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WDJB Shooting

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WDJB Shooting
Post by dscott8   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 5:23 pm

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This morning, a reporter and camera operator from WDJB television station in Virginia were shot dead by a former employee of the TV station. Before the bodies were cold, the spin doctors were spinning and the pundits punting, and social media were awash with drivel from conspiracy theorists and rabble rousers. Blame was being thrown in all directions before anyone had enough facts for a reasoned position.

I was upset enough when discussion of the Charleston church shooting was diverted into a political football over a flag. I've just been upset again after a few hours of reading articles and Twitter posts blaming:

Obama (default position)

The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag

Employment screening less effective than a Top Secret/Nuclear/Crypto clearance

The Rainbow Flag

Media overexposure of rampage killers

Facebook and Twitter

My topic here is not gun control, or racism, or even murder. It is, why does our nation slap band-aids on problems instead of identifying the root causes and fixing them? Is it because a true fix often can't be implemented before the next election? Or are we too intellectually lazy to work through it, preferring to swallow our opinions from agenda-driven politicians, preachers and pundits who are so far removed from a normal citizen's daily life that they neither know nor care what the real issues are?
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by gcomeau   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 5:48 pm

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dscott8 wrote:My topic here is not gun control, or racism, or even murder. It is, why does our nation slap band-aids on problems instead of identifying the root causes and fixing them? Is it because a true fix often can't be implemented before the next election? Or are we too intellectually lazy to work through it, preferring to swallow our opinions from agenda-driven politicians, preachers and pundits who are so far removed from a normal citizen's daily life that they neither know nor care what the real issues are?


It's because the real fix is politically untenable until a larger percentage of the American electorate grow the hell up ...




("Fix" being defined as effective measures which significantly reduce such incidents, not magical remedies that make all violence and criminality be banished from humanity... in case anyone wants to be deliberately obtuse and pretend they don't understand that...)
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by Daryl   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 7:28 pm

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Condolences to family and loved ones. Bet even this doesn't change the nutters' opinion that the cure for gun crime is more guns.
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by Imaginos1892   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 8:07 pm

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Daryl wrote:Condolences to family and loved ones. Bet even this doesn't change the nutters' opinion that the cure for gun crime is more guns.

No, it's the nutters that want to ban guns. It's 500 years too late for that.
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If you call 9-1-1 and tell them that somebody with a gun is breaking into your house, they will send two cops in 10 or 15 minutes. If you tell them that somebody is breaking into your house and you have a gun, they will send 10 or 15 cops in two minutes.
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by gcomeau   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 8:55 pm

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Imaginos1892 wrote:
Daryl wrote:Condolences to family and loved ones. Bet even this doesn't change the nutters' opinion that the cure for gun crime is more guns.

No, it's the nutters that want to ban guns.


Or, you know, regulate them *sanely* like so many other nations manage to do...

It's 500 years too late for that.


The explanation of that statement should at least prove to be good for some entertainment value.
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by Daryl   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 9:24 pm

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When our gun laws were changed in 1996 I had some reservations. Still I handed in my two assault rifles, received fair compensation, and registered the other six guns.
Since then the incidence of gun crime has reduced, and people feel safer because they are safer.
I still have access to firearms, although the freedom of having them in open racks in the house has gone, but we have to grow up sometime.
Considering that there is 32 times more likelihood of being shot in the USA than here it does seem to be working.

Figures quoted today in the news show that 33,000 people die from gunshots in the USA each year, or 90 a day. A single shooting here makes national headlines for days.
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by dscott8   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 9:49 pm

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We already have a very long discussion thread on guns. Rather than re-rake that garden, let me give an example of how we "fix" problems: Affirmative Action.

Problem: Minority communities find it tougher to work their way out of economic disadvantage because of hiring discrimination.

What we tried: Creating quotas and tracking percentage of new hires by race.

The result: A perception that minority employees, even highly qualified ones, were unfair competition. Also a focus on the EEOC statistics that made companies pursue "double dippers" such as minority female candidates that allowed the company to check two boxes on the EEOC reports.

Why it didn't work: It did nothing to solve the reasons behind hiring discrimination, the most obvious being the differences in quality of education and nutrition (hungry kids don't learn as well) between majority and minority communities. There was also no effort to break negative stereotypes: "I won't hire those people, they're all lazy." "How do you know?" "They're all unemployed!"

The result: Minorities being hired for jobs for which they (through no fault of their own) weren't fully qualified, leading to lower productivity and resentment from co-workers. Tenable legal arguments over "reverse discrimination". A degree of preference for double-dipper minority women that resulted in employment disadvantages for minority men, possibly a contributing factor to instability in minority families.

It seems to me that ours is a history of great ideas poorly executed.
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by PeterZ   » Wed Aug 26, 2015 10:27 pm

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I don't believe the problem is racial discrimination. I do believe that there are few businesses that want to risk relocating in those high crime areas.

Per capita crime had falling regularly in the US until the 1960's. Is that a coincidence? I suspect not. Those great social programs of that period accompanied rising crime until the 1990s. Crime started falling again until quite recently. That period coincided with Clinton's welfare reform. As more people returned to public assistance, crime began to rise again. The reversal of the trend came within the last 2 years. Revisiting the data suggests that the decline continued at least until 2012. I haven't devoted the time to collect specific data for more recent periods.

Perhaps its not just public assistance but that and the increased emphasis of victimhood. The mantra of police killing blacks is the most obvious. The stats don't support this canard. Police kill more whites per capita of people taken into custody. Is that figure grossly lopsided? No. But facts are facts; blacks are not being targeted by police and killed.

The circumstances surrounding Michael Brown's shooting have been mischaracterized to a fare thee well in support of this renewed victimization. So, I truly don't believe its race based discrimination that fuels the unemployment of the inner cities nor the crime. The lack of jobs stemming from this recession doesn't help, but its not the driver. Yet we've had recessions since the 1990s when crime resumed its decline and crime did not reverse that trend until at least 2012.

So my belief is that the left's encouragement of viewing oneself as a victim is the principal driver of this spike in crime.
Last edited by PeterZ on Thu Aug 27, 2015 9:27 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by Annachie   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 5:51 am

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Um Peter you may want to revisit what you just wrote as you appear to contradict yourself.

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You are so going to die. :p ~~~~ runsforcelery
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still not dead. :)
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Re: WDJB Shooting
Post by PeterZ   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 8:05 am

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Thanks. I posted off a Kindle. Limited controls don't you know.

Annachie wrote:Um Peter you may want to revisit what you just wrote as you appear to contradict yourself.

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