Pixel Scroll 11/30 The Doom That Came to File770

(1) TOLKIEN AT THE PLATE. Pitchers’ faces turn almost gargoyle-like at the moment they deliver the baseball. Major league baseball blog Cut4  decided it would be amusing to match those expressions with melodramatic quotes from Lord of the Rings.

The pitch face. Completely uninhibited, wholly pure. Every pitcher has one. It takes a lot of effort to throw a pitch 90-plus mph, after all, and pitchers can’t exactly worry about what arrangement their features make while trying to hit their spots. And so, the pitch face is one of baseball’s most totally human elements.

Below, some of the best we saw this year. And to explain their greatness, we captioned them with quotes from the only movies as epic as these faces: The Lord of the Rings trilogy….

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.”

pitcher

(2) SWEDISH SF ART. A fine gallery accompanies a brief interview with the artist in The Huffington Post’s, “Sci-Fi Painter Simon Stålenhag Turns The Everyday Into Dystopia”.

One artist working actively to infuse visions of the future into scenes from the present is Simon Stålenhag, whose narrative paintings have recently been collected into a book, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. The paintings in Tales from the Loop show children and adolescents traipsing across gray plains, energetic in spite of their glum surroundings. Power lines and radio towers dot the skyline, alongside foreign machines, hefty and ominous.

That Stålenhag’s imagined robots stand beside clusters of desktop computers, scoreboards and hatchbacks makes their existence that much more believable. “Look what we’ve created,” he seems to suggest. “Imagine what else we can create.”

staylenhag art

(3) FERMI PARADOX REDUX. A long time ago there was a famous commercial for a hamburger chain that mainly consisted of an elderly woman interrupting a rival’s ad copy, shouting “Where’s the beef?” The Fermi Paradox has a similar effect on speculations about intelligent life in the universe – and Jim Henley’s new post puts a dent in a favorite corollary — “Fermi Conundrum Redux: The Singularity as Great Big Zero?”

Half the objections come from transhumanist types saying that “We’ll just send our robots” or “mind-uploading” or “frozen genetic material raised by AI nannies” or self-replicating Von Neumann machines etc. – the whole LessWrong kitbag of secular eschatons.

But it occurs to me that all that does is bring those notions into the orbit of the Fermi Conundrum, née Fermi Paradox*. The Conundrum, as we all know, runs, “Where is everybody?” That is, we should see evidence of intelligent life Out There or right here or, if you’re especially cynical, should have been wiped out by another civilization before we even evolved this far, just to be on the safe side. The answer, “Maybe there just aren’t any other intelligent civilizations,” almost has to count as the most probable answer to the conundrum at this point.

(4) NEWITZ BIDS GOODBYE. Today was Annalee Newitz’ last day at io9 and Gizmodo. Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders co-founded io9 in 2008. In “I’m Heading Out to the Black. Farewell, io9 and Gizmodo!” at io9, Newitz announced:

And this is where my path diverges from io9 and Gizmodo. This past year managing both sites taught me that I’m not actually interested in being a manager. I want to write. That’s why I got into the writing business, and that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life. So I’ve accepted a position as tech culture editor at Ars Technica, where I’m excited to be devoting all my time to writing about the cultural impact of technology and science.

Did I mention that change is scary? Actually, it’s terrifying. And amazing. And a fundamental, banal part of being trapped in linear time. Anyone who loves the future, or who looks forward to a tomorrow that’s different from today, has to accept the uncertainties of change. Your Utopian vision might lead you straight to the shithole. But sometimes, your one-year speculative experiment grows into a giant robot that saves humanity from giant monsters. You won’t know until you actually veer off the road you were on, and steal a little plutonium to fuel your dreams.

Newitz says Katie Drummond will carry on Gizmodo.

(5) NaNoWriMo PROGRESS. Misty Massey asks “Did You Win NaNo?”  at Magical Words,

Today is the last day of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, a gloriously insane thirty-days of writing like your head is on fire and your booty is catching. I’ve participated for a whole lot of years now, although I never win, because this kind of writing is just not what I do. Despite having been told time and again that I should just write it all down and fix it later, I can’t. It needs to be as perfect and wonderful as I can manage the first time, so my writing style is Eeyore-slow.  But I still sign on for NaNo every year, just in case.  I managed about 9,000 words. Which, for me, is a stunning achievement.

