>> ^csnel3:

>> ^Jinx:
I'm trying to imagine the tone of the news story if this happened in Europe.
I think my problem with guns is they escalate the confrontation. "Fortunately" it seems she didn't give him a chance, because a chance is a risk when there is a gun involved and it doesn't matter who's hands it happens to be in. She hesitates and he overpowers her, or he pulls his own gun and is a better aim and what started out as burglary is now a murder and that kid grows up without any parents.
I can't really condemn her actions though. Just that a guy is dead, even if it was some crook.

I'm trying to imagine WTF you're talking about. The gun didnt "escalate" the situation, it difused it. Are you ignoring the fact the guy was armed with a knife? Why is your scenario based on total fantasy instead of reality? What if she didnt have a gun, and the VERY REAL, ARMED INTRUDER murdered her. How do you come to the conclusion it started out as a burglary? He was breaking down the door armed with a 12" knife! This is a very simple story of a person protecting themselves, no need to add bunch of hypothetical BS to it. I realize that you are trying to justify your "problen with guns", but, this is the WRONG story to use as an anti-gun argument.

It escalated the situation because it was difused with a gun...you know, as in somebody is dead. How is that hard to understand 0.o. I'd hate to have the Cold War difused in the same manner.


I didn't conclude that it started out as a burglary. It was hypothetical. As is the assumption he was out to kill her.

Is this a good story to support my argument? No, not really, but then stories aren't good evidence anyway. Consider that stories where a guy breaks in, steals a TV and leaves without incident don't tend to get much media coverage.

And yes, I was justifying my position. Sorry if I ruined the mood on this success story for guns.

>> ^Jinx:
I'm trying to imagine the tone of the news story if this happened in Europe.
I think my problem with guns is they escalate the confrontation. "Fortunately" it seems she didn't give him a chance, because a chance is a risk when there is a gun involved and it doesn't matter who's hands it happens to be in. She hesitates and he overpowers her, or he pulls his own gun and is a better aim and what started out as burglary is now a murder and that kid grows up without any parents.
I can't really condemn her actions though. Just that a guy is dead, even if it was some crook.

I'm trying to imagine WTF you're talking about. The gun didnt "escalate" the situation, it difused it. Are you ignoring the fact the guy was armed with a knife? Why is your scenario based on total fantasy instead of reality? What if she didnt have a gun, and the VERY REAL, ARMED INTRUDER murdered her. How do you come to the conclusion it started out as a burglary? He was breaking down the door armed with a 12" knife! This is a very simple story of a person protecting themselves, no need to add bunch of hypothetical BS to it. I realize that you are trying to justify your "problem with guns", but, this is the WRONG story to use as an anti-gun argument.

I'm trying to imagine the tone of the news story if this happened in Europe.

I think my problem with guns is they escalate the confrontation. "Fortunately" it seems she didn't give him a chance, because a chance is a risk when there is a gun involved and it doesn't matter who's hands it happens to be in. She hesitates and he overpowers her, or he pulls his own gun and is a better aim and what started out as burglary is now a murder and that kid grows up without any parents.

I can't really condemn her actions though. Just that a guy is dead, even if it was some crook.

Hate to say I told you so, but I TOLD YOU SO.

>> ^longde:

Update from gothamist:
Last week, a jury voted to dismiss all charges against the McDonald's cashier who used a metal rod to beat up two customers who slapped him and then jumped over the counter at the West Village location in October. While 31-year-old Rayon McIntosh is off the hook, a jury has now voted to indict Denise Darbeau and Rachel Edwards, the two women who jumped over the counter, on burglary charges.
The 24-year-old women were initially charged with misdemeanor trespass in the West 3rd Street McDonald's altercation which took place on October 13. Those charges were increased to burglary, which meant that they allegedly entered the fast food restaurant with intent to commit a crime. “The person who committed a crime got away with a vicious assault,” said defense attorney Harold Baker. “It seems backwards to me...The people who were hurt are now charged with a crime.” Darbeau suffered a fractured skull and a broken right arm in the incident, while Edwards received a gash on her face.

