Knife attack kills 27 people, wounds 109

[Hermit]

The point you miss is that increased availability of lethal weapons can increase the possibility of mass murder.

...the probabilities of mass murder are higher where the civilian population is disarmed. Almost all of the mass killings in the US have happened where guns are prohibited either by law or by the management of the property. This is not an irrelevant factor.

Australia, on the other hand, had 8 mass murders involving firearms in the 12 years leading up to the 1996 gun buyback scheme and 0 in the 17 years that followed.

Is it really kind to spoil Seth's theories with inconvenient facts?

Maybe. I expect him to deny that his theories are spoilt. His reply will include - among others - any of these words: "Nope", "Irrelevant", "Fallacy", "Inalienable Rights", "Unethical", or some combination thereof. Alternately, he'll just pass by my post without commenting at all.

[pErvinalia]

Marxist Alinsky Propaganda Wayback Machine Fallacy!!

[Warren Dew]

The point you miss is that increased availability of lethal weapons can increase the possibility of mass murder.

...the probabilities of mass murder are higher where the civilian population is disarmed. Almost all of the mass killings in the US have happened where guns are prohibited either by law or by the management of the property. This is not an irrelevant factor.

Australia, on the other hand, had 8 mass murders involving firearms in the 12 years leading up to the 1996 gun buyback scheme and 0 in the 17 years that followed.

Is it really kind to spoil Seth's theories with inconvenient facts?

What facts? You mean the fact that Hermit has to insert that "involving firearms" part to avoid counting things like the mass murder this thread is about?

[JimC]

The point you miss is that increased availability of lethal weapons can increase the possibility of mass murder.

...the probabilities of mass murder are higher where the civilian population is disarmed. Almost all of the mass killings in the US have happened where guns are prohibited either by law or by the management of the property. This is not an irrelevant factor.

Australia, on the other hand, had 8 mass murders involving firearms in the 12 years leading up to the 1996 gun buyback scheme and 0 in the 17 years that followed.

Is it really kind to spoil Seth's theories with inconvenient facts?

What facts? You mean the fact that Hermit has to insert that "involving firearms" part to avoid counting things like the mass murder this thread is about?

It was a perfectly reasonable rebuttal to Seth's generalisation that "the probabilities of mass murder are higher where the civilian population is disarmed"

[Hermit]

...the probabilities of mass murder are higher where the civilian population is disarmed. Almost all of the mass killings in the US have happened where guns are prohibited either by law or by the management of the property. This is not an irrelevant factor.

Australia, on the other hand, had 8 mass murders involving firearms in the 12 years leading up to the 1996 gun buyback scheme and 0 in the 17 years that followed.

Is it really kind to spoil Seth's theories with inconvenient facts?

What facts? You mean the fact that Hermit has to insert that "involving firearms" part to avoid counting things like the mass murder this thread is about?

It was a perfectly reasonable rebuttal to Seth's generalisation that "the probabilities of mass murder are higher where the civilian population is disarmed"

But even if you include all mass murders not involving firearms - there were three of them - all committed via arson. Or, to put it in another way, there were 3.8 more mass killings and 3.2 deaths in each year leading up to the gun buyback compared to every one in the following years. The facts applying to Australia still shoot holes, so to speak, through Seth's assertion, even if non-firearm mass killings are included. Also, I did not bother with the arson cases because I don't know if even Seth would try to claim that an armed population would have prevented them. Two of the fires were lit when everybody was asleep and the third was started in the bush one kilometre away from the building that housed the victims.

[SnowLeopard]

Lovely. Is that helping gays in Uganda or Ukrainians in Crimea or civilians in Sudan or anybody else anywhere on earth?

Nope.

The UN is comprised of a bunch of fuckwit bureaucrats partying with hookers and blow on their respective government's dime who accomplish exactly zero by way of "safeguarding" anyone. Dumb fucks that work for them aren't even allowed to load their weapons and their blue helmets make dandy targets.

If you're depending on the UN to keep the tyranny of the majority from slitting your throat you might want to go talk to the Serbs and Croats about how well that works.

You're just talking pure nonsensical strawman/hyperbolic/every other word/fantasy pish now in lieu of making any actual point now it seems.

The abundance of AK47s in Africa isn't helping the Ugandan gays much either is it.

If you think your pea shooters would stop a majority being able to slit your throat indefinitely in the event of this apparent imminent complete collapse of our civilization you're expecting which is actually never going to happen, you're in for a bad time

[MrJonno]

The best thing a gay person in Uganda can do is not try to get hold of an AK47 and have an armed revolution but to claim political asylum somewhere else and perhaps aid a political campaign as an exile

[SnowLeopard]

Our government does NOTHING without our consent.

LOL

Well that's your final grip on reality broken

If it tries to do something the People don't agree with there are many avenues of redress which all culminate in one simple form of redress that protects all the others: the resort to armed rebellion.

Oh so like every other country on earth then. How very not special of you.

I missed the armed rebellion following the NSA spying on American citizens. What page of the paper was that on again? Maybe you can link me to a photocopy of the ballot paper where you ticked "YES" to allowing the NSA to spy on you. Cus, you know, they do NOTHING without your consent after all...

It's unfortunate that you don't realize the only reason you're allowed to be "armed" is that the government knows it could wipe the floor with you terrorists if it wanted to...

[MrJonno]

When you elect a government power is given (or preferably loaned) to that government.

To assume power post election still resides with the people is not only naive it would be impossible to run society on that basis.