(6) FAVES. Stephanie Burgis lists her “Favorite MG Novels of 2015”. And lo and behold, Ursula Vernon, you are Number Six…

  1. Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon, is a wickedly funny fantasy novel with a fabulous heroine, and it turned me into a huge Ursula Vernon fan. You can read my full review here.

(7) JESSICA REVIEW. Jim Henley’s post “Jessica Jones (And Her Amazing Friends): A Netflix Original Series” sounds like he’s going to keep watching, if you ask me.

(8) BANGING ON. Larry Correia notifies his readers “JP Enterprises is now offering MHI [Monster Hunter International] and MCB logo AR-15 lower receivers” – a logo etching on a gun part.

I just had a fun thought. While certain other bestselling novelists are writing sanctimonious ignorant tweets bleating for more gun control, Larry Correia offers you custom rifles. 🙂

JP-MHI-1024x867

(9) THE RACK IS BACK. Lou Antonelli made sf and fantasy the dominant genres sold at the Dollar General store in Mount Pleasant, TX, as he explains in “Help the spin rack make a comeback!”

In talking about publishing original fiction [in a 2008 article by Antonelli], [Tom] Doherty mentioned that those paperback spin racks we used to see in stores and pharmacies were often a point of entry for people to the s-f and fantasy genres.

They used to be ubiquitous – those tall, vertical wire racks that you could spin around to see all four sides loaded up with mass market paperbacks. Doherty noted how the consolidation of book distribution had all but eliminated them. He said he hoped the fiction published by Tor.com would serve the same function as a point of entry for new readers in the digital age.

…Now, fast forward two and half years, to the summer of 2011. I was scheduled as a panelist at ArmadilloCon in Austin, and one of the panels was on “Secret History”. The Thursday before the convention I stopped at a local Dollar General in Mount Pleasant to pick up some groceries on the way home from work, and while standing in line, I caught sight of a spin rack.

Yes, Dollar General still believes in the spin rack. I walked over and saw that among the books was a copy of Steven Brust’s “The Paths of the Dead”. While I don’t read high fantasy, I bought the book because Brust was on the panel with me.

The following Sunday afternoon, as the panel on Secret History broke up, I stopped and pulled the book out. I told Steve “you know you are a best-selling author when you’re on the spin rack in the Dollar General in Mount Pleasant, Texas! That means your books are sold EVERYWHERE!”

(10) OUT WITH THE OLD. Jeff Duntemann’s photo of “Samples from the Box of No Return” is like a fannish time capsule.

I’m packing my office closet, and realized that The Box of No Return was overflowing. So in order to exercise my tesselation superpower on it, I had to upend it on my office floor and repack it from scratch.

I hadn’t done that in a very long time.

You may have a Box of No Return. It’s downstairs from the Midwestern Junk Drawer, hidden behind the Jar of Loose Change. It’s for stuff you know damned well you’ll never use again, but simply can’t bring yourself to throw away. A lot of it may be mementos. Some of it is just cool. Most of it could be dumped if you were a braver (and less sentimental) man than I….

There follows a descriptive paragraph of the treasures discovered. And things less that treasured.

I tossed a couple of things, like my SFWA membership badge. SFWA wanted to get rid of me for years for not publishing often enough; I saved them the trouble. Rot in irrelevancy, you dorks; I’m an indie now, and making significant money. Some promo buttons were for products I couldn’t even recall, and they went in the cause of making room. But most of it will go back in the (small) box, and it will all fit, with room to spare for artifacts not yet imagined, much less acquired.

(11) Today’s Birthday Boy

  • Born November 30, 1835 – Mark Twain

  • Born November 30, 1937 – Director Ridley Scott

(12) ONE STARS. Scalzi, Leckie, Rothfuss and others reading various one star reviews out loud.

