As to the amount of heroin being important, I think it is. $40 worth is obviously consistent with 'personal use' not an amount for sale. That does make a difference. It's certainly not enough to allow seizure of 3rd party property because of what he's been doing (secretly) at someone else's home he's staying at, IMO. If he had $100 grand/million worth of heroin, it would be hard for the home owners to say they had no idea, it would have to be willful blindness to not notice that amount in your home, or the strung out people coming and going.
The reasonable/normal thing that should happen in these cases is the owner is notified about the criminal activity and given a chance to remove the perpetrator/stop the activity, not treated as if a tenant/family member is the owner. That's an over-reach that will likely win this family their home back and restitution in the end.

I see cops who are tasked with upholding the law and trained and paid well to do so, being abusive criminal bullies and douchebags with authority and 'immunity', and others ignoring that duty to support/shield fellow officers in that criminal activity, time and time again. Because nearly 100% of police act that way, as accessories after the fact at best if not actual accessories and in direct opposition to their duties to protect the public, yes, I think they are nearly all 'evil' and criminal. There is the rare exception of the officer that sacrifices his/her own career to do the right thing and report other officers, but they don't stay cops after 'snitching'.
Wow, so you think cops are a separate 'race'? Talk about a lack of critical thinking ability! Similarly trained 'professionals' that separate themselves from society and have their own separate homogenous 'culture' are far more homogenous than any 'race' of people. Your insinuation to the contrary only paints you in an extremely bad light, only one kind of person thinks entire races are homogenous.
A better analogy would have been 'Have you ever seen gang members committing crimes and drawn the conclusion that all gang members are evil?' I would answer that 'no, but I do think they're all criminal.' Gang members don't have a duty to uphold the law that they are shirking, so MIGHT not be 'evil' in their criminality.
Absolutely, I got an A in critical thinking, thanks for asking. Have you ever studied the subject?

@newtboy If you've heard "most Teabaggers" advocating such things, why haven't you reported them to the "authorities" for conspiring to commit a crime?

Leaving lies and absurdities aside, "advocating" something is legally different from specifically inciting someone to commit a crime, knowing that they will in fact go through with it. I guess Manson could've claimed that he was joking or something, but the court didn't think so any more that they would think that Bin Laden and the other 9-11 "masterminds" were just "advocating" without expecting anything to happen. Manson was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, not with actually murdering anyone. "Most" Teabaggers aren't conspiring to kill anyone.
Like the head of a criminal organization "conspiring"* or ordering a subordinate to go take someone out, a lot depends on the relationship between the instigator and the one who does the deed -- which is not the same as "advocating" generally or to random people to do some criminal activity in the abstract. So, yeah.. why, indeed, would they get such a "bad rep?"
As for Manson getting a "bad rep?"
It's a mystery dude, a total mystery.


*The charge does not require actually committing any crime (other than conspiring) of going through with it. That's why law enforcement likes entrapment so much: because they can make arrests by instigating people to plot a crime. It's like hiring an undercover cop pretending to be a prostitute. No actual crime was committed, but the intention to commit a crime itself is considered a crime. But, to be sure, there's some degree of "mind reading" involved in the charge of conspiracy, as the law implies the assumption of intent. The charge, then, lends itself to false accusations (and convictions) too. (Apparently social media is inundated with agents trying to get people to agree to crimes so that they can get arrested and prosecuted for conspiring. Of course, nobody trolls videosift for legal advice.)

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.)

Well, thank you for the compliment, fellow masterdebater.
Or did you mean "masturbator"? Then I'd have to disagree, I'm certainly not bad at that.

Yeah, my post was super hyperbolic but it was just a continuation of the thinking going on here. I took it to the next level. The basic message I took from this thread was "Fuck that guy, he's an insurance scammer and got what he deserved!"
I disagree.
First of all, his crime (scamming people out of money) makes him a huge asshole and definately someone I wish not much well being in general. However, he was slowly run over by a car! You have to do some really awful shit to deserve that kind of punishment. If that man was the pope, I'd have applauded the lady and asked her for a re-run because the pope supports child rapists. If that man was Jeffrey Dahmer, I'd ask if I could have a go. But he's, as far as we know, neither a rapist or murderer or anything else as horrible. He could be dead. He could be a vegetable. He could be disabled. None of that is a punishment fitting his crime. Not even a Bernie Madoff deserves that.
The second thing is this whole "he did something stupid and now he got what he deserves" debate. Look, I'm a person of schadenfreude. I have sadistic personality traits that fill my shrivelled, black heart with gleeful joy everytime somebody gets hurt. But there are limits.
My examples are horrible and gross but what sets them apart from what this guy did is mainly they're not criminal activities. Sure, if you shoot at cops and get shot, you deserve that. You committed and act of agression and got pwned. That man was not agressive towards anyone.
He didn't lay under a moving car, he lay beside a standing car that then rolled over him while making a turn because the driver didn't notice him. Misjudgement on his part? Sure. The same as playing russian roulette or shooting at cops? Nope. That's because his activity, running into a standing or slowly moving car and pretending to be hit, doesn't include certain death as certain possibility.
The only reason people here are so comfortable with this man getting run over is because he's an asshole criminal. If that would've happened to him while he was pulling an internet prank, everyone would be horrified. Imagine that guy wearing a ridiculous costume and talking into the camera at the beginning of the video how he'll make that woman think she hit him with the car and what a great prank that'll be. Is he still getting what he deserves?
People give a shit about the man in the terrible accident because they made a judgement that he is a criminal and not worth it.
See, John Oliver has a point when talking about prisons.
I saw a video of a man getting run over. It didn't upset me but the reactions to it did.

