I follow these stories closely and I've never heard of a single incident where an armed citizen interrupting a crime has been mistakenly shot by another armed citizen.

In the U.S., it's the POLICE you need to worry about. They shoot a lot more innocent civilians than armed citizens.

They managed to wound NINE innocent bystanders when they fired a fusillade of bullets at a killer outside the Empire State Building. They killed a little girl in Detroit attempting to execute an arrest warrant on a person that wasn't in that house. In Cleveland, two groups of cops fired 140 bullets at each other across a middle school parking lot after chasing a vehicle onto the property. No weapon was found in the suspect vehicle.

I feel entirely comfortable with my fellow citizens. It's the trigger-happy government employees that worry me.

The idea that a firearm renders you invulnerable is a strawman set up by the anti-gun crowd. No firearms freedom advocates are claiming that carrying a firearm is a panacea for personal safety. A firearm merely gives you a fighting chance against an armed or physically superior attacker.

Speaking of the Boston bombings, are pressure cookers and fireworks banned in your country? Do the anti-gun laws extend into Ireland and did they prevent the IRA from carrying out attacks?

Considering the fact that the criminals didn't attack anyone else in the general vicinity, I don't think their goal was to murder as many people as possible. If they were intent on mass murder, they would have found a means to that end.

Perhaps nothing would have saved the victim, but the odds of his survival would have been much better with a firearm.

I'm sure cops everywhere will continue to "outsource" their roles in the wake of diminishing budgets. (Although this does sound like a headline from The Onion.)

"Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact..."

And this is the first I've heard of it.

Everyone moderating me down on these later replies, because if there's one thing us Americans love more than sex, it's watching famous people get cut to pieces. But for your statements to be true, thousands of people who's credibility is at stake if they get it wrong vetted this person and found no problems. She didn't get a Nobel Peace Prize for eating babies and screaming "SATAN!" ... she got it for improving the lives of millions.

Now you can pitch your conspiracy theory like everyone else here, and collect mod points from the "We Love Watching Bigger People Than Us Fall" crowd, or you can look at this objectively: There's no way so many people could look at her life and so few find a problem.

We laugh when people deny climate change here and call them retarded, but the moment someone says someone who was fiercely religious has done real and considerable good, it's grab the pitch forks and haraaaaaah...

Who's wearing the tinfoil hats now, mmm?

You're right. I just get creepy descriptions of lewd sexual acts and rape threats; Only a couple marriage proposals.

Oh we have that here. There used to be Thog, who always posted in all caps and pretended to be a caveman. He was the reason for the "lameness" filters you sometimes encounter when trying to post. Then there was the 'natalie portman' and 'hot grits' puberty that slashdot went through on its way to full fledged "ur gay" maturity...

Hey guys, Einstein just called me using GravePhone(tm) and he had the following to say:

"Okay, maybe God does play dice, but I still stand by the law of conservation. God doesn't just make shit up. Now if you'll excuse me, Aristotle wants some one on one on the basketball court."

Hey, I'm glad you figured that out man. But I'm not arguing she's a model human being... Those twenty-odd rewards, public opinion polls, and numerous committees and governments are arguing she's a model human being are.

See, I'm a [wo]man of simple tastes. I like dynamite and gunpowder and gasoline. Do you know what all these things have in common? They're cheap. ... And effective.

Oh look, a strawman. Okay, let me point out the epic fail of you here:

Scenario A: A government neglects its citizens medical care and the citizens are too poor to afford it. Someone steps in to provide 'some' medical care.

Scenario B: You steal from some citizens. The government catches you. You point to serial murderers and say "Well, what about them?"

Can you spot the difference?

As to the rest, you're attacking her beliefs, and her inaction, against a backdrop of a great many people not acting as well -- and somehow trying to say that defeats or minimizes all the good she did. That is a perverse belief and behavior.

I've been irritated at the moderator/detractors lately: They love modding me 'overrated', or taking something that's funny and modding it flamebait/troll, knowing full well someone will come along and mark it funny again. They're trying to bleed me of karma because they can't attack what I'm saying, but they can make me suffer for it just the same. AH! There's a girl here! And she's being smart, and snarky, and... and... mod down! mod down! ABORT! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIeeeee..... *head asplodes* *shrugs* Just further proof that the hipsters have finally made landing here as well. Things that become popular invariably bring intolerance and bigotry with them... and our community is no exception. :(

Of all the things you say you can cite about this, you choose something with the words "futile democracy" and "the curse" in it? Do I even need to look at it to know it's biased?

