Hockey is a violent sport. A lot of hockey people think that allowing fights, which in the NHL usually happen between each team's designated "goons", prevents or lessens other dirty/dangerous play that would build up with unchecked aggression that is a pretty natural part of the sport. That's an oversimplification, but one of the major justifications.

I love watching hockey. I think it is a great sport that allows for many different paths to victory -- you can have a winning team made up of fast, graceful, highly skilled players, OR cerebral, teamwork based players, OR intimidating, brute force goons. Or a mix of any/all of those.

I'm not an expert, but I'm a fan. I didn't grow up with hockey in my blood (not from Canada), but became a fan in my teens. But, I do actually see a certain amount of logic in the hockey pundits argument that fighting cuts down on other dirty play. I think that if anyone watches enough hockey, they see evidence that it is true. Maybe not quite as true as the pro-fight pundits suggest, but it is there.

Better officiating, penalties, and suspensions for the kinds of dangerous / dirty play that fighting is supposed to cut down on would help. Even though I think fighting has a place in the game, the NHL does need to evolve some more consistency in those areas.

I'm a Colorado Avalanche fan. The Avs main rival for a long time was the Detroit Red Wings, and then a former Wings player (Brendan Shanahan) became the head of player safety. His job was basically to review dirty plays or plays that resulted in an injury, and dole out warnings/suspensions/fines. He took a lot of flack for inconsistency; many people thought that in two similar incidents he might hand out a long suspension to one and a slap on the wrist to the other. But even though he was from my "rival team", I thought he did a pretty good job, and it represented a great step forward for the NHL. The thing that I thought he did really well was that for every incident he reviewed, there was always a video available on the internet showing what happened from multiple angles followed by his thoughts on it, what disciplinary action he was going to issue, and his justifications for it. Of course everyone isn't always going to agree about that kind of stuff, but he put it out in the open instead of behind closed doors.

To me, that was a big step forward for the NHL. If they continue on that path, I think it is reasonable to suggest that fighting will become less important/necessary/beneficial. But I think it will always be at least a small part of the game.

Slavery is irrelevant to the plight of the black man today.

All people have equal chance at freedom for the last 50 years.


Most poor folks would rather take government handouts than lift themselves out of poverty. If I was in that position I suppose I would also take the handout.



Democratic policies and Democratic control of major cities have destroyed the black community


Out of the 10 poorest cities
Five cities have been led by Democrats for more than 45 years.
Two other cities, Miami, El Paso, have never had Republican mayors. Not ever.

Poverty
Rank City Democrat
Since
1 Detroit, MI 1961
2 Buffalo, NY 1954
3 Cincinnati, OH 1984
4 Cleveland, OH 1989
5 Miami, FL forever
6 St. Lewis, MO 1949
7 El Paso, TX forever
8 Milwaukee, WI 1908
9 Philadelphia, PA 1952
10 Newark, NJ 1907

Democratic policies and Democratic control of major cities have destroyed the black community.

If you want to help end racism and help black communities turn around then stop voting democrat.

"I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty but leading them or driving them out of it."
... Ben Franklin

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee."
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
when the "Gales of November" came early.

The ship was the pride of the American side
coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
with a crew and good captain well seasoned,
concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.
And later that night when the ship's bell rang,
could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
and a wave broke over the railing.
And ev'ry man knew, as the captain did too
'twas the witch of November come stealin'.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
when the Gales of November came slashin'.
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
in the face of a hurricane west wind.

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin'.
"Fellas, it's too rough t'feed ya."
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said,
"Fellas, it's bin good t'know ya!"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
and the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when 'is lights went outta sight
came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the love of God goes
when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
if they'd put fifteen more miles behind 'er.
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
they may have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
in the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
the islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
with the Gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
in the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral."
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they call "Gitche Gumee."
"Superior," they said, "never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early!"

Replacing with proper embed. Matched from previous thumbnail *backup=[...snipped...]

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Sideways launch of the USS Detroit. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

I want to support a lot of what these guys are saying. But I think they are fundamentally wrong.

First. Although racism is alive and well in Class warfare, it's still not Black Vs White. It's Money Vs. the Poor.

