Postmodern Jukebox - Maps (Vintage 1970s Soul Cover) has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Postmodern-Jukebox-Maps-Vintage-1970s-Soul-Cover

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.)

Before the U.S. invasion, Iraq had an integrated society, with different religions inter-marrying, and different religions working in government.
After the U.S. took over, people were chosen for state work according to religious quota (something new to iraq), and religion became a 'big deal' in regards to putting food on the table.
General dislikes turned into conflicts.

The "Shia v Sunni" thing is more hyperbole for western audiences, than it is a matter of recent history.
Saddam mostly oppressed areas rife with insurgent groups. Conflict festers and spreads. People die, their families/friends become militant, then they die, and their families/friends become militant, etc, etc, etc. Families/friends live near each other, so it spreads geographically. Eventually you find cities or regions that have managed to upturn.
Like any city/region, similar people tend to live together. So you in effect have groups/cultures vs government.
Hence why the internal conflict was by city/region (just like it is/was in Syria), and why it had a cultural flavor.
Granted, there is always some backlash that spills into a community at large, when a portion of it is identified as a 'problem'. Point is, there was not some eugenic ethnic/religious conflict going on.

The real 'oppression by religion' is happening today.
Neighborhoods have become mono-religious. Minorities have left their neighborhoods and fled to regions that are mostly 'of their own kind' - because nobody wants to stick around to see if they become the next target.

Best thing that can happen now is what happened to Syria after WW2 : Some other power steps in, chops up the country into smaller pieces, and populates each piece with a particular culture (eg. Syria was taken by Britain and France, split up, and became Syria + Lebanon + Jordan - granted the post ww2 split of Syria had more to do with the the last gasps of colonialism, and less to do with stabilization. 'Fun' note : It's the Syrian expulsion the French colonial rulers in the 1970's, and the subsequent French 'black eye', that set the tone for why France is so happy to support whoever wants to overthrow the Syrian government.).

-scheherazade

According to http://rt.com/news/170704-tesla-tower-lightning-russia/

The secret, open-air, high-voltage testing device was constructed in the late 1970s for testing insulators to protect vehicles, aircrafts and electronic equipment against lightning.

Sometimes i somewhat wish I were born in 1970 or so, and these kids would actually have to try to tell me this tale instead of carrying three cameras each.

Kraftwerk live in Soest, 1970 (Rockpalast)

60 Minutes, reporting on things that have been known since the 1970s.

This is Democrat failure of epic proportion.

From Wikipedia:
Politics

"Oakland was politically conservative from the 1860s to the 1950s, led by the Republican-oriented Oakland Tribune newspaper. In the 1950s and '60s, the majority stance shifted to favor liberal policies and the Democratic Party.[156][157] Oakland has by far the highest percentage of registered Democrats of any of the incorporated cities in Alameda County. As of 2009, Oakland has 204,646 registered voters, and 140,858 (68.8%) are registered Democrats, 12,248 (5.9%) are registered Republicans, and 41,109 (20.1%) decline to state a political affiliation.[158] Oakland is widely regarded as being one of the most liberal major cities in the nation.

The Cook Partisan Voting Index of Congressional District 13, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, is D+37; among the six most extremely Democratic congressional districts in the US."

Crime:
Oakland's crime rate began to escalate during the late 1960s, and by the end of the 1970s Oakland's per capita murder rate had risen to twice that of its neighbor city, San Francisco, or that of New York City.[125]

During the first decade of the 21st century Oakland has consistently been listed as one of the most dangerous large cities in the United States.[126] Until 2010 the homicide rate dropped four times in a row, and violent crime in general had dropped 27%.

Violent crime in general, and homicides in particular, increased during 2011.[127] In 2012 Oakland reported 131 homicides, the highest since 2006 (when there were 148 recorded).[128][129]"

Now, I will never forget September 11th...... 1970.

Good post!

@enoch

I agree with pretty much everything you said, except the part on rewriting corporate law based on its impracticality. Part of the effectiveness of capitalism is its unambiguous incentives, something as subjective as the public good would be too broadly interpretable and open up firms to endless lawsuits.