(13) ABRAMS INTERVIEW. “J.J. Abrams Is Excited for Mothers and Daughters To See Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The Star Wars: The Force Awakens director stopped by Good Morning America on Monday to talk about the upcoming release, and how he’s hoping it won’t just be a “boy’s thing.”

Star Wars was always a boy’s thing,” Abrams said. “I was really hoping this could be a movie that mothers could take their daughters to as well.”

In the interview, Abrams also confirmed that he at first refused the offer to direct the new Star Wars film, saying that it was a franchise he so revered that he “thought it would be better just to go the theater and see it like everyone else.” After talking to producer producer Kathy Kennedy, however, Abrams said the opportunity was “too delicious and too exciting to pass up.”

Video of the GMA interview is at the link.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Paul Weimer, Mark-kitteh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Greg.]

Update 12/01/2015: Corrected the link to Jim Henley’s review of Jessica Jones.

654 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/30 The Doom That Came to File770

  1. In more egregious factism:
    1990 – Northern Ireland, homicide rate: 5.12
    1990 – USA, homicide rate: 9.4
    You have to go back to the early 70’s to find a point when Northern Ireland outstrip the US in terms of homicide rates. Maybe five years in total during the bloodiest early phase of this particular stage of the conflict.

  2. In Israel everybody who was ever on active duty stays in the reserves.

    Well, you know, that’s yet another inaccuracy you’ve spouted. You are on quite the roll here. Women, for example, are exempted from reserve duty as of the birth of their first child. Many Israeli’s are not moved into the reserves, but are instead given permanent exemptions from further duty. In any event, reservists don’t retain their weapons, which are kept in arsenals at their duty locations.

    Why is it that you are so ill-informed on these issues and yet feel yourself qualified to opine upon them?

  3. Well no Aaron, the problem is you keep getting it wrong. In Israel everybody who was ever on active duty stays in the reserves. They are ready for call-up all the time, they carry all the time. That’s called arming everybody.

    No, actually, Israeli reservists don’t “carry all the time”. Even non-reservist soldiers don’t get to “carry all the time”. They’re not allowed to bring their guns home with them if they go home for the weekend. You know, because of the vastly increased risk of successful suicide if they do. You’ve still not addressed that, you know. How having not a gun in their home was shown to decrease suicide by 40% among the armed forces of Israel. It seems likely to me that a similar statistic would apply to other groups, as well. And, of course, there’s a 0% chance of a little kid shooting their sibling or themself with a gun in the home if there isn’t a gun in the home.

    But you’re terrified of mass shooting events, so you think everyone should be. You’re not worried about the 12,000 lives that, if the Israeli suicide statistics are generalizable, could be saved a year. Or the dozens of kids killed, and hundreds injured, when they or a sibling find a gun that they think is a toy.

    Fine. You’re scared. I get that. I’m afraid of spiders. Irrational fears happen. But a gun isn’t a security blanket. And you’re more in danger from a friend or family member with a gun than you are from a “bad guy” with a gun. Accidents happen, and guns make accidents worse.

  4. McJulie on December 3, 2015 at 4:08 pm said:
    I think that’s why so many people have these completely unrealistic fantasies about being the “good man with the gun” who stops some atrocity from happening. Their hearts might even be in the right place, but…

    I was talking about that on my blog the other day and via a trackback, curiosity etc ended up having some very odd exchanges over at Larry Correia’s blog. They offered some fascinating counter arguments involving dolphins.

  5. Oops; I was editing the above and ran out of time. Mentally add in a blockquote on that first paragraph, please!

  6. I read a fascinating, if preliminary, report that guns kept at home for self defense purposes are four times as likely to be used in an accidental shooting than a self defense shooting. And seven times as likely to be used in a homicide or homicide attempt than a self defense shooting. And eleven times as likely to be used in a suicide or suicide attempt as a self defense shooting.

    And what’s more the NRA believes it is true. You know how I know? The NRA used its tame congresspeople to forbid further research on that kind of thing. If you believe the preliminary results are wrong, you welcome further research–because that will show the preliminary study was wrong. You only hate the idea of further research if you believe the preliminary study was right–but it says something that might hit your pocketbook.

