Even the non-firearm homicide rate in the US is 5 times that of Japan. Japanese gun control can't take credit for all that. Personality is more than 50% heritable, and by extension, so is violent behavior. (Case in point: the vegas killer's father was on the FBI most wanted list). Personalitywise, Japanese tend to be relatively meek and inhibited. Even if every one of them owned a gun, their murder rate would probably still be a fraction of the US murder rate.

Oh Bob. Trolling hard today I see.

The camera caught him retrieving and planting the gun...which had his DNA on it but not the victims, and cameras have repeatedly caught police unambiguously planting evidence and weapons....so I can only assume you are intentionally approving of police planting evidence if you say it shows them to be in the right. You wouldn't be alone, the judge said the same thing, it was a justified homicide because of course he thought the heroin dealer was armed, so shooting him and planting a gun was perfectly fine. (not sure how he supposedly knew it was a heroin dealer before the shooting, though)

You are accidentally correct, however. Even hard leftists CAN seem to grasp reality when shown it, unlike those who would simply pretend those videos don't exist....but don't trust your lying eyes, trust Rush. He's never lied to you.

This isn't accurate at all on Columbus either.

Every educated person knew the Earth was round, they even had a pretty good idea of how BIG it was. Which is why nobody was insane enough to try the trip to the East over the Western sea. It was too far, they would simply die.

Columbus was an idiot who got the math wrong and thought the Earth was a lot smaller than everyone else knew it was. He didn't even really convince the Queen he was right, she just had lots of ships and on the off chance he might be right, she gave him three because the reward was worth the risk.

He then went on to slaughter a few million islanders in the Caribbean because they wouldn't tell him where the gold was (they had no gold).

So... he was basically an idiot and a homicidal maniac, responsible for one of the largest genocides the world has ever known. Yay, let's celebrate a day for him, America! (oh and he also never set foot in what is now the United States AND the first Europeans to come to the Americas were several hundred years earlier).

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

When should you shoot a cop?
Answer: any time a cop threatens your life or that of your family.
You can always morally use actual self defense to excuse homicide. Take it to a jury trial, prove they threatened you or your family, and most likely you'll not be convicted. I sure wouldn't convict someone who shot an armed intruder in their own home, no matter what color the intruder's uniform was.
I would prefer life in prison to having my family murdered, but that's just, like, my opinion, man.

Incredibly sad, no arrest yet, 2 weeks after the video was posted. That's negligence by the Boston PD in my eyes, they know who she is and where she lives, go get her. That behavior usually eventually ends in homicide, it nearly did just then.

Ahhh, that's what you meant.
I submit that because you might not fear in one situation doesn't mean that, for someone less able or more cautious, fear isn't justified.
There are many legal justifications for homicide. Self defense is the most often used, but is far from the only justification. Enforcing a proper citizen's arrest for instance may use any force needed, including deadly force, to affect the arrest...but you better be ready to prove it was needed.

In this case, he used force to effectively stop a continuous attack and stopped the instant the attack was neutralized, and not even deadly force. I don't see why that's wrong, one hit for two, he just hits harder, a chance you take when hitting much larger strangers, no? Had she scratched his eye with her next attack, she may have ended his career.

Granted, with no audio, it's one person's word against another's as to what may have been said, but didn't she claim he attacked her unprovoked before the video surfaced? That's why I used the qualifier "allegedly", I can't tell for myself. It's pretty clear to me that she was instigating while he was walking away, though.

Hmm, I think those are just easier things to check in a study because they will leave a medical or criminal history, whereas homicidal ideation might only be noticed by family and friends.

But it's completely standard in psychology to watch for thoughts of harming others and take them seriously. It's not predictive in the sense that someone with such thoughts will most likely kill someone. But even if we can say their chance goes from 0.1% to 3% that's cause for intervention.

The thruth of this world is that most ideals are bullshit. Let's look at the idea that human life is sacred, the sanctity of human life. God disapproves of murder.
The death penality is older than scripture. It existed before we had written words. It is still a thing.
How can that be if we are so developed, so evolved, so civilized?
Human life isn't sacred. We shit on that on a daily basis. Murder is committed every day. For petty reasons. For political reasons. For stupid reasons.
Your holy book, the Bible, tells me to kill people for adultery.
How can you defend this?
That's why I'm a cynic, that's why I'm a dissapointed idealist. I'd like to believe but I can't. Belief makes me inhuman, makes me cruel, makes me kill adulterers. It commands me to be a murderer.
For what?
For betrayal? For sex? For deceit? For breaking promises?
I'd rather be a cynic. I choose humanism over homicide.
Your book is evil. Your faith leads to evil.
I chose compassion. I chose cynicism.

Wow, you really need to curb these homicidal tendencies.

Maybe it's something you ate?

Yap, the cops killed Terrill Thomas.

'White people are afraid of black people because of violent tendencies' says the white officer that just violently manhandled a 98 lb woman ostensively for being black.
OK, so then he agrees that people should absolutely fear the police then, right? Because FAR more of them commit violent acts per capita, and overall, than black people. And if 'fear' is an excuse for trained, well equipped police with backup to kill unarmed black men, do not armed black men have more reason to fear police and kill them? They really need to rethink their MO, and the thought process behind excusing homicide with the blanket excuse of 'fear', because that excuse goes both ways.

As a society, we disagree, and sometimes condone mass shootings.

War is considered a legitimate reason for mass shooting of anyone designated the enemy.
Self defense is also a legitimate reason for mass shooting a group that's attacking you.

As for murder NEVER being the solution, it depends on your specific definition of murder. Homicide IS sometimes the best solution. "Murder", rarely, but there are rare times when it may be the best possible solution to a problem, terrible as it may be.

The only true absolute is "there are no absolutes"....which paradoxically makes that statement untrue by virtue of it's own veracity and vice versa. ;-)

Yes, there is some chance of being injured or dying while doing almost anything at any time. Extreme statistical unlikely-hoods occur all the time and they are extremely difficult to protect against.

Comparing 400+ deaths a year (for example), while in pursuit of a biological requirement that all humans are required to do, and thus spend roughly 1/4 of their lives doing it, to 80,000+ no fatal injuries and 11,000 homicides from gun use is asinine to the extreme.

You can own an AR15 in NZ.

You can have high capacity magazines in NZ.

It is a popular 3-gun competition and hunting firearm.

"but our average annual firearm homicide rate for the last 30 years or so is ~0.2 deaths per 100k people."

Yet you still allow ownership of these items, and still have murder rates by firearm (and in general) lower than most of the world.

NZ's laws work because they stop criminal and crazy people from owning these items.

Australia banned semi auto rifles of all types and high capacity magazines outright (except for some very exceptional circumstances) yet our firearm homicide rate (and general murder rate) is on average worse than NZ's.

One can allow these items to be owned, they just need to be the right people (you already alluded to that).

Forget about the old armed populace vs tyrannical government trope. Unless you want to admit that there would be a civil war at that point (large amounts of the armed forces would revolt, military weapons in hand, against attacking their own families).