Negative externalities like pollution, standards on employment conditions, and anti-competitive rent seeking are all things best addressed in an adversarial system of corporation vs. government/citizens. In the same way asking the prosecutor to give a lenient prosecution would not work, polarised, balanced advocates work best in a market economy.

Obviously this has broken down to various extents. Corporate lobbying has tipped the balance. Short terms politicians and executives are incentivised to generated jobs/growth in the short term at the expense of sustainability. Larger corporations have the money to buy barriers to entry for competitors by capturing regulatory agencies.

Ideally countries would go to public funding system once you clear x votes of nominations or something similar, you'd have a shorter election cycle and advertising blackouts for a portion of that to limit the influence of money further, scrap jerry-mandering. Even if that were possible in the US, I'm of the view that the money would seep through in some shape or another. In many ways, the US as a concentration of the wealthy is a victim of its own success in the weight that this wealth has on its socio-economic future.

Somewhat more contrary to more left leaning arguments, I think populism fails equally. Now admittedly what passes for populism nowadays, economically at least, is simply the rebranded intentions of corporations with vested interests. But genuine populist economic policy also fails. People want the government to give them things for free and not give other people things for free. They'd rather see uncompetitive industries be propped up forever with subsidies than let them close.

I'm coming around to the view that what's needed is longer term limits, greater executive authority and concentration of power but balanced by firm limits on any elected office tenure. People don't appreciate the long term effects of effective policy before they have a chance to vote politicians out on the short term cost. Longer term limits, say 5-6 years x 2 possible terms would help alleviate that. It would detach elected officials from the need to constantly raise funds. Politicans could actually effect the mandate they were voted in on. Obviously this raises risks of abuse of power but as with everything, you have to balance that against the costs of long term stagnation.

I hate to create a comparison here to central banks, but it's an undeniable fact that once central bank officials were installed independent to act free from the whims of politicans in most developed countries in the 1970-90s, inflation quickly became a thing of the past. People can argue about current policy, devaluing the currency, the way funds are being distributed currently, but the point above is a historic fact. I am of the view that the same would hold (when applied in a more limited way) for the broader economy.

But anyway, this is all wonderfully imagine fantasy land.

Maybe its a foolish decision... maybe it should be purely live only. I decided early on to allow videos where the people are all seen together doing one thing... performing. So much 1970's music is only found like that, studio recordings over live people appearing to perform.

@JiggaJonson
* http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/how-do-media-images-men-affect-our-lives
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/11/14/are-men-the-latest-victims-of-media-misrepresentation/

*http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/psych/zebrowitz/publications/PDFs/1970s/McArthur_Resko_1975.pdf
* http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865574236/Dumbing-down-Dad-How-media-present-husbands-fathers-as-useless.html?pg=all
* http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2013-02-why-arent-more-real-men-portrayed-in-the-media
* http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-depressing-depiction-of-men-in-the-media/
* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darron-t-smith-phd/black-men-media_b_2844990.html

This is where my thoughts immediately went -- maybe $15/hr sounds so high because we're so far behind the inflation curve -- but I wasn't sure, so I pulled up this list of historic minimum wages and this inflation calculator and started doing some conversions.

1950: $0.75 = $7.30 today
1960: $1.00 = $7.81 today
1970: $1.60 = $9.74 today
> 1978: $2.65 = $9.80 today -- @enoch: How are you getting $22?
1980: $3.10 = $9.28 today
1990: $3.80 = $6.92 today
2000: $5.15 = $7.03 today
2010: $7.25 - $7.71 today

@Yogi is probably right; These people are probably asking for $15 and hoping for $10 (and $10 seems reasonable based on historic rates above).

Cranking up minimum wage much higher than that might be treating the symptoms rather than the sickness. Entry level jobs not paying enough is not the root cause; the root cause is that people are trapped in entry level careers. By all means, bump minimum wage up to $10, maybe $12 an hour, but then start taking action so that, when inflation catches up to those rates, there's more job mobility.

Just in case you missed the vimeo title, as I did, this is an excerpt from a speech Howard Zinn gave in 1970 as part of a debate on civil disobedience.