yes, compared to women, he can go out jogging at night without worries, but more men than women are victims to criminal activities. So, yes, he should be worried as well.

I don't think being an ally means self-hate or blaming other men. It means getting out of the way and supporting better understanding of the issues.

I can totally understand where Morgan is coming from about the guns thing. I live in Japan now which has very strict gun laws. Virtually no one here owns a handgun personally. Cops are issued one for their jobs but never use them (it would be national news if a cop discharged a firearm in the line of duty). People who do legally own guns (mostly shotguns and rifles) have a legitimate need for one--they live in rural areas and stand a good chance of encountering bears or other dangerous wildlife.

As I understand it, England is very similar (even stricter--their cops don't normally carry guns). So coming from those kinds of cultures, America's gun culture seems completely bizarre. Japanese people find it baffling that anyone living in a first-world country would want to--let alone "need" to--own a handgun unless they were actively engaged in criminal activity. I'm sure Morgan feels something similar.

Personally, I admire Switzerland's approach to gun control--the military trains virtually everyone in how to safely use firearms and has them keep a government-issued military weapon in their home (but without ammo--in the event of an invasion or mobilization of the militia you have to report for duty to be issued ammo). What you get then is a population that respects and knows how to use firearms and therefore enthusiastically uses them for both sports and recreation but rarely for crime--Switzerland has one of the lowest gun murder rates in the world.

@lantern53 Honestly, you are coming across as very reasonable right now, and clearly you come from a position of direct experience. I'd like to know a bit more about your opinion.

What do you think the police could do to strengthen their public image? Clearly, the institution is not as respected as it should be (that is, it is widely maligned), and I agree, good cops too often get ignored. Do you suppose their poor public image has more to do with a few bad individuals, or is there a more systemic problem possibly with the organization of local departments? I suppose it could also have to do with the laws they are asked to enforce, e.g. marijuana prohibition is notoriously unpopular potentially breeding distrust of law enforcement more generally.

As a follow up, how do you feel concerns about a crooked PD should be handled? Do you trust IA to handle these sorts of allegations for the most part, or are concerns about the "blue wall" justified? Can you think of a better mechanism for enforcing good behavior among officers? Should we just tolerate violent criminal activity in law enforcement because it is rare, and we should "take the bad with the good?"

I understand that, but criminals are not usually acting criminal 100% of the time either, yet they are treated as if they are by police, prosecuted and imprisoned, and ostracized and 'dehumanized' after release by having most of their rights as a citizen removed. It seems that the reality is that we act like once you've committed (or are convicted of) a crime, you ARE a 'criminal' 100% of the time. If it's proper to do that to ordinary citizens because of temporary criminal activity, why not police?
OR...a murderer doesn't murder most of the time, that doesn't mean it should be ignored when they do...especially not because of their 'job'. If a cop is crooked once, he's a crooked cop. Period. (to me)
To your second point, that illustrates my original point exactly. If they (or you) believe it's proper to lie 'in the furtherance of their duties', why on earth would any reasonable person think that would stop on the stand? Since it's unreasonable to believe they would lie right up to that point, but not on the stand, one can not trust anything an officer says on the stand. That's going to be my position until it's made illegal for them to lie to a citizen, at any time. Even then, it's going to take a while for the 'culture' of lying to change.
EDIT: In your example, of finding severed heads in a trunk, you seem to imply that you think it would be the right thing to do to 'placate the judge' by committing the crime of perjury and saying it was a legal search even if it wasn't...If so, why should your testimony ever be given any weight if you think it's OK to just lie in court? If I misunderstood, forgive me.

You say you and your local force doesn't act this way, but I would ask...do/have you lied to/intentionally misled 'suspects' in order to get them to admit what they did? If so, I'm afraid I see you as part of the problem.
I fully agree with you on one thing, I feel this 'culture' trickles down from the top.

