Read this article on PJM. Part of a series on Christianity and Objectivism and how they ca be reconciled at a deep level as long as both sides respect the profound difference in start point, because they mean, lead to, result, in pretty much the same social morals and intents.
It reads well to me, providing a bridge I have felt intuitively is there but have run across no one willing to approach and that I lack the philosophical and logical tools to express.
Seen in Wired (best society of tech pup ever.)
The Verge | I rode the ZBoard in Las Vegas and it changed my life
Read the article, this is what Kickstarter is all about.
Thanks to Eugen Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy for this correction of the the Breitbart post I linked in the my last post.
The FBI Statistics:
| Murder Victims | |||||
| by Weapon, 2005-2009 | |||||
| Weapons | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
| Total | 14,965 | 15,087 | 14,916 | 14,224 | 13,636 |
| Total firearms: | 10,158 | 10,225 | 10,129 | 9,528 | 9,146 |
| Handguns | 7,565 | 7,836 | 7,398 | 6,800 | 6,452 |
| Rifles | 445 | 438 | 453 | 380 | 348 |
| Shotguns | 522 | 490 | 457 | 442 | 418 |
| Other guns | 138 | 107 | 116 | 81 | 94 |
| Firearms, type not stated | 1,488 | 1,354 | 1,705 | 1,825 | 1,834 |
| Knives or cutting instruments | 1,920 | 1,830 | 1,817 | 1,888 | 1,825 |
| Blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc.) | 608 | 618 | 647 | 603 | 611 |
| Personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.)1 | 905 | 841 | 869 | 875 | 801 |
| Poison | 9 | 12 | 10 | 9 | 6 |
| Explosives | 2 | 1 | 1 | 11 | 2 |
| Fire | 125 | 117 | 131 | 85 | 99 |
| Narcotics | 46 | 48 | 52 | 34 | 45 |
| Drowning | 20 | 12 | 12 | 16 | 8 |
| Strangulation | 118 | 137 | 134 | 89 | 121 |
| Asphyxiation | 96 | 106 | 109 | 87 | 77 |
| Other weapons or weapons not stated | 958 | 1,140 | 1,005 | 999 | 895 |
| 1 Pushed is included in personal weapons. | |||||
So the information was misleading but I was willing to be mislead. But it also says that ‘assault rifles’ per.se. are not a large scale threat, they’re just a red herring.
I have to say that I am not sure what this data tells me. If I were knee jerk anti gun and an idealist I am sure that I would immediately say that if I confiscated every gun then I would save most of the ten thousand lives taken per year by firearms. But being rather less impressed by the world I see around me I would suggest that the number would fall but not by anywhere near as much as you might think. 1) Most murders are by criminals and unless their were some magic that eliminated every gun in an instant (and there’s an interesting SciFi premise) you’re not going to get their weapons and they’d even start building their own since the tech’s pretty simple. 2) the number of other types of murder would go up since the term, ‘don’t bring a knife to a gunfight’ has a lot of harsh practicality behind it.
Then you have the problem that this is not Sweden, Denmark, France, or even England or Germany, this is America, a restless, dynamic, even volatile place with folks who own a car, a TV, in fact all the mod cons, and still figure they are owed more. So A)The number of thefts, robberies, home invasions, kidnappings, extortion by violence would break all records because again the innocent would be weaponless [n particular women and old folks would be very vulnerable.] and {Don’t give me fluff about the police,while most are hard-working and honest they are far in time and distance from you in times of need and are there by definition to catch bad guys AFTER the fact. And given modern expectations regarding training, equipping, paying and benefits there will be far too few if the crime rate explodes.} B) this then will increase the general level of lawlessness because no one will believe in the law as administered by the government. Many otherwise law-abiding will resort to guns and some will then be arrested for trying to protect themselves and the downward slope of trust in society will get steeper.
At www.breitbart.com more people killed by clubs and hammers than rifles each year. AWR Hawkins
According to the FBI annual crime statistics, the number of murders committed annually with hammers and clubs far outnumbers the number of murders committed with a rifle.
Wired | The Common Space Fleet (1968) BY DAVID S. F. PORTREE 12.26.12 7:50 AM
Even as the moon landing was approaching futurists were looking to what should follow. They were looking at manned multi year missions based on the technology they had, reuse and incremental development of Apollo – Saturn technology. Just reading this article sent me of into a dream of what could have been. Just thinking about it made me sad, mad, glad: sad for what might have been, mad at those who sidelined the dream because of shortsightedness, glad that at least some had the sense to think-dream based on common sense.
Today Elon Musk and a few others are dreaming similar dreams maybe having read a few of the NASA documents though the basics are so common sense they do not have to have.
Maybe
But only if your ignorance is buttressed by a life untroubled by interaction with the greater world, and the outside world is untroubled by interaction with you.
Ignorance is not about technology or science (or it can be but usually is not,) it’s about the willingness to see things as they are not as you wish them to be, the strength to change your mind when the evidence shows that some alternative is superior, the arrogance to ignore the milling masses if need be and the humility to listen to the quiet voice of reason.
Some comments from some folks who understood …
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29
“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works
“Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.”
― Benjamin Franklin
“Beware the man of a single book.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas
“Confidence is ignorance. If you’re feeling cocky, it’s because there’s something you don’t know.”
― Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl
Joyce Lee Malcolm: Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control
After a school massacre, the U.K. banned handguns in 1998. A decade later, handgun crime had doubled. Australia same dynamic…result increased assaults and rapes. While the law abiding go to jail.
Wall Street Journal on British and Australian experience with banning fire arms both countries have essentially disarmed their populations, except you know for those who don’t care, or who see it as an opportunity for low risk thuggery.
In these countries suicide by gun has gone down but suicide by other means has gone up. Home invasions almost unheard of in the US have become a plague with criminals threatening revenge if the victims call the police.
The Top Ten Myths About Mass Shootings, James Alan Fox, Boston.com.
It needs to be remembered that while it seems otherwise, because of the laser like focus of the mass media on these events, that mass killings are if anything decreasing. Gun free zones are stupid, just assuring the killers that they have a safe hunting zone. Mass murderers do not snap they are planners who plot out the act and are not deterred by locked doors or the like. Any weapon will do, fire, knife, car airplane, fertilizer, poison, gas, bio agents….
Gun Control is about control, it is about fear of the other, it is also about magical thinking “if we close our eyes and wish hard enough the bad thing will go away.” Infantile thinking like this is a waste of everyone’s time, the reality is not every troubling event has a solution and laws are not magical spells that can affect humans whose minds have ‘broken bad.’
This World and Others 