What did this girl have that she needed?

[Blind groper]

Seth

You need more education.

In this case, it is the false memory syndrome you need to study (found under that name on google)

This is something several research psychologists, like Dr. Elizabeth Loftus have studied in detail. It has strong application to the myth of the 80,000 to 2.5 million DGU's.

Basically, false memory syndrome is the formation of false memories by a person wanting to believe something has happened, and therefore 'remembering' it, or else having a false memory implanted by an outside influence, such as a counsellor asking leading questions.

Dr. Loftus found that if you ask people to remember an event that never happened, not only will most come up with some such memory, but 25% of those asked will 'remember' it years later.

How does this apply to DGU's? Simple.

There are roughly 100 million gun owners in the USA. A large fraction of them could be described as gun nutters. That is, people obsessed with guns, and (like you, Seth) possessed of a false belief that guns are good. A large percentage of gun nutters WANT to believe they experienced a DGU. As a result, they build a false memory, just like the 25% Dr. Loftus discovered.

Even so, there are not 2.5 million cases of perceived DGU's each year. That is a fantasy perpetrated by Lott, who has made millions of dollars by writing up such misleading and false data. More likely is the FBI figure of 80,000. But that 80,000 figure is not the number of DGU's. It is a result of a survey. In other words, people's reports of perceived DGU's, which is quite different.

All you need is a small percentage of those gun nutters to build a false memory about DGU's, and you comfortably explain the survey results.

Since such false memories have been demonstrated to be extremely common, on a wide range of issues, then it is totally realistic to expect them to apply to DGU perception also.

On stabbings versus gunshot wounds.

I am sure this is something you already know, Seth, and your contrary statements are just dishonesty at work.

A gunshot wound is very different to a stab wound, in terms of force applied. The thing is that most of the vital organs in the human body are well protected by bone. The brain protected by the skull, and the heart, lungs etc protected by the rib cage.

A bullet laughs at bone, and goes right through the skull or ribs, but those structures deflect most stabbing attacks quite easily. The idea of being stabbed in the heart is mostly myth. It can happen, but it takes a very strong man to force a knife between ribs, or else someone very skilled, to drive a dagger up under the ribs to the heart. Most stabbing would simply bounce off bone. Of course, a person could still bleed to death, but in today's world, there is normally an ambulance on the scene reasonably quickly.

A bullet wound, though, penetrates straight through to the vital organs, and kills rather too often.

Official statistics show 1 in 400 stabbings kill. 1 in 7 bullet wounds kill.

So, Seth, when discussing this, please stick to the facts.

[Seth]

Seth

You need more education.

In this case, it is the false memory syndrome you need to study (found under that name on google)

This is something several research psychologists, like Dr. Elizabeth Loftus have studied in detail. It has strong application to the myth of the 80,000 to 2.5 million DGU's.

Basically, false memory syndrome is the formation of false memories by a person wanting to believe something has happened, and therefore 'remembering' it, or else having a false memory implanted by an outside influence, such as a counsellor asking leading questions.

Dr. Loftus found that if you ask people to remember an event that never happened, not only will most come up with some such memory, but 25% of those asked will 'remember' it years later.

How does this apply to DGU's? Simple.

Yes, you are simple. And stupid.

There are roughly 100 million gun owners in the USA.

Liar.

A large fraction of them could be described as gun nutters.

Liar.

That is, people obsessed with guns, and (like you, Seth) possessed of a false belief that guns are good.

Liar.

A large percentage of gun nutters WANT to believe they experienced a DGU.

Liar.

As a result, they build a false memory, just like the 25% Dr. Loftus discovered.

Liar.

Even so, there are not 2.5 million cases of perceived DGU's each year.

Liar.

That is a fantasy perpetrated by Lott, who has made millions of dollars by writing up such misleading and false data.

Liar.

More likely is the FBI figure of 80,000. But that 80,000 figure is not the number of DGU's. It is a result of a survey. In other words, people's reports of perceived DGU's, which is quite different.

