In Sweden they do a variation on the hazard lights: blink once left, right, left (or similar). It looks nice.

I guess they don't have cribs in Sweden?

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.)

@Jerykk

I'll address by paragraph.

(1)

Wait, so I'm confused. Not enough research on my claim yet the death penalty apparently offers guaranteed results despite evidence to the contrary that I suggested?

Firstly I think you might be trying to make a bit of a straw man. I'm not saying that there should be no penalty. Some penalty obviously discourages some crime. But the argument is more over whether harsher sentences and mandatory minimums as this video discusses are helping, which I would argue they are not for the reasons outlined previously.

As for evidence of rehabilitation reducing recidivism, take for example:

http://ijo.sagepub.com/content/12/1/9.refs (see PDF)

Page 1
Finland, Norway and Sweden all have ~50-70 locked up per 100K, among the lowest. US has 716.

Page 2-3
Norway recidivism - 20%
US recidivism - 52%

I await your evidence to the contrary.

(2)

I'm talking per capita. Per capita the US certainly does have the highest among first world countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country

Sort by per capita and find me a developed country higher than the US please.

Russia is not a first-world country (that's actually a Cold War term, more correctly not a a developed country). I'm Russian, I assure you, I would know

Russia's GDP/capita is $14K USD, versus the US's $52K. Not even a close comparison.

(3)

But do criminals proportionalise justice? Like I asked, do you think anything but a small minority (likely white collar criminals) accurately know the likely sentence of a crime before they commit it? If they don't what's the purpose of making them more severe?

Nobody is proposing there be no penalty. Even Scandanavian prisons are a penalty. The question is, does the threat of 30 over 15 years locked up (should they even be able to decipher legal code to know this) actually make a difference? I would argue not, hence the argument for harsher sentences is illogical.

People are generally good at gauging the likelihood of being caught (ie your pirating example) but that's not what I was talking about (the scale of punishment being a deterrent).

(4)

I don't think what you're proposing is practical or logical. No society is going to accept the death penalty as a punishment for speeding. It's an irrelevant argument to make.

Again, why the need for elaborate ideas never before attempted? Why not just adopt a model that has already worked, such as the Scandinavian one? It seems like you're trying to wrap your mind around a solution that fits your preconceived notion of incentives and no government assistance like I suggested in my first post.

(5)

Venezuela is a developing country. Crime is largely a result of economic mismanagement by Chavez leading to joblessness and civil unrest.

There are plenty of countries with which to compare the US with. Obvious choices would be Australia or the UK. Anglo-Saxon countries, similar culture, comparative income/capita. Or really any European country. Your comparison would suggest tp me you're trying to stretch your argument to fit.

I didn't even know there was a Church of Sweden.

The things you teach me....

(Gay Wizard. Too funny.)

Says Sweden when you follow the link.

And just as a FYI. Hydraulic beds can get weird failures where they will raise on their own. I was told stories about one that would raise on it's own due to some problem with the controls, and the guy wasn't paying attention and drove down the road smacking all the traffic signals. AFAIK newer trucks have lock outs to disable the lift of the bed, but shit happens.

Honk at em if you see some going down the road with their bed raising (aside from salt trucks), cuz you never know what they might have in their bed that'll come spilling over on you. (seen a truck like this one hauling human waste they would put on crops but had too much of so it went to the landfill...looked like pudding and landfills smell really bad...and you could smell from a half mile when that truck was coming to be weighed on it's way in.....I still don't know how he legally hauled that around in what is essentially a non-sealed container.

As a Norwegian, the Swedish was pretty much spot on - I'm guessing that she has relations to Finland and/or Sweden - either lived in or with close relatives from..

*sweden

For those who don't know whereof the "hen" that @gorillaman speaks --
http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-gender-neutral-pronoun-makes-bei-472492079

You know, all these men who object so much to women being the subject of a sentence or a video -- perhaps @Payback has a point.

Let's have all gender free videos and gender free comments. No more using the word "man" or "woman" or "he" or "she". We will need to make up some new words, but that is easy enough to do.

Which country is it that has made their entire language gender neutral? Sweden or some place like that?

That would be a perfectly humanist world. Which clearly these folks who are so offended when women are discussed would be happy to have, right?

I'm serious. Some radical feminists would absolutely agree with payback.

Gender neutral. AT ALL TIMES. Not just when the topic is actually women.

I'd go along with that. Not that I am a radical feminist. Just a normal one.

Ugh. I'm starting to realize I'm susceptible to psychosomatic nausea...

This reminds me in a bad way of the one time I was in anything approaching rough seas. It was a ferry from Finland to Sweden, with winds around 30m/sec. In Stockholm, trams were thrown off their tracks by the wind.

I'd just had dinner when the waves hit and was lying down in my cabin, thinking that might be the easiest way to weather the ship's rocking. It wasn't. Decided to go out on deck to get some fresh air, a task slightly complicated by the way the floor kept falling out from under my feet while I was trying to walk. This on a ship built to transport some 3000 people.

End result, I might as well not have paid for the dinner, plus I self-diagnosed myself with an ear infection that really flared up about the same time. And this is almost an inland sea we're talking about, nothing like an ocean. I think I'll stick to planes for transcontinental travel, thank you very much.

In local news, a jive turkey attacked by a wild turkey. I think this news is local to Sweden, yes?

