Posts by rodgerd
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Even before I bought a gun, the fact that others did have guns in their houses substantially reduced the risk of someone breaking into my house. That is good.
Not so good is the number of people who die in the US because some hopped-up-on-scray-TV-news homeowner blows his wife or kids away when they get home late, thinking they're a burglar. Doesn't happen so much here.
But hey, if your VCR is that important to you that you'll trade someone stealing your stuff for thousands of firearms homicides a year, I guess you've moved to the right country.
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Can anybody get any details on the 164 gun deaths that must have occured in the US since the V tech massacre?
Chances are they - unlike the stupid example of Aramoana (where more widespread firearms possession might have saved a lot of lives; the unarmed cop who was shot in the head trying to stop Gray, for starters) - the best examples of why gun control is valuable to society as a whole.
Consider the CDC stats for 2003:
Causes of death by age group: ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/ncipc/10LC-2003/JPEG/10lc-2003.jpg
Causes of injury death by age group: ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/ncipc/10LC-2003/JPEG/10lc-unintentional.jpg
The number two injury related death for 15 - 24 year olds is firearms homicides. The number 4 killer for 10-14 year olds is firearms homicides. For the 15 - 24 year old age group the rate of firearms homicides is almost half that of the road toll. Those numbers seem kind of disturbing to me.
(By way of comparison, apparently around 75% of firearms deaths in New Zealand are self inflicted)
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The real problem is the constitution and the culture.
More the latter, less the former. One of the points of the inexplicably-despised-by-gun-nuts Bowling for Columbine was that US firearms ownership isn't that much higher than Canada - but argued that there is a culture of racism, fear, and violence in the US that is far worse than anything north of the border (one statistic which was waved about in the doco was that the non-firearms murder rate is higher in the US than the total murder rate in Canada, per capita).
I've seen little to convince me that the main reason for their second amendment was less to do with self defence or shooting prarie dogs with assault rifles or whatever, but to keep the government in line, something the NRA is remarkably uninterested in when there's a Republican administration in Washington!
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Damn, publicaddress ate my link.
Try http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5016274.stm for tips on dealing with "those slags dancing around"
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But can you point to any specific examples of this happening?
Timothy McVeigh? The Atlanta Olympic bomber? IRA bombings in the UK? Attempting to blow up a nightclub full of "promiscous women" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5016274.stm)? The nail bomb killings in the UK? That's just off the top of my head.
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The obvious difference between tragedies like Aramoana, the Port Arthur Massacre, Dunblane ect and the constant mass-murders in the US is that in other countries these massacres act as a wake-up call and lead to much stricter gun-control laws and a subsequent - touch wood - decline in random mass-killings
Actually, I think that's one of the dumbest aspects of reactions to situations like Aramoana. A sufficiently motivated and focused nutjob can and will find a way to wreck mayhem if he or she so wishes. The main value I see in not allowing every man and his dog easy access to firearms, especially handguns, is that it makes spur-of-the-moment killings that bit harder, not that it prevents someone determined to go down and take a bunch of others with them.
The problem the US has with firearms is not the high-profile mass murders, it's the number of people who are killed by someone they live with who thought the deceased was an intruder, or the people who have ready access to a gun for a suicide attempt, or the people who have a handgun on them when they lose their temper in a pub.
They also have a problem with a realtively more violent society than comparable Westen nations that would likely persist even if you took the firearms away.
But I echo Russell's bemusement at the people who look at the US for guidence on the best way to manage firearms. There are, after all, countries with reasonably high availablility of firearms who don't have anything like the degree of firearms related problems. Why import a broken model?
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Nobody: And, indeed, one of the biggest problems I see in this is the degree of judgment about what would be involved so as not to result in Nat's worst-case scenario, where first -sale doctrine is blown away. Or, at the other end, we end up with Muldoon-era judgements about what is and is not worth of post-sale royalty.
Personally I'd say if one were to go down this route it ought to be pegged to items that aren't mass produced. Your painting or one-off custom chopper, sure; your signed limited edition print perhaps; your book or poster? Not so much.
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Cough... Perhaps I'm running in the wrong circles, but I don't know anyone who buys rare and antiquarian books by the truckload either. I can't for the life of me see why as recently as last November I saw a signed first edition copy Stephen King's Carrie sold for over NS$7,500. I've even seen first editions of the the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and we're not talking first impressions in fine or near-mint condition) offered for upwards of NZ$20,000.
The analogy still fails because authors and painters make the bulk of their money in totally different ways. Comparing an author to a painter would only be valid if authors made money from their original manuscripts and the printing press didn't exist.
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I still remain to be convinced, however, that artists have any more entitlement to an 'artists' resale royalty', than New Zealand writers have to a cut if their books start appreciating in the market for modern first editions.
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Analogy police, sir. We've had reports of a terrible analogy in this thread!
There's a pretty big difference there. People buy books in bulk, and people don't tend to buy paintings in the same way. Your analogy would be valid if artists wanted to renegotiate their arrangement for mass-market prints, or authors personally wrote every copy of every book they ever sold by hand, and were limited to a few hundred items in their lifetime.
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merc: Add Len Lye to the list of unappreciated artists. I understand the reason he bequethed the whole of his personal collection to the Govett-Brewster because they were the first New Zealand gallery to showcase his work.
That would make the tantrum they threw down in Christchurch, demanding the Govett-Brewster give them the Lye collection down south forever ("he was born here!"), even more precious than it sounded otherwise.
As an aside, I find it a bit bizarre the number of Kiwis that go to play union in England. Really. You could make damn near as much money playing in France, and many of their top clubs are in the south. South of France vs England? No contest!