No it's not. The FBI figures come from a review of case reports, not a survey.

All you need is a small percentage of those gun nutters to build a false memory about DGU's, and you comfortably explain the survey results.

Except that's not how it works. Your speculation is just hoplophobe crap based in nothing more than supposition and conjecture.

Since such false memories have been demonstrated to be extremely common, on a wide range of issues, then it is totally realistic to expect them to apply to DGU perception also.

So, using your own citation, Dr. Loftus says that 25% of memories may be false memories, which means that 75% aren't, which even if you're correct, which you aren't, that's still 60,000 to 1.875 million non-false DGUs PER YEAR. And that's still many times more DGUs than your favorite number of 8000 handgun murders.

You still lose.

On stabbings versus gunshot wounds.

I am sure this is something you already know, Seth, and your contrary statements are just dishonesty at work.

A gunshot wound is very different to a stab wound, in terms of force applied. The thing is that most of the vital organs in the human body are well protected by bone. The brain protected by the skull, and the heart, lungs etc protected by the rib cage.

A bullet laughs at bone, and goes right through the skull or ribs, but those structures deflect most stabbing attacks quite easily. The idea of being stabbed in the heart is mostly myth. It can happen, but it takes a very strong man to force a knife between ribs, or else someone very skilled, to drive a dagger up under the ribs to the heart. Most stabbing would simply bounce off bone. Of course, a person could still bleed to death, but in today's world, there is normally an ambulance on the scene reasonably quickly.

A bullet wound, though, penetrates straight through to the vital organs, and kills rather too often.[/quote]

Only if the bullet hits a vital organ, which much of the time it does not. In fact, of all the shots fired by criminals only 15% hit anyone at all, and of those only 15% are fatal. So only 2.5% of shots fired by criminals are fatal. This militates for the victim carrying and being more proficient and accurate with his gun, so as to render the attacker incapable of continuing the action that prompted the victim to shoot him in the first place, whether the criminal is attacking with a knife, a gun, a club, a broken beer bottle or a tire iron.

Official statistics show 1 in 400 stabbings kill. 1 in 7 bullet wounds kill.

As I said. According to your own figures, only 14.2% of bullet wounds are fatal. But the chances that one will actually be hit by a bullet from a criminal's gun is itself quite small, assuming that you are ever even shot at, which the vast majority of people aren't.

And in any event, even if what you say is true, all you're doing is reinforcing the justification for carrying a gun for self-defense, because that statistic works the other way too. A handgun is a much better defensive weapon than a knife is for several reasons including lethality.

As for "stabbings" you know less about knife fighting than you do guns. The best way to kill someone with a knife is to slash vital points like the brachial artery, the jugular vein, the femoral artery, or the kidneys, not stab them. How you attack someone with a knife depends on what kind of knife you have. Stabbing is the amateur method. Slashing is far more effective and quite devastating. But even stabbing is bad because it might not kill you instantly, but it will kill you all the same unless you get immediate treatment. By the way, the entire abdomen is open to knife wounds, as are the armpits, inside upper arms, behind the knees, around the kidneys below the ribcage.

The pro method is to sneak up behind the victim, grab his chin with your left hand and pull it to the left and insert the knife vertically, which should be at least 6 inches long, into the space just behind the clavicle on the right side, near the neck. This cuts the aortic arch and the victim blacks out within seconds and dies very quickly.

The second method is the military tactic of approaching the same way, left hand over the mouth and insert the dagger into the kidneys. Even a short knife inserted into the kidneys will instantly render the individual helpless with agonizing pain and they will bleed out very quickly.

Even more so if the brachial artery is severed.

Now, how many stabbings/knife attacks are there each year? We know about handgun murders, that's about 8000.

So, Seth, when discussing this, please stick to the facts.

You first.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Repeatedly calling me a liar simply reinforces the obvious truth that you do not have the data to oppose what I say.