I think that you will find reactors don't produce weapons grade plutonium, rather, they produce a grade of plutonium known as reactor grade. Weapons grade plutonium is upwards of 95% Pu239. Reactor grade plutonium is what is known as weapons usable, not weapons ready. This is because of the high contamination factor of Pu240, Pu241, and Pu242. These heavier breads of Pu have both high spontaneous fission rates (bad for your fission weapon), and considerable heat, enough so to make weapons fabrication a problem (is it bad when your closed weapons device needs ventilation to not melt itself). While these problems are addressable in advanced weapons platforms, outside of well established nuclear weapons programs, making weapons from them is very challenging.

The main trouble, however, I think is economics, and nuclear is forced to internalize many of their impacts where as other solutions, mainly fossil fuels, do not. That is a pretty key competitive disadvantage.

Also note that electricity is only a fraction of total power, total power includes many non-electrical uses, most notably motor vehicles via liquid fuels. When you look at solar in this light, it represents a sub-fraction of a percent. So 5% of annual solar electrical generation is only a small part of a larger energy picture, and picture which also needs to be weighted against the rest of the world for which solar provides very little power. This isn't an attack on solar, it is a bringing to light of how vast the gulf is to address climate issues with any one technology.

So I think you will find that he isn't off by orders of magnitude, rather, he was being pretty generous to the total amount of energy produced by solar and wind world wide, and climate issues and emissions are world issues.

Key World Energy STATISTICS IEA:

http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/kwes.pdf

(I trust the IEA's numbers)

But I share the sentiment that we need to reduce coal and gas to address climate concerns. The fact that German emissions have risen for 2 years in a row is troubling to say the least. I consider France and Sweden to be better models, lower CO2 per capita and electrical prices in both cases compared to Germany, and both heavy nuclear users...with Sweden using a fair deal more hydro power than France. Nuclear and hydro are the proven heavy lifters in the area of CO2 reductions, which is why I think his criticism of environmental groups in addressing climate issues is justified as they generally oppose both.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER 2012 IAEA:

http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NE/Pess/assets/12-44581_ccnp2012_web.pdf

Don't know where you live but here in Finland, the whole concept is something you're born with. For most of my adult life i really thought that it is the same for all in the "western" world and once i learned the truth my instinct was "damn that is just wrong". In the 80s, i thought that our concept CAME from USA, not that we should be exporting that concept there. It is the land of the free, ffs. (it came here from Sweden, actually..)

Just the fact that if you get hit by a car or develop cancer, health payments is the least of your worries, just like it should be. Patient can concentrate, stress free, on recovery and you don't need to miss any treatment because you ain't got the money for it. Just the concept that profit should not be a part of health care industry (unless you want to, we got private clinics that are above the universal health care in term of waiting times etc.) that is ingrained to the culture brings comfort and equality. The middle class chooses between the two, the high end goes private and poor get the same quality from general healthcare, there's something very comforting there. Every person i see, i just know that he/she is taken care of. I'm not better or worse than the rest.

In my mind, it's a question of human rights to get the same treatment than the wealthy get. Money should not be a part of that equation. The same principle goes for education, it is a human right to get the same education as the rest will, money should not be a part of that either. We are here because of our culture and wouldn't be able to survive without past generations knowledge. One crucial part of that knowledge is how to treat wounds. Denying that is just sick, demented, plain wrong.

This is how much my life differs from you. I get all the possibilities and it's my freedom to use them or not. And on top of it all, we do it cheaper than you. How is that not implemented everywhere baffles me.. How sick a parent must be to deny his child all the possibilities, how sick you neighbor has to be to deny that from you?

@Trancecoach
ok.fair enough.
the reasons why i was making the religion analogy is due to your bullet form responses.
your outright deflecting when points are made...shifting the goal posts to meet your criteria.
you point to the UE and i counter with sweden and finland,basically i used your own premise and your response? not good enough.move those goal posts!

you know who else argues exactly the same way? religious fundamentalists.
so i was just being a bit cheeky with ya and i assumed (wrongly it appears) that you would take it in the spirit it was meant..busting your balls.

my sadness resided in the slow realization that our conversation was one-sided.

that no matter what idea i put forth would be met with the same tactics and it assumes i wish to change your mind.i dont but i truly did want to understand you.
and your replies have been informative and i have a much better understanding now.
that is something i appreciate.
but you were talking at me,not with me.
and you did ignore my questions in regards to the darker side of capitalism.

so i dont know what you thought i was projecting onto you.i was expressing sadness and that i felt foolish.

with my newfound understanding of our relationship and your willingness to address those questions that were left unanswered.

let us begin:
1.we hear so much about the "producers" of wealth and industry.would you admit that this wealth is not gained alone but is in fact the result of a multitude of people,services and infrastructure?
a.if yes.are you willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?
b.if no.explain.

2.in a free market with no regulation,how would society keep the financial industry in check?

3.do you believe in democracy? if so,then what is wrong with regulations?

4.since we both know the vast corporate wealth we have been witnessing is due to corporations influencing government policy.should these corporations be dissolved completely?or is it government that needs to be expunged? and what would be your solution to fill that void?

5.in a free market intellectual property is an oxymoron,as is copyright.how do you suggest to rid us of those things?

6.isnt democracy a form of free market?