Why Dont You Blog?

Well, we have talked about the evil madness policy that is the governments proposed 42 day detention without trial for people suspected of terrorism. It is wrong and no amount of fear-woo spreading will convince me otherwise, however there are those who are not so set in their views.

One of the major arguments “for” the 42 day detention is how we live in a “different world” than a few years ago when 28 days was enough. These people often opine how “we” don’t understand the threats the security apparatus face and how much “they” need this time to fight the evil terrorists. Wisely, the actual security organisations themselves have remained quiet on this and I have more than a little respect for that, although it makes it hard to counter the fear-woo.

Wonderfully, today the former head of the Security Service - the organisation charged with protecting the nation from terrorism - has made clear her (personal) opinion on the matter.

Lady Manningham-Buller, in her maiden speech to the House of Lords, said: “I don’t see, on a principled basis, as well as a practical one, that these proposals are in any way workable.”

Well, I couldn’t have put it better myself. Even better, this is not someone who has no idea about the threat. This is not someone who doesn’t understand the problems faced by the security apparatus. Baroness Manningham-Buller spent 33 years working for MI5 combating terrorism and espionage throughout the cold war, the IRA bombing campaign and headed up the organisation in the madness that followed the Jul 2005 bombings. This is not someone who can be dismissed as having “no idea,” she has lived it for almost all her adult life. If she thinks it is wrong, it may well be wrong…(*)

Sadly, I doubt the almost non-existent coverage of her statement will sway much of the UK population.

But it should. The more power we give to the state, the harder it becomes when things go wrong. And they do go wrong with a scary regularity. Also in today’s news was the armed response to a case of mistaken identity:

Three police forces are to be investigated after armed police ordered a man to lie face-down at a railway station in a case of mistaken identity.

Two Dorset Police officers arrested the 21-year-old at gunpoint after his train stopped at Bournemouth on Saturday. He was identified by British Transport Police after Hampshire police told them of an earlier incident in Basingstoke.

Now this is fairly harmless and the poor person in question was simply made to lie down. However the situation where an armed response was going in meant everything was very dangerous. Keep in mind, this is an innocent person. They have committed no crime. What if, for example, they were hard of hearing or simply confused by the instructions shouted by the armed officers? There was an example of what can happen when it goes wrong on the London Underground in 2005.

No one is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. These are so frequently used it is almost embarrassing to write it here, however it highlights a critical measure. We, as a society, should be aware that mistakes get made. Rather than holding continual, pointless, inquires after the act why not prepare for them by making sure that the damage caused by mistakes is minimal. I am not saying the measures taken by Dorset Police was wrong (although it does smell of the new offence of “being black on public transport”), as they do have a public safety issue to balance. However, the more we give them the ability to punish and detain innocent people, the greater the risk of a serious mistake - and the more power the state has, the harder it is to bring to account.

–

(*) Don’t think this means I agree with her on torture or the overall “war on terror” approach… It just means she isn’t always wrong… As soon as she reads this blog and realises I am always right the better…

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

An advert on Wingnut Daily leads to “The ultimate biblical exploration of self-defence”, a book with the title Shooting Back also available as “an exciting DVD.”

What would you do if armed terrorists broke into your church and starting attacking your friends with automatic weapons in the middle of a worship service?

Well, that is one form of terrorist attack that is never going to affect us non-believers….. You might therefore think a common-sense solution to that imaginary scenario for phobic believers might be to maybe stop going to church, but this book doesn’t go down that route….

It’s advice for his fellow worldnutters from a South African who was in a church that was attacked in 1993. (Don’t ask me if it was one of those extremist Terre-Blanche-style-white-hate-”churches” because they don’t actually mention that small detail. )

….But van Wyk was not defenseless that day. Had he been unarmed like the other congregants, the slaughter would have been much worse.
“Instinctively, I knelt down behind the bench in front of me and pulled out my .38 special snub-nosed revolver, which I always carried with me,” he writes in “Shooting Back,” a book being published for the first time in America next month by WND Books. “I would have felt undressed without it. Many people could not understand why I would carry a firearm into a church service, but I argued that this was a particularly dangerous time in South Africa.”

Many people indeed might not understand why someone would carry a firearm into a church service.

(I am a mite distracted by the odd physical conformation of someone who is naked without a gun. How much human flesh can a gun cover? Is he a really odd shaped human? Is it a pretty large gun like an anti-aircraft weapon. That might cover enough flesh to constitute an article of clothing. However, it would be hard for it to pass unnoticed by even the dumbest church-attackers.