On the 25% false memories, please re-read what I said, because you misread my message completely. Sheesh!

You make a big thing about how a professional killer can kill with a knife. Sure, I do not dispute that. Anyone with training and practice can become good at whatever they are trained and practiced at. But the point I make is that (British stats) only 1 in 400 stabbing wounds are fatal, while 1 in 7 gunshot wounds are fatal. Even if you are right, and only 15% of bullets fired actually hit anyone, that is still 8 times as lethal as a knife attack.

However, the thing that makes you wrong, wrong, and wrong all the time, is your refusal to look at international data. The USA is the murder capital of the western world, with 5 times the per capita murder rate of my country, and 4 times higher than most other western nations. The murder rate, as Harvard and Boston Universities found, and as my own figures show, is very strongly linked to gun ownership. More guns mean more murders.

[mistermack]

There's a film on the telly in half an hour, called Amish Grace.

It's about a school shooting that happened in 2006, in Pennsylvania.
I looked it up on wikipedia, to see if it was interesting.

It looks like the standard loony US school shooting, by a nutter with a gun.
He killed five little girls and very seriously injured five more.

One bit on wiki was of interest though. This happened in October, and it was the 24th school shooting of that year !!

Like I've said before, if you live on a shit pile, you don't notice the stink.
That's the only way I can imagine that Americans could think this is normal.

The Bush administration held a conference to discuss the issue of school violence.[65]

Sorted.

[Hermit]

Yabbut if everybody in the schools was packin' heat, man, and the nutters knew that, they'd all turn sane immediately and abandon their crazy plans. If one or two of them unaccountably persevered with them, the teachers would outdraw the baddies with already drawn guns because even though they are concentrating on telling Jimmy to stop pulling Jacky's plaits. Teachers are always that much faster on account of being the goodies. For the same reason they never miss their target, let alone kill one or two of their students by mistake. Oh, and teachers themselves never ever lose it. FACT!

[Seth]

Seth

Repeatedly calling me a liar simply reinforces the obvious truth that you do not have the data to oppose what I say.

I've stated the evidence hundreds of times, just as you have lied hundreds of times. I've got other things to do.

On the 25% false memories, please re-read what I said, because you misread my message completely. Sheesh!

No I didn't.

You make a big thing about how a professional killer can kill with a knife. Sure, I do not dispute that. Anyone with training and practice can become good at whatever they are trained and practiced at. But the point I make is that (British stats) only 1 in 400 stabbing wounds are fatal, while 1 in 7 gunshot wounds are fatal. Even if you are right, and only 15% of bullets fired actually hit anyone, that is still 8 times as lethal as a knife attack.

So what? All that means is that handguns are eight times as effective for self defense, which happens 10 to 300 times as often as criminal attack.

However, the thing that makes you wrong, wrong, and wrong all the time, is your refusal to look at international data. The USA is the murder capital of the western world, with 5 times the per capita murder rate of my country, and 4 times higher than most other western nations. The murder rate, as Harvard and Boston Universities found, and as my own figures show, is very strongly linked to gun ownership. More guns mean more murders.

No it doesn't, as proven by the increase in guns in the US versus the continuously dropping murder (and other crime) rates.

The key is who has the guns. You refuse to distinguish between lawful ownership and use of guns for self defense and illegal possession and use for crime. That's a logical and rational failure on your part that causes you to spout bogus statistics referencing an issue that is not suitable for statistical analysis because the right to effective self defense is not apportioned to individuals on a statistical basis, it's complete and absolute for each individual.

[Seth]

Yabbut if everybody in the schools was packin' heat, man, and the nutters knew that, they'd all turn sane immediately and abandon their crazy plans. If one or two of them unaccountably persevered with them, the teachers would outdraw the baddies with already drawn guns because even though they are concentrating on telling Jimmy to stop pulling Jacky's plaits. Teachers are always that much faster on account of being the goodies. For the same reason they never miss their target, let alone kill one or two of their students by mistake. Oh, and teachers themselves never ever lose it. FACT!

