of recession". Not quite literally, but very very close (for those not blessed with residence in the Sceptered Isle, "The wrong sort of X" is now a saying, begun by our much-beloved British Rail a few winters back when after a very thin snowfall brought all the trains to a standstill (again) they earned derision for saying that it was "the wrong sort of snow"). So what happened? It was on R4 this morning, Broon appearing for an interview. The obvious question: "…
grrlscientist | February 5, 2010tags: A Brief History of the United States of America, humor, funny,comedy, African-Americans, Black Americans, guns, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, NRA, National Rifle Association, racism, streaming video
This video explains the intimate relationship between guns, freedom and racism. Yes, I know there are exceptions to this guns-freedom-racism link, but I grew up among morons like this, and I couldn't escape from their festering hatred fast enough.
razib | November 12, 2009Greg Laden vs. Matt Springer. Here are some Nidal Hasan headlines (via Steve).
grrlscientist | September 23, 2009tags: little boy, burglar, offbeat, humor, funny, satire, streaming video
This video is an interview with a little boy who uses his father's gun to shoot a burglar, and then, when the wounded burglar is screaming in pain, he proceeds to shoot off other appendages, too. It's all in a night's work.
Little Boy Heroically Shoots, Mutilates Burglar
palmd | April 8, 2009I'm not real interested in blogging about politics. It's just not my thing. But the recent increase in absurd and frankly scary rhetoric from the right is giving me the shpilkes. It's not just the tea-baggers (heh heh...I said "tea bagger"), but I might as well say something about their lame-ass tea parties. These tea parties differ, but many of them involve sending tea bags to a representative or to the IRS to protest taxes. These "parties" don't actually protest higher taxes, just the idea of taxes. After all, taxes have always sucked, and no one was having tea parties under Reagan,…
revere | December 9, 2008Old folks are dangerous enough. I should know. I am one. Bad enough you allow me to hurtle down the highway in semi-control of a couple of tons of steel while thinking about science (at least I'm not thinking about decking some young thing or even decking some young thing while hurtling down the highway in semi-control of a couple tons of steel). But put a weapon specially designed for my cold, arthritic hands? (OK, they're not arthritic, but they probably will be soon). This story (hat tip reader emc) is almost too bizarre:
A US company claims to have received federal approval to market a 9…
revere | April 14, 2008Boingboing had a short notice about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System ("FARS"), plugging it as an all purpose dicing and slicing source for information on motor vehicle related deaths in the US. You can make your own custom queries to find out about auto fatalities in your own county. FARS is a great resource. But there is another one, hosted at CDC, that is even better: WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, "whiskers").
WISQARS reports injury statistics for each state over time. You can also compare your…
revere | January 20, 2008The second leading cause of death in the 5 to 18 year old age group in the US is homicide. These are school aged children and the first thing that comes to mind are the big names like Columbine and Virginia Tech. But we know there are other school-related homicides that kill only one or two. Moreover there seem to be more of them than we remember from years past. But are there?
CDC, in conjunction with the US Department of Education and the US Department of Justice undertook to find out for the period July 1999 to June 2006. It turns out not to be an easy task since there is no central…
revere | December 3, 2007Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon to build a remote-controlled unmanned tank.
A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness…
revere | June 28, 2007Since I'm a professor I notice stories about professor's rights. I'm all for having my rights. But there are some rights I don't think professors need to have or should have:
The Nevada System of Higher Education's Board of Regents has endorsed a plan that would encourage faculty and staff members to go about their business armed with guns that could be used to thwart an attack like the one that took 32 lives at Virginia Tech in April. According to the Web site of KLAS, a local television station in Las Vegas, the regents approved a plan under which the system would pay a $3,000 fee for each…
revere | June 15, 2007We discussed Tasers quite a bit on the old site (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) but not since we moved to ScienceBlogs. Tasers are the only widely used "non-lethal weapons," delivering a jolt of 50,000 volts thrugh two small darts connected to the handheld gun by thin wires and shot into the target. The device is made by Taser, International and has been the subject of repeated reports of lethal outcomes (see concerns of Amnesty International), reports the company repeatedly and aggressively denies. The combination of being tasered and being on…