Update from gothamist:

Last week, a jury voted to dismiss all charges against the McDonald's cashier who used a metal rod to beat up two customers who slapped him and then jumped over the counter at the West Village location in October. While 31-year-old Rayon McIntosh is off the hook, a jury has now voted to indict Denise Darbeau and Rachel Edwards, the two women who jumped over the counter, on burglary charges.
The 24-year-old women were initially charged with misdemeanor trespass in the West 3rd Street McDonald's altercation which took place on October 13. Those charges were increased to burglary, which meant that they allegedly entered the fast food restaurant with intent to commit a crime. “The person who committed a crime got away with a vicious assault,” said defense attorney Harold Baker. “It seems backwards to me...The people who were hurt are now charged with a crime.” Darbeau suffered a fractured skull and a broken right arm in the incident, while Edwards received a gash on her face.

That wasn't even a robbery, it was a simple burglary. She was freaking out like her life was in danger

wiki:

Ultimately, a murder investigation focused on David Roland Waters, who had worked as a typesetter for American Atheists. Not only did Waters have previous convictions for violent crimes, there were several suspicious burglaries during his tenure, and he pleaded guilty earlier in 1995 to stealing $54,000 from American Atheists.[21] In the wake of the disappearance, Madalyn Murray O'Hair's estranged son William Murray publicly stated that his mother had a tendency to hire violent atheist criminals because "She got a sense of power out of having men in her employ who had taken human life." [22]

PROTIP: don't hire violent atheist criminals because they give you a sense of power out of having men in your employ who have taken human life.

LOL. This is funny. The city of Rochester won't stand for this. I suspect Louise Slaughter will get involved.

To be fair to the cops in the original video, I spent 8 years in Rochester, and if I recognize the neighborhood, it's the one I lived in. Most people don't realize this, but Rochester isn't exactly green acres. It has a substantially higher murder rate than NYC, active gang populations, drug running, the whole nine yards. As often accompanies that sort of activity, neighborhoods such as the 19th ward, where I used to live, have a pronounced anti-cop attitude. If I were doing an arrest there, at night, I'd rather not have people snooping around. Those stoops know you by your badge number. There were multiple murders/muggings/burglaries in the neighborhood while I was there, including a drive-by my friend witnessed right up the street. I could even tell you the story about how I naively offered the "mayor of the 19th ward" (the head of the crips) a ride home. He introduced me to all his "nephs" that would proceed to hand him bigger rolls of cash than I've ever seen, brought me to the crack house up the street where the toothless dude living in a closet was "saving up for a sandwich, but would buy some bags to lick if he had any," and finally explained to me that when he called me "cool as a bitch" it was a good thing, because he fought dogs, and "ain't no dog gonna fight longer and harder for you than a pit bitch." He further explained, "if somebody says 'you gonna die bitch,' that's not the bitch you want to be." Then there was the part where he tried to offer me car parts, bulletproof vests, guns, drugs, girls, you name it.

That said, clearly there are much better uses of officer resources in that city than curb-distance parking citations.

Also, this isn't in keeping with their typical attitude surrounding activism. When the Iraq war broke out, I worked with a group of radicals organizing anti-war protests. We had protests every week on Fridays leading up to, and into the beginning of the war for months. We shut down the streets in front of the federal offices downtown with about 500-1000 people routinely, and really were pretty obnoxious to the cops in retrospect (doing things like changing our route so they couldn't keep us out of the streets, and yelling in their faces with a megaphone). While we had our own "special investigator" nothing ever really came of it. They let us say our piece, do our CD, and didn't even arrest us for it. They'd talk big, but honestly, given our attitude at the time, they could have been much less civil than they were. Although, how they treat the college kids, and how they treat the bangers in the hood at night is a different ballgame.

>> ^Payback:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/rychan" title="member since June 20th, 2007" class="profilelink">rychan
I wasn't trying to compare the crimes but rather the enforcement mechanisms -- the idea that because a reasonable person wouldn't do it, we don't need law enforcement of it. That's clearly not a compelling argument.
Child abuse is obviously terrible. So is heroin use, though. It kills 100,000 people every year...
The point I was trying to make is, he wasn't saying there should be no laws. He even mentioned that even the 1st amendment has rules, that you can't injure or defame others. He believes that your personal choices should be your own.
If someone injures another, like your child abuse analogy, then he believes there SHOULD be consequences and laws. If your heroin junkie breaks into someone's home to steal money, then he should go to jail for burglary, not being an addict. If he holds a knife to your kid's throat to get their lunch money, he should be jailed for assault with deadly weapon, not because he has a used needle in his back pocket.