Where, exactly, are you going with this? So what if some people think that; It doesn't make it right. You even say so. So at best this is a populist argument.

He lost to Death. I have yet to see anyone win that argument. And I get that you're some kind of Hitchens fan, but maybe he won every last debate he had... but he lost in the court of public opinion. Miserably. This woman won dozens of awards and was loved by millions. Hitchens was a social malcontent whose only claim to fame was being an irritating thorn in famous people's asses... and at that, only a mediocre fame.

And democracy will survive just fine on the facts; We don't need to carve out special groups to hold above criticism -- strong, weak, rich, poor, powerful, weak... what matters in a democracy is the truth, and having discourse. If you think it's gotten "weak", then you either need to re-examine what you consider democracy, consider that maybe democracy itself is fundamentally flawed, or that there is insufficient participation.

Which would have been totally useless since most of the countries and places she setup shop didn't have access to birth control to begin with. It'd be like me building a car in the middle of a desert. Okay, now I have a car. Cool. Now, what about the roads? Or fuel? Bread, on the other hand, is universal: No matter what your situation, bread is useful. Bread is life. Especially in places where she worked... nevermind the religious connotations of giving bread to the poor.

I have previously looked into those allegations. While she may have believed "suffering is good for the soul," it wasn't so much a denial of pain medication as a lack of access to them. Many of these clinics that were setup were in places where access to any medical care was absent.

Which, as someone who isn't a medical professional, I have no special problem with. I disagree with it philosophically, but I defend her right to say it.

You should point the finger at the governments that turned a blind eye to the suffering of their own people, not MT's attempts to provide the most basic of medical care to an otherwise totally neglected population.

I implied nothing, I simply pointed out that he has an appetite for famous people, the more famous the better.

Yes, but my point was this man has made a career out of being a malcontent, a contrarian, and going after celebrities and political positions because he can get a rise out of people. He's just coated this juvenile behavior in a veneer of intellectualism, but he is essentially a troll.

Churchill would have been stomped out of existance if not for the attack on Pearl Harbor drawing the United States into the war. Without our support, Europe would have fallen, and there's nothing exhilerating about that possibility. Were in I in Churchill's position, yes, I would have made the same bold statements, but privately, I would have been shitting bricks.

Snarky. I like it! You get my stamp of approval. And you're right, that does seem to be how PHP develops. But more seriously, the 'gnu/linux' tag was an attempt to politicalize the kernel by RMS. He was sharply rebuffed by Linus and others. Most distributions are less... puritanical... about what to include. So when I say 'linux' for this driver, I mean all flavors, not just the 'pure' gnu/linux ones, hence the tag 'depreciated'. Also, I tagged it as such because I knew it would piss someone off and get me modded down. :D And it succeeded brilliantly at that, proving that there are at least a few of the old guard still lurking on slashdot.

Yeah, that sounds like a good description of someone who won the Padma Shri, Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, Bharat Ratna, Ramon Magsaysay Award, the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize, Pacem in Terris Award, Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia, Order of Merit, Honorary US citizenship, Albanian Golden Honour of the Nation, Balzan Prize, Albert Schweitzer International Prize, Nobel Peace Prize...

A real nasty piece of work she is, yup. It's amazing it's gone on for so long without anybody notice. Thank goodness for Youtube publishing a inflammatory "documentary" by a man whose life work was tearing apart anyone who claimed to be religious, said that 9/11 was "exhilarating" for him, and published a book titled "God Is Not Great", if that doesn't give enough of an indication of this man's, achem, axe to grind. Who else has he grilled? Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Lady Diana, Ayn Rand, Pope Benedict XVI...

Well, I'm sure this one dude with an axe to grind was better qualified to assess this person's character than over two dozen governments and private interests who gave her awards. Oh, I forgot -- She made #1 on Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People. 18 times. So make that most of the world that she's bamboozled.

Yes, if you dig down hard enough you'll find something that even the most saintly person has done that could seem controversial. Just ask the Republicans how their whole "Bengazi" crusade is going, if you want a current-events example. With enough scrutiny, everyone can be demonized. And if you don't believe me on that, feel free to sit in an interrogation room with a trained interrogator with 30 years experience. See if you can go a few hours without admitting something that'll crucify your sorry ass. To date, nobody has beaten the Police Interrogation Reality Challenge!(tm)

I tend to believe that all those awards were for good things done by a largely good person. If she slipped a couple times, it only proves she's human... not a "nasty piece of work".

Bread.