There are many instances where a person is actively breaking into a home, forcefully and violently trying to enter a home, sometimes intoxicated and the police cannot come in time. It must be very frightening to have someone banging on your door in the middle of the night. In those cases i would hope a person had the right to defend oneself and often times people are too afraid to leave the house due to then removing the barrier that the perpetrator was trying to remove to begin with, and also they figure there may be accomplices.
Just a few weeks ago, right here in the D.C. region, there was a news item about that. A family had recently moved into one of those unimaginative housing tracts where all the homes fit one of three designs. Their teenager sneaked out of an upstairs window to go out carousing with his friends. Coming back drunk, he had a hard time finding his own look-alike house, until he finally yelled, "There it is, the one with the open window on the second floor."
He climbed in the window and the homeowner shot him with his fucking goddamned gun. The teen's family is in inconsolable grief, and the killer is a basket case who will spend the rest of his life in guilt and shame--just like Zimmerman, although he's such a one-percenter he probably doesn't have any feelings so he'll be okay.
Have you ever lived in Ye Olde South or spent anytime at all there?
I've done some consulting gigs in Florida.
I am a southerner and Boy you are just a little harsh.
You're one of our most reasonable and valuable members so please excuse the insult. I'm really steamed about this miscarriage of justice so I'm not in a mood to be civil about it. But that's not your fault, sorry.
I have traveled and lived all over these United States and there are Rednecks everywhere I have been.
Sure, but they were all born into Southern families who migrated after the Civil War, and then again after WWII. Particularly in the Southwest, where cowboys talk with an accent very similar to Southern, and country-western is a single genre of music.
After raising my children for part of their lives in Northern California where African-American culture was pretty much non-existent . . . .
Yes, Mrs. Fraggle and I live in Humbodt County. Lots of Native Americans, but very few Afro-Americans. Nonetheless reggae is arguably the most popular genre of music.
. . . . I took my children back to Northern Florida (my stomping grounds) in part so that they could be introduced to that culture and in part because I missed that culture.
Afro-American culture varies greatly between the regions where hatred and discrimination against them is still rampant, and where they are somewhat more welcome. Here in the Washington DC region (I've been working away from home for years because there are no jobs up there) there is not much "black culture" at all, because this is surely the most well-integrated area in the whole country. D.C. was majority-black until a few years ago (they called it "Chocolate City"), Baltimore still is, and all the suburban counties have a much higher percentage of Afro-Americans than the nation as a whole. Only in DC itself and majority-black Prince George's County MD can you get the feeling of a true "black culture." This is the ultimate melting pot: after all these generations we're finally absorbing the descendants of the slaves.
NOT ALL FLORIDIANS ARE REDNECKS OR RACISTS!
I know that and I'm sure you know I know that. Here where racial animosity ranges from muted to almost undetectable, people are walking around in a daze. "You mean some asshole actually GOT AWAY WITH THAT?" We're all likely to be easily angered, in between hugging each other.
Let me give you a few examples of racism that I and my children experienced in the Old South.
Well sure. In a region where Afro-Americans are still discriminated against (now they're repealing the Voting Rights Bill so they won't even be able to vote any more) they get rather angry. Duh?
I had the same experience as a kid in Arizona with the Latinos. Fortunately as a li'l baby linguist I got points for trying to learn their language so they gave me some respect. (The Chinese are the same way, a complete stranger will spend 15 minutes tutoring you. But don't try it with the French or Japanese, they'll run away screaming with their fingers in their ears because of your "terrible accent.") We had very little white-black trouble, because of the lingering Frontier mentality that anybody who can carry his weight is an asset to the community; there had been plenty of Afro-American cowboys and although some establishments practiced discrimination it was not insitutionalized and our schools were already integrated when I arrived in 1953. But the Mexicans were "foreigners," even though some of their families had lived there for 200 years. The
pachucos beat up quite a few
anglos, because their parents had been discriminated against by the
anglo parents. When we say "shit flows downhill" sometimes that means simply down to the next generation.
I doubt that you would have that experience in Los Angeles (at least not in the daytime when everybody's sober), and certainly not it my old stomping ground, Tucson.
. . . . I could go on and on, but from here I would like to make my point. this hatred is taught in both black and in white homes.
But you surely understand that
we started it. We see the same thing happening in Israel/Palestine. The Palestinians were kicked out of their own land and they're supposed to be philosophical about it because 2,200 years ago somebody did the same thing to the Jews.
Our entire country was founded on stolen land. We have no right to complain if somebody hates us.
Nowhere in America is the animosity and hatred between these two peoples as prevalent as it is in the South, but damn it bombing them is just more hatred . . . .
You probably realize that I don't actually have that red button on my desk so this is all just mouthing off.
. . . . and what is really needed is patience and maybe for one more generation of those ignorant rednecks to die off. Nowhere in your tirade Fraggle did you mention the hatred being taught to the African American children in their homes.
Hatred becomes part of a culture. It's passed down from parents to children on both sides. Look at Northern Ireland. Or even worse, the Sunnis and Shiites. That goes back more than a thousand years! I'm sure many of the children in that part of the world don't even really understand why they hate each other.
Patience, unfortunately, doesn't have a good track record as a strategy for eliminating hatred.