How is polling the audience supporting that argument? He was making two arguments (at least), one of which was the "reasonable person" argument which I think is baloney. You could apply the same argument to a horrible crime like child abuse.

His _other_ argument which you highlight -- the right to personal freedom -- is much more persuasive. I agree it is THE fundamental argument on this topic, and nobody should believe that it's a slam dunk argument either way.

I think entr0py's argument is compelling. Drugs like heroin are an overly tempting way to ruin your life. It's not a matter of intelligence or education -- one of the most interesting anti-smoking studies found that teenagers actually OVERestimate the danger of smoking. But they still do it, anyway. Virtually everyone who smokes started as a teenager. People simply do stupid things which are against their self interests and society's interest. So I don't want to see heroin regulated the way cigarettes are. That's not sufficient. Anyway, this is the "should government protect you from yourself" argument which some people find repugnant. I take it you are one of them. You don't care if 15% of every high school class dies from heroin abuse because on their 18th birthday they get access to plentiful, cheap heroin. I'm not saying that would be the case, I'm just saying that a strict believer in personal freedom would be fine with this.

Also I think we should worry about preventing crime, not punishing it. Yes, we could offer a young mother lots of heroin and wait until her child neglect becomes actionable by the state, but why let a family be ruined? You're right, her actions would snowball to the point of being illegal without making the drug itself illegal. That doesn't really reassure me much.

Maybe such problems wouldn't be widespread if all drugs were legalized. But they're already fairly common, and I don't see how legalizing everything would make them rarer.

Are you really OK with living next door to a house full of heroin addicts? having them offer your children heroin? Watching them spiral in to filth while they lose self control? Seeing their children show up at the bus stop unwashed and starving? And having the police tell you "Well, they haven't done anything illegal yet. Clearly this situation will crash and burn shortly, but we should definitely stand at the sidelines and watch. We wouldn't want to infringe on anyone's personal freedoms". Or maybe child services is more on the ball and the children end up in state custody sooner rather than later, so it's a happy ending? So maybe children and parents aren't allowed to use these drugs but other people can? And maybe nobody who operates heavy machinery? And certainly not schoolteachers.

It just seems like a useless exercise to me to try to give people the freedom to use a drug like heroin when it will only cause terrible repercussions.

@rychan
I wasn't trying to compare the crimes but rather the enforcement mechanisms -- the idea that because a reasonable person wouldn't do it, we don't need law enforcement of it. That's clearly not a compelling argument.
Child abuse is obviously terrible. So is heroin use, though. It kills 100,000 people every year...


The point I was trying to make is, he wasn't saying there should be no laws. He even mentioned that even the 1st amendment has rules, that you can't injure or defame others. He believes that your personal choices should be your own.

If someone injures another, like your child abuse analogy, then he believes there SHOULD be consequences and laws. If your heroin junkie breaks into someone's home to steal money, then he should go to jail for burglary, not being an addict. If he holds a knife to your kid's throat to get their lunch money, he should be jailed for assault with deadly weapon, not because he has a used needle in his back pocket.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Wonder if all those changes in wiretapping laws had more to do with domestic control than foreign terrorism? There would be no reason to attempt a third rate burglary if you could legally amass volumes of embarrassing private details of the lives of potentially troublesome politicians.


My guess is that they were trying to remove some of the more annoying hoops people had to jump through for legit investigations. Label someone as a "possible terrorist" and tracking them becomes less tedious. I suppose it could also make gathered evidence less likely to be thrown out in court, civil liberties be damned.

At the same time, I just assume there is some level of unregulated monitoring going on with or without the changes. It wouldn't be admissible in court, but that isn't a problem if they're trying to hide the monitoring to begin with. Corporations and knowledgeable individuals do it too.

Wonder if all those changes in wiretapping laws had more to do with domestic control than foreign terrorism? There would be no reason to attempt a third rate burglary if you could legally amass volumes of embarrassing private details of the lives of potentially troublesome politicians.