If he put the gun behind a bench, was he was therefore conceptually naked in his church? No, my misunderstanding. The gun wasn’t behind the bench. To cover his conceptual nakedness effectively, it must have been stashed somewhere about his person that he couldn’t get at without having to do the modest thing and get behind a bench. )

Now, maybe I am being a bit too biblically literal here but from my school Religious Knowledge lessons, I don’t remember much in the New Testament about fighting back with maximum firepower? I thought it was all about loving thine enemies and turning the other cheek. My misunderstanding. That was another New Testament altogether.

But, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. In fact I’ll see his paranoid advice and raise it.

I myself feel in a state of mortal terror unless I’m armed with at least a couple of dozen inter-continental ballistic weapons. I mean, you never know when you might come under attack and have to protect innocents around you. So I always feel that a few medium-to-long range nuclear weapons gives you all the security you need. Why stop at carrying mere hand-guns into church?

And indeed, what utopian fool would go anywhere without wearing at least an NBC suit over a set of Kevlar underwear? And carrying a light submachine gun. We live in a dangerous world.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

Now, normally I would be quite happy to rant about how the average person in the street should not be carrying firearms and the like, but in this current case it is a moot point. The weapon in question was held illegally and, for now, we don’t have a “right to bear arms” in the United Kingdom.

As background, today the news centred around how the person who shot and killed 12 year old Kamilah Peniston in April was named as her 17 year old brother, Kasha Peniston. In a nutshell, their mother illegally owned a .38 revolver, Kasha found it and was playing with it when “it went off” and shot Kamilah in the head. Paramedics arrived to find Kasha screaming for help, cradling Kamilah in his arms. She was later pronounced dead at hospital. (BBC news)

The brother was initially charged with murder (and pleaded innocent) but has now accepted a charge of manslaughter. (This is reasonable as murder requires intent, there is no reason to suspect there was any intent in this case). The mother has pleaded guilty to illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition.

From that one accidental discharge of a firearm, three lives have been irrevocably destroyed. The mother and brother will live the rest of their lives with the guilt, the social stigma and the criminal record. Assuming the brother serves the “typical” sentence for manslaughter, he will be around 25 when he is released back into the community - knowing nothing about adult life other than what he has learned in jail. Without wishing to be downbeat about this, the chances of him re-offending is significantly higher than his already high peer group. The mother has basically lost her family as well as facing a sentence of around 3 - 5 years (possibly longer as the consequences of her illegal possession may influence the sentence).

It is a tragic tale and it highlights a sequence of mistakes and errors - the mother should have taken stronger measures to ensure the children had no unsupervised access to the weapon, the son should have been taught how to use the revolver safely etc. The most basic thing which could have been changed to save the daughters life is for the mother to not have the weapon in the first place.

It is certainly the will of Cocidius that this tragic event happened at a time where there is considerable debate in the UK about people having the means to defend themselves in their houses. I am sure Kamilah’s mother felt she needed the .38 for a sensible reason, but does that reason seem so sensible to her now?

Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

Blackwater being rather topical, I thought I’d find out something about who or what Blackwater is. In the last couple of days, CNN has been bursting with stories about the reported activities of Blackwater employees, with the shooting of Iraqi civilians being only the cherry on a large unsavoury cake.

On 2 August, James Meek, writing in The London Review of Books reviewed “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” by Jeremy Scahill, thus showing an impressive degree of prescience regarding their future news value.

Even in this privatisation-hardened age, even in the United States, the notion that military installations are a monopoly of government remains so ingrained that in 2003, when the Chilean-American arms go-between José Miguel Pizarro Ovalle first saw the real-world mercenary processing centre run by the private firm Blackwater in North Carolina, he had to reach for the imagery of Cubby Broccoli. ‘It’s a private army in the 21st century,’ he gushed to Jeremy Scahill.

The whole tone of the article refers constantly to the fantasy James Bond villain-style of the organistion

It is a private military base, spread over seven thousand acres, near the town of Moyock and the Great Dismal Swamp, with firing ranges, tactical exercise areas and an armoury (containing more than a thousand weapons, according to the Virginian-Pilot, the local newspaper, though there is no law preventing Blackwater stocking as many as it wants)

The book relates how a public sector contractor became a private sector nation-state without (much of) a landmass.

it was the al-Qaida attacks of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent US intervention in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq, that turned the taxpayer cash flow from a dribble to a high-pressure jet of dollars. It also gave Blackwater the chance to transform itself from a company that trained government employees to shoot into a company that supplied its own, private shooters for service anywhere in the world.

Al-Qaida attacks may have been tough on the victims but they were the perfect business opportunity to Blackwater. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, as the old saying goes.