I wonder what this says to other gun totting folks in places like Florida with very relaxed gun laws. Will this verdict embolden those folks? Will this acquittal result in more gun killings? Will Zimmerman kill again? Will he be emboldened with this acquittal?
When a person kills someone, its rather common to be so shaken by how bad it feels, that he will make sure he never does it again. However, Zimmerman seems to be a dedicated loser, so his emotions don't necessarily work the way ours do.
Yet here I am. Still alive. Suicide isnt a crime. Painful for the family, but none the less, not a crime.
Painful for everyone who ever loved you and tried to help you. They all feel guilty. Modern civilizations attempt to convince people not to do dumb shit even if it's legal, so your argument is weak. Besides, suicide actually is a crime in many places. It will also invalidate your life insurance policy so your spouse and kids will be left with nothing.
I love the approach of the anti-gun. You can't have something because a criminal might steal it and/or use it.
You're understating it. It's not just that it
might be. It is actually
more likely to be used by yourself or someone else to commit a crime than
by you in self defense. We're all scientists here, or at least wannabees. Surely you understand probability and statistics. Don't pretend that you don't.
Oh great. There's no official, trusted source on these figures. So you've managed to dig up one that still puts road accidents
barely above guns as a cause of death. And we're supposed to fall on our knees and beg your forgiveness, while we wait two more years for the numbers to finally become incontrovertible? Cars, roads and drivers are becoming safer every year, and the traffic death statistics have been falling for fifty years. Meanwhile the number of guns in America keeps increasing and so does the number of gun deaths. I'd say surely you can do that math, but based on your disingenuous opening, I have to wonder.
Suicide is NOT being killed by other Americans.
Well sorry. I should have said "More Americans are killed by Americans with guns than by road accidents," to account for suicides. But then you'd probably say that since a certain percentage of those dead people were not American citizens, my assertion is still false.
You argue like a creationist, not a scientist. You're not interested in the truth, you just want to win the argument.
And finally, 32,367 (all gun deaths including suicide) is 0.01% of 311,800,000 (the population of the USA in 2011). That is 1/100th of one percent. Quite a bit smaller than FraggleMath.
Now you've really revealed your own innumeracy. That's one percent
per year. I said that you have a one percent chance that the cause of your death will be a gun. That is a
lifetime statistic. The current life expectancy is about 85, so it's really more like 0.85%. Pardon me for rounding.
Your lifetime probability of being killed in a road accident is in about the same range. But it's falling precipitously, so for young people the lifetime odds of being killed by a gun really are greater than a road accident.
Chance of being murdered by an American with a gun? 11,101 (murders via all guns) is 0.003560% of 311,800,000 (population of USA 2011). That is 4/1000th of one percent (I rounded up). FraggleMath... FuzzyMath... you get the picture.
You keep making a fool of yourself. Once again, that is an
annual figure, not
lifetime. The lifetime probability is .4%, which is less than my 1% because for some ridiculous reason you don't think that suicide with a firearm counts as gun violence.
It certainly does. If you feel rotten and there's a gun in your desk drawer you can pick it up and shoot yourself before you have a chance to think twice. But if you have to figure out what a lethal dose of a drug is and whether you even have that much of it, or steel yourself to the idea of slitting your wrists, or fill your garage with carbon monoxide and take a chance of killing your faithful dog too, or tie a noose and hope you did it right or otherwise you'll hang there in pain for twenty minutes while your brain slowly runs out of oxygen and then your family will find you and pull you down and you'll spend the rest of your life in an institution with an IQ of 50... you'll think twice about it, and then think twice again, and then the odds are very high that you'll change your mind.
Chance of being murdered by an American with a gun? 11,101 (murders via all guns) is 0.005394% of 205,800,000. That is 5/1000ths of one percent.
Per year, dude,
per year. I'm talking about the chance of you dying that way, period. In any year of your life. Both road accidents and gun violence, the statistics were calculated the same way.
Yes, the odds that the cause of your death will be
somebody else with a gun is only half of that number. But I'm way curious as to why you dismiss suicide by bullet as gun violence. What the hell else is it? If you have a gun in your home and you've been feeling especially down, you can very easily commit suicide. If you don't, it is
really, really difficult.
How long was slavery legal?
About 250 years.
Does it matter where else it applies. The difference between self-defence and stand your ground, is that if you can run away you don't have too, you can just kill a human being instead. That is not emotional, that is exactly what the law states.
As I've often postulated and no one has disagreed, the fundamental rule of civilization, which in fact
makes civilization possible, is that you may never kill another human being except under present threat of lethal violence (or at least very injurious either to a person or to civilization itself)--in other words, you can defend yourself against someone else who has opted to
become uncivilized first.
The reason is that if we each had to devote a considerable portion of our attention, energy and assets to
protecting ourselves from each other, the surplus wealth and productivity that drives civilization and makes it possible would be dissipated and we'd be right back in the Stone Age.
This is why I have so little respect for gun lovers: They want to take us back to the Stone Age because civilization is just too complicated and difficult for them.
They illustrate my point. There are now so many guns in America that we're all scared shitless by them. People are changing their habits to avoid being in a place or a situation in which they might be shot. This attention to a risk that should not even be allowed to exist
saps our energy and impedes the advance of civilization.