No, a couple of teachers approach the shooter from different angles and put him under fire, causing him to retreat and take cover, thereby preventing him from killing more innocents and giving them time to escape or take cover.

I refer you to Jeanne Assam, an armed civilian working at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs who, along with another armed civilian, Larry Bourbonnais, took the shooter under fire and kept him out of the sanctuary where more than a thousand people were gathered, thereby limiting the deaths caused by the attack to two unarmed young women shot in the parking lot.

There are other examples of teachers using their guns to stop school shooters. There are also examples of unarmed teachers using fire extinguishers or their own bodies in vain attempts to stop the killing. Specifically, Newtown, Connecticut, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach attacked the killer with their bare hands in an attempt to stop the killing. Both died.

Had either, or preferably both of them been armed, even with, say, a shotgun or two stored in a quick-access gun safe in the school office, they would have been able to at least return fire at the shooter, distracting him and delaying him, giving teachers more time to secure doors and evacuate and hide children. Quite possibly they could have ended the shooting then and there, especially if, for example, school janitor Rick Thorne, who also confronted the shooter, had likewise been armed, which would have provided a tactically-superior crossfire situation.

I really wish people who are ignorant of the strategy and tactics of armed encounters would shut their ignorant yaps when the experts (like me) deign to educate them.

[mistermack]

I refer you to Jeanne Assam, an armed civilian working at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs who, along with another armed civilian, Larry Bourbonnais, took the shooter under fire and kept him out of the sanctuary where more than a thousand people were gathered, thereby limiting the deaths caused by the attack to two unarmed young women shot in the parking lot.

There are other examples of teachers using their guns to stop school shooters. There are also examples of unarmed teachers using fire extinguishers or their own bodies in vain attempts to stop the killing. Specifically, Newtown, Connecticut, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach attacked the killer with their bare hands in an attempt to stop the killing. Both died.

What did I tell you all?
There's a terrible stink round here. What this dung heap needs is more shit.

Professor Seth.

[Seth]

I refer you to Jeanne Assam, an armed civilian working at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs who, along with another armed civilian, Larry Bourbonnais, took the shooter under fire and kept him out of the sanctuary where more than a thousand people were gathered, thereby limiting the deaths caused by the attack to two unarmed young women shot in the parking lot.

There are other examples of teachers using their guns to stop school shooters. There are also examples of unarmed teachers using fire extinguishers or their own bodies in vain attempts to stop the killing. Specifically, Newtown, Connecticut, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach attacked the killer with their bare hands in an attempt to stop the killing. Both died.

What did I tell you all?
There's a terrible stink round here. What this dung heap needs is more shit.

Professor Seth.

I think it's sad that you find the killing of children in school preferable to arming teachers to prevent them from being killed.

[Blind groper]

Much better than permitting children to be killed is to remove access to guns from all the nutters. The only way you can do that is to tighten gun control. This has already been done in all of the wealthy advanced western nations with sane governments. ie. all but one.

My country, for example, has had two mass shootings in 50 years. (Mass shooting is defined as 5 or more victims killed each time). The USA over that same period had about 1000. Since the USA has about 60 times the population of NZ, you can see that, on a per capita basis, they have about 18 times as many mass shootings.

Why do they have so many more? Simple. Easy access to guns.

But, once more, we can expect Seth to utterly ignore international comparisons. This is his blind spot. If it does not happen in the USA, he does not even think about it.

He claims that the drop in murder rate over the past 3 decades is due to Americans having more guns. He fails to note that the same drop happened in another 23 nations, besides the USA, and there was no increase in gun ownership in any of those 23 nations.

Conclusion : the drop in murder rate had nothing to do with any increase in guns. But Seth has his internatonal blind spot and cannot see what is clear as day to the rest of us.

[Hermit]

But, once more, we can expect Seth to utterly ignore international comparisons. This is his blind spot. If it does not happen in the USA, he does not even think about it.