Second. "Get out there and vote" is a Fallacy. You will never win anything when the game is already stacked against you on both sides.
What they need to do is get involved in the system. Create their leaders, stand behind them and further their own agenda.

I would hope their agenda is equality and not just them on top on others on the bottom. But that is is how the system works. You need to be involved in the process.

There are two HUGE roadblocks that have been built in these people's way. First. Education. You need to be smart in the ways of Politics. You need the highest education to go up against the leaders in power.

How do you get higher education? You need money. These people, such as the people of Detroit, have been pushed down into poverty. They need money for two things. The education of their leaders and their youth. And they need Money to challenge the position of power -- the system has slowly been transformed into a system that sides with money. Money to run in politics, money to buy off other politicians.

Without money and education, they have no power to effect change.
Without money and education, WE have no power to effect change.

And that's how the leaders in democratic countries stay in power. They've engineered the system in their favor.

In the US, there are only two Parties. and they are both as corrupt as each other. So it's a no-win, never-win scenario.

At least in Canada we can have and create new parties and as long as they have the support, they have to be taken seriously.

Costs taxpayers billions. Check.
No one living on board. Check.

Yup. That's Detroit.

Your video, Sideways launch of the USS Detroit, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I figured you'd be able to buy a Detroit city block for $1000 by now.

At one point, the City of Detroit was too poor to buy them toilet paper.
I stopped by the station in this video and gave them a donation.

The documentary "Burn" covers the whole story in an incredibly gripping manner.

Racism extends a *little* bit further than just Detroit.

but hey, don't smash my face over it

They need to play this in Detroit.

There are many parts of the U.S. that essentially are the wild west. Head out to Compton, Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, Baltimore or any other number of cities with high poverty rates and you'd be crazy not to carry a gun with you.

As for New Zealand gun crime rates, sure, they are lower than U.S. gun crime rates. But then, New Zealand's overall crime rate is five times lower to begin with. The disparity isn't limited to just gun crimes.

Like I said before, there's no clear correlation between gun control and crime rates. For every area that has strict gun laws and low crime, there's another area that has stricter gun laws and more crime. Conversely, there are areas with lax gun laws and lower crime rates than areas with strict gun laws. The data simply doesn't show any consistent trends other than the fact that poor areas have higher crime rates than prosperous areas.

You seem to think that eliminating guns will somehow eliminate mass shootings. However, there is zero correlation to the number of legal gun ownerships with the number of homicides. In fact, here are some statistics for you:

At present, a little more than half of all Americans own the sum total of about 320 million guns, 36% of which are handguns, but fewer than 100,000 of these guns are used in violent crimes. And, as it happens, where gun ownership per capita increases, violent crime is known to decrease. In other words, Caucasians tend to own more guns than African Americans, middle aged folks own more guns than young people, wealthy people own more guns than poor people, rural families own more guns than urbanites --> But the exact opposite is true for violent behavior (i.e., African Americans tend to be more violent than Caucasians, young people more violent than middle aged people, poor people more violent than wealthy people, and urbanites more violent than rural people). So gun ownership tends increase where violence is the least. This is, in large part, due to the cultural divide in the U.S. around gun ownership whereby most gun owners own guns for recreational sports (including the Southern Caucasian rural hunting culture, the likes of which aren't found in Australia or the UK or Europe, etc.); and about half of gun owners own guns for self-defense (usually as the result of living in a dangerous environment). Most of the widespread gun ownership in the U.S. predates any gun control legislation and gun ownership tends to generally rise as a response to an increase in violent crime (not the other way around).

There were about 350,000 crimes in 2009 in which a gun was present (but may not have been used), 24% of robberies, 5% of assaults, and about 66% of homicides. By contrast, guns are used as self-defense as many as 2 and a half million times every year (according to criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University), thereby decreasing the potential loss of life or property (i.e., those with guns are less likely to be injured in a violent crime than those who use another defensive strategy or simply comply).

Interestingly, violent crimes tend to decrease in those areas where there have been highly publicized instances of victims arming themselves or defending themselves against violent criminals. (In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of home burglaries occur when people are in the home, whereas only 9% of home burglaries in the U.S. occur when people are in the home, presumably as a result of criminals' fear of being shot by the homeowner.) In short, gun ownership reduces the likelihood of harm.