Glad to see fewer and fewer 'NRA bad (cue chimpanzee sounds)' comments here as well VoodooV. I would also point-out that the 'new west, cops and robbers' scenario is much more frightening a prospect considering that it's the intentional breeding grounds for absurd levels of criminal activity that is the systemic result of the insanity of a once prosperous country's hijacking by political/totalitarian criminals since the 60's 'hippies' sold-out and became corporate lackeys and lawyers of and for, the criminally insane.

"NRA soundbite of "buy a gun! pew pew pew! bad guys dead, live happily ever after!" would be one interpretation of the NRA's message, another would be, "Hey dumbass? Arm yourselves against being one of the first to go when the government fails you and the future you thought you had disappears overnight."

@Sundamx-He won, he's alive and the bad guys are dead. Five people dead IS a win if those 5 people still walked the planet the broken, unrepentant, criminal thugs that they were destined to remain.

You're ill-informed if you think that 'no amount of training will stop a bullet' besides, that sounds like a sound bite from an idiot and all-to-vocal fringe of semi-conscious do-nothings.

Not so much dumb luck in this scenario when you crunch the outcome and consider the body count.

These coppers are engaging in criminal activity. They are practicing an unrighteous livelihood. England is a police state. What they are doing here on camera is what any criminal organization's enforcers have done for centuries. One does not need to know the particular circumstances surrounding this incident, the videotape tells the entire story.

First of all, I'd like to point-out that once the lovely Ms. Spicer here took of that hideously frumpy dress, got rid of her patina of shellac and wet her hair, she suddenly became much comelier and glamorous and down-to-earth sexy for me personally, as I have ALWAYS gravitated towards women who shun make-up who looked like they just threw-on their favorite comfortable clothes, and could give a fuck about what anyone thinks about how they should look or act.

Any man who thinks otherwise is most-likely, a superficial and abusive fucking douchebag who will invariably seek-out the female form of douchbag, and have lots of power, money, and influence in either politics, banking, sales/insurance, or some other form of criminal activity which does nothing for the planet except create more douchebag children who will turn into bigger douchebag adults than their sheit-scumbag parents ever dreamed. This is a huge phenom in the current planetary paradigm and has been going-on for centuries to create the dysfunctional western civilization we enjoy today, cascading into insanity and oblivion, a world controlled by completely evil pieces of shit.

Here's the real-deal Trancecoach and it's in-line with Bill Burr's idea of an 'epidemic of gold-digging whores' routine so popular here among sift-voters, because it's all true. Assholes and douchebags wield enormous power and control over the rest of us honest and capable peeps on the planet because people in-general, don't know who they are or why they think and act the way they do, because as victims of abuse both physical and psychological, they give their own energy and power over to these cunts who are ass-raping the planet with their lies and egos, their narcissism and toxic personalities.

These hopelessly evil humans have been very successful in programming the herd-mokeys as well to aspire to become cunts, douchbags, and assholes just like themselves, as evidenced in the inordinate amount of these gullible mini-versions running loose on the globe and breeding like fruit flies.

This phenomenon is endemic in the west, the Middle East, China and South America, and it will get way worse before it gets any better.

I guess I am missing something. As a 60+ yr old white male, I don't see what's problematic with more black people (young or otherwise) having guns. And, no, I am NOT being sarcastic.

I suppose if the attitude of the vid's creators was that all black people were inclined to criminal activity, then the vid might lay claim to some level of ironic humor. Kinda sad.....

Schedule 7 seems horrendously ambiguous. They can hold you for nine hours without a reasonable suspicion that you are involved in any criminal activity...but it must not be used arbitarily and is solely for determining if somebody is a witch. err I mean if somebody is involved in terrorism.

I'm not really sure how you can detain somebody without suspicion and simultaneously demonstrate that it wasn't arbitrary or unconnected to terrorism. Where exactly is the accountability here. Oh. There isnt any. Hearing the Home Office dismiss this whole affair by saying that it is up to the Police to decide how they use (misuse?) their powers is quite frightening. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I have the same information as you, so there are limits!

Approximately one third (32.4% in 2012) of Norway's prisoners are foreigners, so it is statistically possible to end up with a 20% rate consisting of a 50% rate among foreigners and 5% among locals, I consider it both a little unlikely, and hardly a damning indictment of the system even if that is the case.

The english language section of the Norwegian Correctional Services web site does mention the challenges they face in trying to rehabilitate foreign prisoners:

This presents a number of challenges for the staff as to language, religion and culture. In addition, a part of this category consists of more or less professional criminal offenders with a certain degree of organization who may be responsible for security problems, criminal activity in or from prison and recruitment of young offenders. Visiting facilities and rehabilitation measures are much harder or impossible to create for offenders who will be deported to their home country after serving their sentence.