School Walkouts

[Durian Fiend]

Comments from an NRA spokesman after the march were the typical snarling, dismissive and disrespectful crap we've come to expect.

As they say, when leaders act like children and children act like adults, it's a sign that change is on the way.

[punaticbychoice]

Some believe in static reality- but change happens even if it's not wanted.
GW Hegel(among others) and dialectics you know.

[Old Croc]

"When's the last time that happened in Puna?"

2011? But it was only attempted murder. Close enough for me.

http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/10/puna-...-shooting/

[punaticbychoice]

Old Croc @ 13:43:10 03/25/2018-
Just a heads up, your link was classified as malicious by my system.
Seriously- not a smart ass comment.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

2011? But it was only attempted murder. Close enough for me.

How many other incidents which happen, or in this case didn't happen - - once a decade or so, incidents that affect one person out of 200,000 living on Big Island, would cause you to respond in a similar manner? Do you stop going in the ocean if one shark bites, excuse me, almost bites a swimmer every 7 or 8 years?

BTW, most of the gun related incidents here are between relatives. Stay on the good side of your cuz and you'll probably be ok.

[Old Croc]

punatic: the link works fine on my system.
HOPTE: I'm not sure what your point is, but mine is that I don't want to be defenseless during a home invasion, because many seriously bad things could happen.

[PaulW]

Home invasions are extremely rare, it's usually drug dealers attacking each other.
Certainly not worth the risk of bringing a deadly weapon into your house.
But I do agree with you that military style weapons are not needed for so-called home defence.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

I'm not sure what your point is

My point was that an individual's risk on Big Island for a random home invasion or a random shark attack are similar. Almost nonexistent. If you believe it's necessary to arm yourself against a violent break-in, you should also find it necessary to arm yourself against sharks if you go in the ocean. The risk is similar.

If you want to combine the dual pleasures of insanity and social acceptance, religion is your only choice. - Last Aphorisms

[oink]

I'm not foolish enough to get involved in the debate on this topic on this forum but for a balanced perspective that doesn't appear radically pro or con on the topic there's this from NPR:
Despite Heightened Fear Of School Shootings, It's Not A Growing Epidemic https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564...nd-reality

Pua`a
S. FL
Big Islander to be.

[Old Croc]

Sources:
Notes: You may notice some duplicate or circular reporting in some of these citations. I didn't use all of these sources for my earlier posts, but as I didn't save the originals, I found additional ones while trying to find them.

1. “Australia is a socialist nation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Australia

https://theconversation.com/successful-p...mann-82935 Note: Bill Shorten is the leader of the Labor (socialist) Party.

https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2012...h-are-not/

2. “Australia's population is only about 25 million vs. over 327 million in the U.S.”
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/...endocument

https://www.census.gov/popclock/

3. “There are over 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S., which would be over 44% of the Australian population if they were there.”
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...n-the-u-s/

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/im...-show.html

Note: 11/25 = 44 %

4. “There are over 40 million Africans in the U.S., which would be over 160% of the Australian population if they were there.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography...ted_States
Note: 40/25 = 160 %

5. “The most popular crime in Australia is theft.”
https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReport...?cid=20013

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/...ffenders~4

Note: In addition to these is my perception while reading local newspapers.

6. “The majority of homicides were committed using firearms. The number has been decreasing, although not consistently, since 1992, about five years before the gun confiscation law took effect. (Source: Australian Institute of Criminology, National Homicide Monitoring Program)”
https://aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi361

7. “As I tried to point out in my OP, clearly the number of gun deaths has been declining BEFORE the 1997 gun-confiscation law. Using mean slope, I see two segments, from 1987 to 2005 when the number was 220, and from 2005 to 2016, where the slope is virtualy zero, or level. You can see that in 2016 the number of gun deaths actually increased.
Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s onwards, so you could pick out any subsequent year and the AVERAGE firearm homicide and suicide rates after that year would be down compared to the AVERAGE before it.”
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compar...gun_deaths

8. “In fact, since 1997 gun ownership in Australia grew over three times faster than the population (from 2.5 million to 5.8 million guns).”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-28/au...re/7366360

Not directly related to the quoted sentence but applicable to my overall theme that you can't plop Australian gun laws onto the U.S. and expect them to work:
https://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/ne...e/3232814/

9. “Having traveled extensively in Europe, did you notice that European countries such as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands have even stricter gun-control laws than Australia does, but their mass public shooting rates are at least as high as those in the United States? During the Obama administration, the per capita casualty rate from shootings in the European Union was actually 27 percent higher than the U.S. rate.”

Belgium gun laws: https://www.bustle.com/articles/149385-w...earm-rules

France gun laws: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/26/opini...index.html

Netherlands gun laws: https://steemit.com/guns/@johnthehoan/th...etherlands

http://gemstatepatriot.com/blog/ban-everything/

10. “After 1997, both Australia and New Zealand experienced similar drops in mass murders, even though New Zealand had NOT altered its gun control laws.”
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/02/2...tions.html

11. ”There are more weapons per capita in Switzerland than any other western nation, and yet the Swiss have one of the lowest crime rates in the west.”
http://www.guncite.com/swissgun-kopel.html

http://www.ecclesia.org/truth/swiss.html

12. ”Surely you've seen the statistics of how Africans commit a disproportionate number of crimes.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/...ack-crime/

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/201...he-numbers

https://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-d...ent-crime/

http://americanfreepress.net/crime-stats...k-leaders/


"When government fears the people, there is liberty.  When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."     - Thomas Jefferson