So, for example, Boston has the strictest gun control and the most school shootings. The federal ban on assault weapons from '94-'04 did not impact amount and severity of school shootings. The worst mass homicide in a school in the U.S. took place in Michigan in 1927, killing 38 children. The perpetrator used (illegal) bombs, not guns in this case.

1/3 of legal gun owners obtain their guns (a total of about 200,000 guns) privately, outside the reach of government regulation. So, it's likely that gun-related crimes will increase if the general population is unarmed.

Out of a sample of 943 felon handgun owners, 44% had obtained the gun privately, 32% stole it, 9% rented/borrowed it, and 16% bought it from a retailer. (Note retail gun sales is the only area that gun control legislation can affect, since existing laws have failed to control for illegal activity. Stricter legislation would likely therefore change the statistics of how felon handgun owners obtain the gun towards less legal, more violent ways.) Less than 3% obtain guns on the 'black market' (probably due, in part, to how many legal guns are already easily obtained).

600,000 guns are stolen every year and millions of guns circulate among criminals (outside the reach of the regulators), so the elimination of all new handgun purchases/sales, the guns would still be in the hands of the criminals (and few others).

The common gun controls have been shown to have no effect on the reduction of violent crime, however, according to the Dept. of Justice, states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate. A 2003 CDC report found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws reduced gun violence. This conclusion was echoed in an exhaustive National Academy of Sciences study a year later.

General gun ownership has no net positive effect on total violence rates.

Of almost 200,000 CCP holders in Florida, only 8 were revoked as a result of a crime.

The high-water mark of mass killings in the U.S. was back in 1929, and has not increased since then. In fact, it's declined from 42 incidents in 1990 to 26 from 2000-2012. Until recently, the worst school shootings took place in the UK or Germany. The murder rate and violent crime in the U.S. is less than half of what it was in the late 1980s (the reason for which is most certainly multimodal and multifaceted).

Regarding Gun-Free Zones, many mass shooters select their venues because there are signs there explicitly banning concealed handguns (i.e., where the likelihood is higher that interference will be minimal). "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns," says John Lott.

In any case, do we have any evidence to believe that the regulators (presumably the police in this instance) will be competent, honest, righteous, just, and moral enough to take away the guns from private citizens, when a study has shown that private owners are convicted of firearms violations at the same rate as police officers? How will you enforce the regulation and/or remove the guns from those who resist turning over their guns? Do the police not need guns to get those with the guns to turn over their guns? Does this then not presume that "gun control" is essentially an aim for only the government (i.e., the centralized political elite and their minions) to have guns at the exclusion of everyone else? Is the government so reliable, honest, moral, virtuous, and forward thinking as to ensure that the intentions of gun control legislation go exactly as planned?

From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary. Do they really want to deprive those who are culturally acclimatized to gun-ownership, who may be less fortunate than they are, to have the means to protect themselves (e.g., women who carry guns to protect themselves from assault or rape)? Sounds more like a lack of empathy and understanding of those realities to me.

There are many generational issues worth mentioning here. For example, the rise in gun ownership coincided with the war on drugs and the war on poverty. There are also nearly 24 million combat veterans living in the U.S. and they constitute a significant proportion of the U.S.' prison population as a result of sex offenses or violent crime. Male combat veterans are four times as likely to engage violent crime as non-veteran men; and are 4.4 times more likely to have abused a spouse/partner, and 6.4 times more likely to suffer from PTSD, and 2-3 times more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, unemployment, divorce/separation. Vietnam veterans with PTSD tend to have higher rates of childhood abuse (26%) than Vietnam veterans without PTSD (7%). Iraq/Afghanistan vets are 75% more likely to die in car crashes. Sex crimes by active duty soldiers have tripled since 2003. In 2007, 700,000 U.S. children had at least one parent in a warzone. In a July 2010 report, child abuse in Army families was 3 times higher if a parent was deployed in combat. From 2001 - 2011, alcohol use associated with domestic violence in Army families increased by 54%, and child abuse increased by 40%. What effect do you think that's going to have, regardless of "gun controls?"
("The War Comes Home" or as William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies said, "A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.")