Someone needs to explain the whole philosophy of privatisation to me again. I naively assumed the general argument is that state-run companies don’t have to compete and so provide inefficient services and so on.

So it must be that the US Government started to feel that its boring old state monopoly army wasn’t customer-focussed enough. Someone thought “What this army needs is some competition.”

What a brilliant idea. Why not carry on and have dozens of customer focussed go-ahead armies, focussed on the bottom line, rather than old concepts like the nation state, which admittedly have hardly distinguished themselves in practice.

And there’s more of a plus. They could compete between themselves to carry out contracts. The cut and thrust of the marketplace needn’t just be a metaphor. They can start shooting it out over who gets to rule the next bit territory. Last company with a surviving chief executive wins. Bidding wars over contracts can become non-metaphorical.

As well as its cutting edge customer-focus, it’s not without a noble historical precedent, either. Every other minor lord could call a few hundred disposable peasants to back them up in medieval times. And they were so peaceful, weren’t they? Hey nonny no.

Companies can send any junior executives without a hope of becoming CEOs to the Middle East to take territory there. There are so many pre-modern echoes here it feels a bit like stepping into a VR Crusades museum.

Actually, I’ve just remembered that some experimental organisations like this have already been established among the civilian populations. I believe they are called gangs.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Popularity: 31% [?]

Well, I was going to leave the Virginia Tech tragedy and not mention it again, but the sheer idiocy demonstrated by good old Debbie Schlussel can not be missed out! This blog has mentioned Ms Schlussel in the past, so I am sure you can imagine what wonderful comments she is coming out with now.

On that delightful part of the blogosphere which is her blog, Ms Schlussel was very quick off the mark with “updates” about the Virginia Tech shooting. Obviously being quick was more important than having anything but the most approximate relationship with reality. She has a post titled “Who is the ‘Asian’ Mass Murderer at Virginia Tech? UPDATE: Shooter is S. KOREAN w/Student Visa” and within it, is a seething pool of woo, nonsense and racial hatred. It is almost comical.

The sheer volume of bile and nonsense on this blog post is surprising, and makes it reasonably difficult for me to pick what bits I will repost here. Please, check out her blog (especially the comments) and see for yourself the reality. Some highlights, in time order are:

Popularity: 44% [?]

Popularity: 44% [?]

Again, over the course of the next few weeks I am going to be spending a lot of time listening to the perennial source of annoyance that is the Radio. Today, understandably, the Virginia Tech shooting is pretty much the most dominant news item. This is a terrible event and my heart really does go out to those who have lost loved ones, friends and family in, what appears to be, a senseless act of violence. I am not “touched” by this [*] as much as some people and this blog wont deliberately have a day of silence on 30 April, but I can see why others will.

As could have easily been predicted, an incident like this reinvigorates both sides of the gun control debate. Here in the UK, it is always presented with a touch of amazement that guns are so “easy” to get hold of in the US, and killings like this are trumped up as further reasons to prevent the average person having easy access to firearms. Interestingly on one of the radio news items there was a piece from the US pro-gun lobby going on about how if the students had been allowed to have guns, they could have defended themselves. Ironically the university was, apparently a “gun free zone” which resulted in the law abiding students being unarmed, and the nutcase being armed.

Now, while this is an appealing line of reasoning, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of a “wild west” style shoot out in a university and, for once, this is not the main reason behind this blog post. Following on from the radio debates over gun laws, I am curious as to whether or not some rights are considered more fundamentally important than others.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Popularity: 27% [?]

Fights with kicks rather than punches are very much more likely to lead to serious injury or death, according to a pathologist I heard on TV the other day but can’t find a reference for. (Thank you, Google….) Anyway, with or without scholarly support, simple logic suggests that most of us can kick much harder than we can punch, because a kick engages the whole bodyweight. If you kick someone or stamp on them, there is a good chance you will kill them.

So, even in unarmed combat, the feet are deadlier weapons than the hands. The likelihood of death depends on the power of the weapon. To take up on points in the guns-and-crime blog, fights in which feet are used will be deadlier than those in which punches are traded. Where the protaganists have knives or guns, there is always more chance of death or serious injury.

So, the often-expressed argument that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” falls down here. For a given level of aggression, the chance of death rises the easier the access to deadly weapons.

This isn’t the whole issue, of course. Every Swiss citizen is required to hold a gun. I doubt if the Swiss murder rate is even equal to the UK’s, let alone the USA’s. (Except, obviously, the murder rate in the English village, Midsomer Norton, which must put Baltimore in the shade) Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the USA (genuine thanks to Wikipedia ) but lower rates of non-fatal violent crime than the next highest contender in the murder sweepstakes, which is Detroit.