Ayup. In addition to ignoring the big picture his usual fallback position is to say something like "Fuck your statistics. We haz unalienable rights. Must defend ourselves from the tyranny of government."

[Seth]

Much better than permitting children to be killed is to remove access to guns from all the nutters. The only way you can do that is to tighten gun control.

Nonsense and you know it. You know that the only way to keep guns away from "nutters" is to eliminate guns from the planet. You also know this is not possible to do, and even if you did, nutters would just use knives (Japan) or gasoline or explosives or something else because nutters are nuts and they want to kill people. Hell, all they have to do is drive a truck through a schoolyard during recess.

This has already been done in all of the wealthy advanced western nations with sane governments.

And...it doesn't work, despite your cherry-picking "wealthy advanced western nations" bullshit.

These are some of the worst school shootings in recent years:

The Mercaz HaRav massacre, also called the Mercaz HaRav shooting, was an attack that occurred on 6 March 2008, in which a lone Palestinian gunman shot multiple students at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem, Israel, after which the gunman himself was shot dead.
September 23, 2008: Matti Saari, 22, killed nine fellow students and a teacher before shooting himself at a school in Kauhajoki, Finland.

November 7, 2007: Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, shoots and kills eight people and himself at a high school in Tuusula, Finland.

November 20, 2006: Sebastian Bosse, 18, goes on a rampage at his former high school in Emsdetten, Germany, near the Dutch border, shooting and injuring four students and the school janitor. Police commandos later found Bosse dead.

The Beslan school hostage crisis (also referred to as the Beslan school siege or Beslan massacre)[2][3][4] started on 1 September 2004, lasted three days and involved the capture of over 1,100 people as hostages (including 777 children),[5] ending with the death of 385 people.
April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, previously expelled from a school in Erfurt, Germany, kills 13 teachers, two former classmates and a policeman, before committing suicide.

March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, killed 16 nursery children and their teacher in Dunblane, then shot himself.

The Ma'alot massacre[1] occurred in May 1974 and involved a two-day hostage-taking of 115 people which ended in the deaths of over 25 hostages.

ie. all but one.

For all the good it did them.

Dr. Lott: No. Europe has a lot of multiple victim shootings. If you look at a per capita rate, the rate of multiple-victim public shootings in Europe and the United States over the last 10 years have been fairly similar to each other. A couple of years ago you had a couple of big shootings in Finland. About two-and-a-half years ago you had a big shooting in the U.K., 12 people were killed.

You had Norway last year [where 77 died]. Two years ago, you had the shooting in Austria at a Sikh Temple. There have been several multiple-victim public shootings in France over the last couple of years. Over the last decade, you’ve had a couple of big school shootings in Germany. Germany in terms of modern incidents has two of the four worst public-school shootings, and they have very strict gun-control laws. The one common feature of all of those shootings in Europe is that they all take place in gun-free zones, in places where guns are supposed to be banned.

My country, for example, has had two mass shootings in 50 years. (Mass shooting is defined as 5 or more victims killed each time). The USA over that same period had about 1000.

Liar.

Since 1863 there have been 83 "mass killings" in the US out of a list of 91 in Europe, 85 in Africa/Middle East, 39 in the Americas not including the US, 127 in Asia, 124 in Oceania and Maritime Southeast Asia (which includes NZ-3 and AUS-5). New Zealand has had 3 "familial" mass killings with a total of 13 victims, There have been 35 mass school killings in the US, out of a total of 91 school killings worldwide, including 1 in NZ. Source

Since the USA has about 60 times the population of NZ, you can see that, on a per capita basis, they have about 18 times as many mass shootings.

Why do they have so many more? Simple. Easy access to guns.

And yet people are killed in New Zealand, and everywhere else, with guns, even in places like Japan where gun control is as rigid as it gets.

But, once more, we can expect Seth to utterly ignore international comparisons. This is his blind spot. If it does not happen in the USA, he does not even think about it.