If you think power resides with you, then next time you are caught speeding (or in Seth's case shooting the postman) see how far you get when you say the policeman doesn't have the power to arrest you

[Seth]

It was you who introduced the concept of aloneness, by describing the hypothetical situation of a mob lynching an individual. All I did was point out that gun laws don't make any difference to that situation, given that they tend to either increase or decrease the supply of guns to everybody. The reality of uneven numbers is still what it was.

Now you're just changing the subject to somebody fighting when the numbers AREN'T so unequal. Presumably because you know you were writing incoherent gibberish in the first place.

Problem is that you seem unable to reason by analogy. I have never claimed that an individual can successfully fend off a mob of people intent on killing him, although he can try and take as many of the mob with him as possible and possibly dissuade the mob from continuing the attack by killing a few critical members...such as those who are leading/instigating the mob. The "whatever else happens you die first" argument with a gun pointed at the most vocal instigators can be remarkably effective...or not.

At any rate, the actual point is that where no one but the government has arms, EVERYONE, meaning every individual and all individuals collectively are at the mercy of those who do have the guns. On the other hand, when everyone is armed the likelihood that a mob will seek to persecute a minority is substantially reduced because even if the minority is not able on it's own, individually or collectively, to defend itself, the wider armed community that does not agree with the actions of the mob can stand to and help to defend the minority against mob action. It is this balance of power that works at literally all levels of human interaction, from international geopolitics stabilized by strong militaries to nuclear deterrence created by MAD to the neighbors next door who are willing to come and help you out if you're in peril, when it comes to criminal violence instigated by one person or many, the concept of an armed society is the best way to deter, prevent or terminate such threats. Being unarmed does nothing but make everyone who might want to help as helpless to help as those helpless neighbors they are trying to, or want to help.

The problem is never too many guns in private hands, it's always too few guns in the right private hands and too many guns only in the hands of criminals and despots.

This is why in Mexico, locals have formed their own militias to fight the narcoterrorists. And guess what? After first trying to disband these local militias the Mexican government and military has accepted and begun supporting them because they are actually having a beneficial effect on driving narcoterrorists out of the communities they protect. Mexico, like the US, has a law allowing locals to form militias for exactly that sort of thing, but unlike the US, Mexico generally forbids citizens to keep and bear arms, and specifically denies them access to military-grade weapons on par with those possessed illegally by the narcoterrorists. But despite being much less well-armed than the narcoterrorists, group action using what arms they have has proven to be successful in the fight against organized crime.

Were such efforts undertaken in the US the effects would be immediate and decisive. A strong citizen's militia armed with military-grade weapons deployed along the border would put a stop to drug and human smuggling literally overnight. But neither Mexico nor the Progressive Democrats want either to be stopped because human trafficking supposedly benefits the Progressive voter fraud machine and drug smuggling justifies the "War on Some Drugs" that wastes more than ten BILLION dollars a year on militarizing our police forces, which the Progressives want so that they can use those militarized police forces to better oppress the rest of us.

In places like Africa, where genocidal attacks are disgustingly common, the problem again is not too many guns, it's too few guns in the hands of the potential victims of genocide.

This is true and has been true everywhere throughout human history. Only an armed citizenry is able to defend against both public and private tyranny. Thus it will always be.

[Seth]

Our government does NOTHING without our consent.

LOL

Well that's your final grip on reality broken

If it tries to do something the People don't agree with there are many avenues of redress which all culminate in one simple form of redress that protects all the others: the resort to armed rebellion.

Oh so like every other country on earth then. How very not special of you.

I missed the armed rebellion following the NSA spying on American citizens. What page of the paper was that on again? Maybe you can link me to a photocopy of the ballot paper where you ticked "YES" to allowing the NSA to spy on you. Cus, you know, they do NOTHING without your consent after all...

It's unfortunate that you don't realize the only reason you're allowed to be "armed" is that the government knows it could wipe the floor with you terrorists if it wanted to...

You mean like it "wiped the floor" with the Afghan and Iraqi terrorists? If and when the American people decide that government has stepped outsides the bounds of power it's been granted by them, and when political and legal recourse have failed to rectify the problem, they have the ability and the arms to take direct action to put down a tyrant and they outnumber our standing military (including reserves) by nearly 300 to one, and that assumes that the military as a whole would obey orders to wage war on US citizens, which is actually highly unlikely. You see, the Founders thought of all of this long, long ago and they were way more intelligent than you can ever hope to be.

You're a dunce who doesn't understand military strategy or tactics or the nature and use of asymmetrical warfare and insurgency, particularly where the whole of the populace is well-armed.

So shut the fuck up and go back to your haggis.

[Seth]

The abundance of AK47s in Africa isn't helping the Ugandan gays much either is it.

Only because they don't have any.

If you think your pea shooters would stop a majority being able to slit your throat indefinitely in the event of this apparent imminent complete collapse of our civilization you're expecting which is actually never going to happen, you're in for a bad time

Maybe, maybe not. I never said I'd be acting alone. Nor did I say I might not die. But even if I am I can certainly take a whole lot of the mob with me before I go...because I'm well armed and well trained.

What the fuck are YOU going to do? Shoot arrows at them? Threaten the mob with your bitty little sock knife?

You know what we free people call sheeple like you?

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Corpses

[rainbow]

You know what we free people call sheeple like you?

Civilised?

[Seth]

You know what we free people call sheeple like you?

Civilised?

Nope. Corpses.

[MrJonno]

You know what we call people who call other people sheeple terrorists hopefully soon to be in jail terrorists