I'd guess that it's more: A weak government, proliferation of arms comparable to the government's, and the willingness and desperation of the people to use them to take what they want destabilize a country.

So: The US doesn't have violent crime because there are guns. The US has violent crime because the population of poor, disenfranchised people that think they have no other option is large. More shootings happen because these people (criminals) have access to guns. More homicides occur because a gunshot's more damaging than a stab wound (and gives more of a sense of invincibility, probably, meaning they're more willing to take the risks that lead to the situations in which they have to use them).

Of course there are also crimes of passion and psychos--and these will also likely be more fatal with firearms than without (but not necessarily--see recent string of Chinese knife-wielding maniacs). But what is the ratio of burglaries/other crimes-gone-wrong to man-kills-man-in-bed-with-his-wife or man-goes-on-sniping-spree or man-hacks-apart-school-children? Dunno, but I'd guess the first is probably the larger portion by a huge amount.

Any discussion of "Guns do X" is definitely oversimplifying the situation. You can't compare the US to Germany to Canada to Somalia purely on gun ownership, because the cultures and social security nets (and any number of other things) are different as well--ranging from "pretty cushy" to "non-existent."

Finally! Thanks Amateur for mentioning this. It took me to the end of 27 comments to find someone who said this.

First off, theres some obvious fudging of facts or at the very least lack of a presentation of all the facts.

Just as a quick example.....He says that the US has X times the amount of prisoners as lets say Iran. But what he glosses over is the fact that the US also has some multiple of that country's population.

Oh some more points where STEPHEN FRY IS WRONG....if you're American and you believed this arrogant crack-pot you should be ashamed.

1. The three strikes law is NOT UNIVERSAL only present in about 26 states
2. The strikes only apply to Felonies or Violent crimes (as they are defined in the states)
3. To show you how Fry the Sheperd for which you are the sheep misled you, heres the four cookie story. A freakin six-time parole violator...assault...and he broke into the store to rob the safe not steal cookies.

"In one particularly notorious case, Kevin Weber was sentenced to 26 years to life for the crime of stealing four chocolate chip cookies (previous strikes of burglary and assault with a deadly weapon).[11] However, prosecutors said the six-time parole violator broke into the restaurant to rob the safe after a busy Mother's Day holiday, but he triggered the alarm system before he could do it. When arrested, his pockets were full of cookies he had taken from the restaurant.[12]"


The point is, Stephen "whopdi freakin doo" Fry, on some random TV game show/program shoots off three random facts of unknown origin and everybody here bites into it. "Well hes Stephen Fry he must be spitting out the absolute truth." I feel like your mother but.....you shouldn't believe everything you see on TV.

Downvote this comment all you want but it wont change the fact that you were all led by the nose-ring.

Disclaimer: I understand fully that the US prison system has its serious problems and needs to be reformed, But Frys account of it was wrong and misleading and based in the "anti-americanism" which is so popular.


>> ^AmateurD:
There is some serious fact checking to be had here methinks.

The problem is that proving corruption and bribe/favor-taking by politicians is very very difficult to do legally. Look at the William Jefferson case. The guy was ridiculously crooked, but only gets 13 years. 13 years for this kind of corruption? That's pathetic. When getting caught (already hard) and convicted on 11 counts (much much harder), you'd think that the penalty should be a bit stiffer. You can get more than that for simple burglary! This guy took half a million bucks and stood to gain a LOT more if he had not been caught, not to mention his abuse of power and betrayal of his constituents. We need better investigative powers (and measures to ensure they're not abused) and MUCH stiffer sentences for corruption. Good luck getting Congress to write laws that would be tougher on themselves though, especially without adding a bunch of loopholes.

As for this free speech issue, I don't think corporations should have "free speech" rights. People have those rights. People can donate money for political reasons. Corporations are created for commercial purposes and have interests and priorities that are geared to commerce and profit above all, not justice, ethics, morality or anything else that individuals are concerned with. Giving them the right to fund political campaigns and messages is crazy. We're essentially giving organizations geared almost entirely toward extracting as much money as possible from people a HUGE influence in who gets elected and who makes the laws that will regulate those organizations. Anyone else not seeing the problem with this?