With no local knowledge of US cities- beyond what’s provided by the supreme TV show The Wire, of course - this is just speculation. Maybe guns are just easier to get hold of in Baltimore than Detroit? So any crime is more likely to end in a death?

There has got to be more to it, of course, given the Swiss example of a country with lots of guns and few murders. Social and cultural factors can provide an explanation. The social divisions in American cities are huge,. They are made more painful for those at the bottom of the racie and class heap by a context of values that regard those without money as worthless.

It’s common for ministers (BBC ) to blame hiphop music for the spread of gun crime in England. The glorification of guns and money in gangsta rap lyrics is indeed often ugly. However, it reflects values common in American society. These may be attractive to young men around the world who feel unmanned by the options open to them. However, it isn’t likely to influence fulfilled and optimistic young men, beyond a fantasy level. This is like blaming heavy metal bands for teenage suicides.

And in any case, it comes back to the avilability of guns. There are always dangerous and violent people. If you have the misfortune to come up against them, you had better hope they don’t have guns. (And that they don’t know about the feet thing either.)

Popularity: 27% [?]

Popularity: 27% [?]

At the risk of turning this into a new topic which is hounded to death on the blog, I found some more interesting comments about carrying guns in public - nothing new, they are just more recent ones on the More Guns, More Homicide post.

Previously I pointed out that, as a Brit, I found it odd that the desire to carry a gun while you go about your daily life is so strong in some Americans and that oddness remains. I still find it strange beyond belief that some one in a civilised western democracy can feel so “unsafe” they need to be armed when ever they are in public.

Now, this self defence argument for “packing heat” makes me wonder a bit more. For example, on the comments “ben” was asked the following question by SG (read original):

let me get this right Ben. Someone walks up to you in the street and sticks a knife in your face, says “gimme your wallet”, and you think you can draw your gun and threaten and/or shoot them before they stab you? Is this how the self-defence argument works? Or does it work by you pulling your gun before they pull the knife, i.e. shooting them if they look threatening?

While this seems like a reasonable method of explaining the self defence argument for carrying a gun the responses it drew included this from MarkP (”I’m an actuary, I own a gun but don’t carry it, and have no particular love for them”) (read original)

No, SG, he thinks if he pulls his gun, the knifewielder will see the gun and will flee. And he is substantially correct. People wield weapons mostly for bluff. If the knifewielder had wanted to just have a fight, he would have stabbed Ben without asking for the wallet.

The only thing funnier than paranoid gun nuts protecting their phallic symbols are gun-phobes revealing that they cannot think logically about guns for one second, and know nothing about the real world. I suggest this be alleviated by talking about “weapons” rather than guns, since guns are only the most effective weapons at killing, but certainly not the only ones. Just ask the people in Rwanda.

While on the surface this seems like a logical line of reasoning, it suffers from a logical fallacy, having said that his attempt to broaden the debate is worthwhile, but I suspect it is futile.

Now as I see it the fallacy is that he is assuming the gun wielder is not bluffing but the robber is. If the statement “people wield weapons mostly for bluff” is true, then it must also apply to the gun owner and therefore drawing the weapon does not carry any reason to assume the robber will run.
When the gun is drawn the situation escalates. The robber will suffer from an adrenaline rush and may well decide that running will result in being shot in the back and attacking the gun owner is the only option. On a purely technical point, if the knife wielder is close enough to be a real threat anyway, the hand gun is probably useless unless it is already drawn.

There is more though. Ben replied to the question with: (read original)

It works like this: If I thought my life was in danger, then I’d draw and shoot if necessary. If not, then he can have my wallet, car and any other inanimate object he likes.

It is an interesting conundrum he presents. Some one is threatening you with a knife and you may not consider your life was in danger? If there is no threat, he will surrender his objects but if there is a threat he will try to fight. Very unusual and difficult to imagine how it can work in practice.

There are a multitude of arguments for, and against, gun ownership. My personal thoughts about the escalation of violence may well suffer from the slippery slope fallacy but I doubt it. When one person is armed and the other isn’t deaths may occur. If both are armed deaths may still occur and may well be more likely. Is the belief the death may not be the victim sufficient grounds for people to carry guns? Would you rather be punched or shot as the result of an argument with another car driver? Would you carry a gun in case the other driver came up to you and started shouting? At what point would you draw the gun?

As soldiers are taught, once the weapon is brought into view the whole situation changes. If your opponent does not back down immediately you pretty much have to kill them. The more people carry guns, the more likely an otherwise heated situation will turn violent. Is this grounds for banning firearms in the US? I don’t think so, but then I don’t live there.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]