In addition, families in the U.S. continue to break down. Single parent households have a high correlation to violence among children. In 1965, 93% of all American births were to married women. Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women (a rate that rises to 53% for women under the age of 30). By age 30, 1/3 of American women have spent time as a single mother (a rate that is halved in European countries like France, Sweden, & Germany). Less than 9% of married couples are in poverty, but more than 40% of single-parent families are in poverty. Much of child poverty would be ameliorated if parents were marrying at 1970s rates. 85% of incarcerated youth grew up without fathers.

Since the implementation of the war on drugs, there's a drug arrest in the U.S. every 19 seconds, 82% of which were for possession alone (destroying homes and families in the process). The Dept. of Justice says that illegal drug market in the U.S. is dominated by 900,000 criminally active gang members affiliated with 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities, many of which have direct ties to Mexican drug cartels in at least 230 American cities. The drug control spending, however, has grown by 69.7% over the past 9 years. The criminal justice system is so overburdened as a result that nearly four out of every ten murders, and six out of every ten rapes, and nine out of ten burglaries go unsolved (and 90% of the "solved" cases are the result of plea-bargains, resulting in non-definitive guilt). Only 8.5% of federal prisoners have committed violent offenses. 75% of Detroit's state budget can be traced back to the war on drugs.

Point being, a government program is unlikely to solve any issues with regards to guns and the whole notion of gun control legislation is severely misguided in light of all that I've pointed out above. In fact, a lot of the violence is the direct or indirect result of government programs (war on drugs and the war on poverty).

(And, you'll note, I made no mention of the recent spike in the polypharmacy medicating of a significant proportion of American children -- including most of the "school shooters" -- the combinations of which have not been studied, but have -- at least in part -- been correlated to homicidal and/or suicidal behaviors.)

I realize everyone is foaming at the mouth and positive of what happened here, but it should be noted that Israel denies hitting the hospital, and that the United Nations had not confirmed the source of the blasts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/world/middleeast/despite-talk-of-a-cease-fire-no-lull-in-gaza-fighting.html?_r=0

Everyone wants to paint Israel like this giant monster, but things are being way overstated. Let's get serious. If Israel was embarking on a program of "ethnic cleansing" they could easily kill every last person in Gaza. Seems clear enough to anyone that this is not what they're trying to do.

If Hamas was in Mexico shooting rockets at Texas half the people shouting genocide at Israel would be wearing little yellow ribbons hoping our soldiers all come back safe from our Mexican invasion.

I have a hard time imagining, or believing, that anyone purposely bombed a hospital full of children. But I can easily believe accidents of all kinds will happen in a battleground the size of Detroit.

1) The problem is that the U.S. is so large that even a single state is often larger than entire European countries. As such, there's a large amount of income and crime disparity between states. Michigan, for example, has a high crime rate because it contains Detroit, which would qualify as a third-world country by most standards. Other states have significantly lower crime rates. Just as in Russia, some regions are far more prosperous (and safe) than others.

For example, Minnesota has a comparable population to Norway. As of 2012, it had a murder rate of 1.8, which is admittedly higher than that of Norway. However, Louisiana had a murder rate of 10.8 and actually has a smaller population than either of the aforementioned regions. The murder rates per state ranged from 1.1 to 10.8. That's a huge range in this context. Both states are part of the U.S. If the U.S. only consisted of one state, the murder rates would be radically different based on which state it was. That's the inherent problem with comparing small countries to the U.S. The sample size of the European countries is so small that you can't derive any meaningful data for comparison.

2/3) A large amount of violence is the result of drugs. Either people committing crimes to obtain drugs, people committing crimes because they are on drugs or cartels committing crimes to distribute drugs and maintain their stranglehold on the market. Would legalizing narcotics alleviate these issues? Maybe. They might also cause a rise in other issues, like traffic accidents. Alcohol already causes an absurd amount of lethal and non-lethal accidents on the road and no doubt legally-obtainable PCP, cocaine, heroin, meth, LSD, etc, would only exacerbate that.