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Comment Re:Militia, then vs now (Score 1) 1633

Yet the overall murder rate trend did not change appreciably - despite the fact that it should have included those massacres. In fact, it briefly went up after the ban, despite there being a massacre immediately before the ban...

Which, I suppose, just goes to show just how small and insignificant those massacres are in the big picture, if you take the media attention they receive out of the equation and look at raw numbers. Yet people keep referring to them as some major factor that should be a significant driver of public policy. It's about as ridiculous as the security theater that followed 9/11.

Comment Re:Code names (Score 1) 179

I completely agree with this. I'm do not use Ubuntu regularly, but sometimes I have to help people who do. I do not know the names by hearth, I guess I can just do cat /etc/issue and get it? Nope! There is only says the version number. Ok, no problem, I'll google the number. No way, in the support forums everybody just uses the code name. Finally I have to check on wikipedia whatever name version 12.04 has.

At least for Ubuntu, checking /etc/apt/source.list will give you one of the words in the version you're running... for instance, I can tell my test game server box is running "precise" and typing "precise ubuntu" into Google tells me it's Precise Pangolin.

Which happens to be the 12.04 release.

Comment Re:Democracy? (Score 1) 1633

We elect people. They represent us. If we don't like the way they are representing us, we elect someone else. That is how government works in a democracy. So when you suggest that we need to be armed in order to protect ourselves against our government, what you are doing is suggesting possible violence against the people that WE elected.

Well, except that due to the way the US electoral system works, it's possible to get elected without having a majority. Heck, it's possible for 1/4 of the country population to amend the Constitution over the heads of the other 3/4 if they gang up!

So much for democracy.

And then, of course, a state can be a democracy today, and a dictatorship tomorrow. Germans found that out the hard way back in 1933.

Comment Re:Militia, then vs now (Score 1) 1633

That makes no sense. Are you saying that freedom of speech is not a fundamental right? Perhaps you don't think it is, but the people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights certainly considered it a natural right - and yet they codified it.

The reason why is very simple. Bill of Rights, for the most part, is the codification of those natural rights that were actually threatened or infringed immediately before or during the American Revolution. Hence why they were deemed to be the most vulnerable, and therefore most deserving of the extra degree of protection that codifying them would yield. That's why BoR has some really weird stuff, like a separate amendment about "quartering soldiers" - because that's precisely what the British did.

Comment Re:Militia, then vs now (Score 1) 1633

First of all, "gun death", "gun suicide", "gun crime" etc are all completely meaningless metric. A murder is a murder, regardless of the tool used to carry it out; ditto for suicide. The only thing that matters is the overall number of crimes, suicides etc.

Now, one thing that you conveniently forgot to mention is that murder rates, violent crime rates etc were all dropping in Australia before the ban, as well. And after a brief post-ban spike (which was likely completely unrelated), they kept dropping at the same rate.

Same thing for suicides. Yes, gun suicides have dropped, but hangings were on the rise (in fact, there was also a spike right after the ban, such that the overall suicide rate was higher - despite the reduction in the number of gun suicides) - and overall suicide rate is basically going down at the same rate as before.

In other words, one thing that Australian statistics shows is that gun ban had zero effect whatsoever on murder rate, violent crime rate, or suicide rate.

Comment Re:Now I Know... (Score 1) 575

Well in that case it's a good thing they're not giving money to a company founded by Hitler or anything. (Hint: companies are not evil. No company in existence can actually have that moniker applied to them - they are at best amoral, probably even ethically impaired. But evil most definitely is far too hyperbolic).

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