Category Archives: Violence and Guns

Walk out not up #walkoutnotup #walkoutandwalkup

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There is nothing wrong with “walk out and walk up” because it expands consideration and activism in a good direction.

It says, “while you are busy protesting the fact that dozens of children and teachers are murdered in their schools per year — and good for you for doing this — note that in your suburban school system of 5,000 students, about one will die per year of their own hand, using Uncle Bob’s Glock that he keeps on his night stand just in case.”

There is a great deal wrong with “walk out NOT walk up” because it is bone headed self aggrandizing yammering about how wrong people are in their ability to perceive things, and their tone, which in and of itself is wrong.

I’ll give you the short version of why #walkoutnotup is #wrongandstupid here, and point you to a longer post I wrote a few weeks ago, seeing this tone trolling coming, because it does, always, come. Continue reading Walk out not up #walkoutnotup #walkoutandwalkup


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I for one welcome Donald Trump’s policy to arm half the teachers …

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… because of this: Some of my best friends are teachers, including my wife. Overall, teachers are the best people. When I imagine a trained armed force larger than the United States Marine Corps, made up of 100% teachers, teachers ready to put things right, I get all giddy.

But seriously… Continue reading I for one welcome Donald Trump’s policy to arm half the teachers …


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Trump and Gun Control. LOL Republicans.

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Donald Trump will advance the regulation and control of deadly weapons but not in the way you might think. He is currently contemplating, which is a big word to use for Trump so maybe I mean having some verbal diarrhea that vaguely resembles an idea, banning assault style weapons and bump stocks. Of course, he can’t do that himself, it would be Congress, but he’s talking about it. Continue reading Trump and Gun Control. LOL Republicans.


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Minnesota Gubernatorial Candidate Calls For Gun Safety Bill

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Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto just released a letter calling on the Minnesota House and Senate, which returned to session this morning, to ban assault type rifles and bump stocks, and to institute universal background checks. Continue reading Minnesota Gubernatorial Candidate Calls For Gun Safety Bill


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Are you ready for a national school walkout?

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The idea is to protest how easily school shootings seem to happen, and how our country has not reacted to this problem ever, other than sending around a lot of thoughts and prayers.

You should know that the planning of this event has already been adulterated by either idiotic Americans or smart Russian spies. Watch carefully and pay attention… Continue reading Are you ready for a national school walkout?


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Gun Control and School Shootings

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When a school shooting happens, good people become horrified and many ask for better gun laws.

The answer that comes from the anti-safeguard lobby, those who mainly want guns to be unregulated with respect to ownership, safety, use, or disposition, is that such laws would not have stopped the tragedy that prompted the conversation.

They may be right (but see below). But they have missed the point. The problem is, the people who suddenly want to do something about senseless gun deaths have also missed the point. Continue reading Gun Control and School Shootings


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Falsehood: “People, not guns, kill people”

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Yes, of course, you need a person (usually) to pull the trigger. But it is abundance of and ease of access to guns that causes the United States to be off the charts in woundings and killings from firearms. This is what the research has shown for a very long time and continues to show. Here, I’ll give you yet another example. All of the following text, and the tables, are exerted directly from the paper. Continue reading Falsehood: “People, not guns, kill people”


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Hey Texas, Give This Guy All The Guns He Wants!

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Yahoo! Ride ’em cowboy! Shoot ’em up and get ‘er done! That’s what I say. Tell those namby pamyb libtards to stuff their gun control where the sun don’ shine.

You betcha, Texas, give this man all the guns he wants! Continue reading Hey Texas, Give This Guy All The Guns He Wants!


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Is this terrorism?

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Is a particular act an act of terrorism? Is a particular person a terrorist?

People want the label applied to acts and people that are readily and resoundingly vilified. It hardly matters if the person is an actual official terrorist. If they killed someone and you are really really mad at them you want them to be a terrorist. Or, if they are just scary. Like the elderly black homeless man in this story, labeled by the Iowa Farmers as a terrorist because it was impossible for him to squeeze his wheelchair through a door gracefully.

We yell at each other about whether or not a person will be labeled as a terrorist, and it is often said that if a mass killer is found out to be brown, he’ll be labeled as one, but if he is found out to be white, his actions will be attributed to mental illness. And so on.