Oh, it happens everywhere. No doubt about that at all.

He claims that the drop in murder rate over the past 3 decades is due to Americans having more guns.

Liar.

I said, and continue to say, "more guns, less crime." That is an observed fact, not speculation. The correlation is there. Whether the increase in guns resulted in the drop in crime is a matter of debate, but what is absolutely true is that an increase in the number of guns in the US, a MASSIVE increase, has NOT resulted in an increase in crime. Crime continues to go down, for whatever reason. Therefore your claim of "more guns, more crime" is a lie, plain and simple.

He fails to note that the same drop happened in another 23 nations, besides the USA, and there was no increase in gun ownership in any of those 23 nations.

Strawman argument. What the worldwide drop in crime proves, when contrasted with the increase in guns in the US, is that your claim is a lie. It is not true that more guns equals more crime. The opposite is factually true. But you continually ignore this fact because it utterly destroys your entire argument.

Conclusion : the drop in murder rate had nothing to do with any increase in guns.

And more importantly, the murder rate did not go up, it continued to go down as more and more guns came into private hands in the US.

That completely destroys your entire argument.

But Seth has his internatonal blind spot and cannot see what is clear as day to the rest of us.

[/quote]

Actually, your "statistics" serve only to prove my claim and destroy yours utterly. Crime keeps going down, even as more and more guns enter the market in the US.

QED.

[Blind groper]

Seth

It would be really, really nice if you actually learned how to interpret statistics.

Where some phenomenon is influenced by two or more factors, no single factor will explain all its changes. The number of murders is influenced by number of guns, in that more guns lead to more murders. This is not just me talking. It is the position of America's leading universities also, as I have shown.

However, it is not the only factor influencing murder rates. If you lived in Pakistan, in the Taliban areas, you would see a massive murder rate, and the cause would not be religious idiocy. If you live in Columbia where drugs are made and sold, the high murder rate would be due to the drug trade. In the same way, even though more guns means more murders, that is not the primary reason for the increase in murders in western nations from the late 1960's, nor the primary reason for the drop in murders after 1990. The reason for that, I have told you time and time again, is due to a change in the age composition of the various populations due to the baby boom. Only that explanation is sufficient to explain the fact that the drop in murders happened right across the western world simultaneously.

Your much repeated claim that more guns mean less crime is 'demonstrated' only by John Lott, who has been described by his academic peers as having faulty research methods, and publishing conclusions that are exactly opposite to what other researchers find. I can tell you exactly why.

If you were given a report that said smoking improved human health, and you saw that the research was sponsored by a tobacco company, you would know it was bullshit. Yet you keep offering me data saying guns are good, put together by a man who has made millions of dollars with that message.

Come on, Seth. How stupid do you think we all are? We would not believe the tobacco company and we are not going to believe stuff from a guy so clearly money motivated.

[Hermit]

There's this bloke who made millions of pounds spreading a message. The message was that there is an almost zero % chance that gods exist. I'm stupid not stupid, so I'll conclude that there is an almost 100% chance that they do.

[Seth]

Seth

It would be really, really nice if you actually learned how to interpret statistics.

This is not a statistical argument, so there's no need to do so.

Where some phenomenon is influenced by two or more factors, no single factor will explain all its changes. The number of murders is influenced by number of guns, in that more guns lead to more murders. This is not just me talking. It is the position of America's leading universities also, as I have shown.

Well, they are as full of shit as you are, and Harvard in particular is a well-known hotbed of anti-gun zealotry. Be that as it may, there is a simple fact at work in the US that neither you nor your pet hoplophobes can refute: More guns, less crime.


Come on, Seth. How stupid do you think we all are? [/quote]

"We?" You got a ferret in your pocket or something? As for you, I think you're pretty damned stupid. Probably more stupid than all of the abysmally stupid hoplophobes I've ever met who also have difficulty interpreting a simple fact: More guns, less crime.