People also want the label to be applied instantly, just as the news of some horrid event is coming out. No matter what. Call the terrorist a terrorist NOW or you, too, are a TERRORIST.

Here’s the thing. What a terrorist is, or what terrorism is, has an official definition. There are probably going to be unclear cases, but the term terrorism has a meaning and it is important to get this right even if getting it right somehow goes against the sensibilities of the Extremely Annoyed. Also, since there is a real definition and details matter, it is absurd to demand that the label be used instantly. It takes time. And, we can wait. There is no gain in instant labeling of a terrorist. Police and investigators would do the same things in either case in the initial stages of an event.

The FBI gives these two definitions of terrorism:

International terrorism: Perpetrated by individuals and/or groups inspired by or associated with designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored).

–for example, the December 2, 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, CA, that killed 14 people and wounded 22 which involved a married couple who radicalized for some time prior to the attack and were inspired by multiple extremist ideologies and foreign terrorist organizations. Continue reading Is this terrorism?


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Rates of sexual assaults among college students, by gender orientation

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This is just over a year old but just came across my desk. The study is: Sexual Assault Victimization Among Straight, Gay/Lesbian, and Bisexual College Students by Jessie Ford and Jose Soto-Marquez, Violence and Gender, June 2016.

From the abstract: Continue reading Rates of sexual assaults among college students, by gender orientation


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Study says: Police Body Cams Have No Effect. I Expected This

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You have cops everywhere doing cop things. Every now and then a cop does something really bad and someone gets killed. That is not going to show up as a statistical effect when looking at the overall behavior of the cops, unless you do some very specialized Bayesian statistics, which no one is going to do on that sort of data.

So, the just released study, summarized here by NPR, is not a surprise.

Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers’ use of force, at least in the nation’s capital.

That’s the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts.

“We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” says Anita Ravishankar, a researcher with the Metropolitan Police Department and a group in the city government called the Lab @ DC.

“I think we’re surprised by the result. I think a lot of people were suggesting that the body-worn cameras would change behavior,” says Chief of Police Peter Newsham. “There was no indication that the cameras changed behavior at all.”

Perhaps, he says, that’s because his officers “were doing the right thing in the first place.”

The purpose of the body cam is to find out what happened in this or that extreme event, when there is a death, or a plausible accusation of wrong doing. Another likely effect of the body cam is to cause bad behavior to be more rare, just because the cameras are there. But bad behavior is often the result of out of control emotions, or of bad training, or some other thing that the presence of a cam is unlikely to detect. I would not be surprised if body cams did have this effect on some police forces, but not most.

There are statistical ways to see if the body cams are having an effect on behavior but they have to assume that the behavior is a) really there already and b) of a certain specific form. Then you can subset your data down to the sensitive parts of it, and see if, say, before or after body cams you get a difference. But really, the best way to do that is to pair up the cops (statistically) so you have one set of cops match, with respect to relevant characteristics, another equal size set (on the same police force) where one set is wearing the cams, the other not (there are some added difficulties in doing this, like matching patterns so neither or both have the cams, etc). This sort of approach could identify an effect. But the methods that would normally be used won’t unless it is dramatic.


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Guys crossing the street, rabid dogs, and elevators

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I feel it is time for a repost of an essay I wrote about five years ago during an earlier period of turmoil on the internet caused by women and men acknowledging that women are generally under constant sexual harassment and under constant threat of sexual assault.

There may be a few broken links here that I’ll just deaden, but otherwise, I’m not changing the essay at this time.


I want to mention three separate instances of men acting inappropriately towards a woman that occurred to people I know over the last couple of months.

[Trigger warning: Sexual harassment and rape]

In once case, a man drove up to a woman who was just getting out of her car, in a relatively secluded parking lot, to ask her what kind of mileage she got on that model and make. There was nothing exceptional about the car that would cause special interest in this issue. In the second instance, a man skated (on in-line skates) up next to a woman who was skating on a long trail a mile or two into the woods where no one was around, and insisted on “teaching her” how to “draft” which involved him skating to a few inches behind her and holding his hand on the small of her back while he explained how great that felt. In the third instance, a stranger cornered a women in an enclosed space, tried to rape her, and in so doing hit her several times in the head while pulling off her clothing.

Continue reading Guys crossing the street, rabid dogs, and elevators


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