    Now the NRA knows more about guns than I do, and when their actions–not talk, which is cheap, but actions–say they believe the preliminary study was right, I’m inclined to take that seriously.

  7. The Phantom said:

    Now, of interest is the fact that since the 2000 election, there’s been virtually no attention paid to gun control. Formerly lionized Sarah Brady is so far out of the spotlight she might as well be a leper.

    Sarah Brady died in April. She was 73. Most people aren’t as active in their seventies as in their fifties–and it was only ammosexuals like yourself who regarded her as “a leper.”

    Because Algore ran on gun control and he -lost-. He lost a sure thing to ‘doofus’ George Bush.

    Al Gore won the popular vote. That is a fact even GWB’s most fanatical advisors and lawyers didn’t deny. And we knew within a few months after the debacle that was Florida that, with a full recount of Florida, Gore would have carried Florida and won the electoral college, too.

    George W. Bush was elected President by a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court.

  8. What, pray tell, would dolphins have to do with guns?

    Dolphins are smarter than people. Which is why they don’t use guns. I’ve never seen a dolphin with a gun so it must be true. 😉

  9. @Phantom

    Now, of interest is the fact that since the 2000 election, there’s been virtually no attention paid to gun control.

    Well, except for the uproar after Sandy Hook, and the attempt to pass universal background checks, and the President’s talking about it ever since, and all the Democratic candidates making gun control prominent parts of their platforms.

    Although I don’t know why I’m bothering, since the Phantom is apparently afraid of factsism and has taken his idiotic statements elsewhere.

  10. I work in risk management for a university. Gun violence and “active shooters” are something we’re very aware of and very concerned about how to address. I’ve been through an in-person training session on how to respond if there’s an active shooter. We discuss this regularly and are trying to use all the resources we have available, whether physical or mental or infrastructure or otherwise, to mitigate the problem.

    Not one of my colleagues, including the one who served on Marine One and later trained White House staff in emergency response, thinks it would be a good idea for more people to carry guns.

    On a slightly different note, I really admire Filers’ willingness to engage, and engage, and engage with people in hopes they’ll come to recognize that things like facts and research data and logically consistent arguments are valuable and necessary. May I suggest that perhaps it’s time to decide this particular engagement is unlikely to be productive? How many times do factual errors and logical fallacies have to be pointed out before it’s not worth it?

  11. I doubt there are any Mormon terrorists anywhere in the world right now, or even any white ones now that the IRA is out of the trade.

    The families of those killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, and the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, would like a word.

  12. Hey Aaron, read the next sentence:

    “That was halted by a civilian with a folding chair, plus an old guy who had already been shot tackling Loughner.”

    Seriously man, if you’re not even going to read what I said, there’s really not a lot of point in continuing to say it to you is there. You literally have to make up that I said stuff that I didn’t say? What is wrong with you people?

  13. Ah, Phantom.

    What you’ve either missed or ignored is that there was an armed civilian there, a responsible gun owner, and he very nearlyrics shot one of the heroes, who had taken Loughner’s gun.

  14. TooManyJens on December 3, 2015 at 9:01 pm said:
    I doubt there are any Mormon terrorists anywhere in the world right now, or even any white ones now that the IRA is out of the trade.

    The families of those killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, and the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, would like a word.

    Hell, there’s still 3 or 4 terrorist groups oin Northern Ireland who haven’t ceased activity.

  15. @Phantom

    You keep citing discredited, if not outright unreliable individuals, and you keep expecting people to accept them by claiming some vast unproven conspiracy to silence them. Now, you did say that the FBI Uniform Crime Report supported you. Good. That seems like a reasonable starting point. Now show me where it does – quote directly, with citation where it refers to the number of mass shootings averted by civilian gun owners.

    Regarding your claims that the Giffords shooting is an example of the bit I bolded in above:

    1. I’m looking for data, not anecdotes.
    2. As others have pointed out, and by your own words, it does not support the postulation that a civilian gun owner has stopped a mass shooting – the shooter was stopped by unarmed bystanders, and one armed bystander had nothing to do with it, and in fact almost shot one someone else by mistake. And finally:

    Non-events don’t get reported. Selection bias, right?

    That’s nonsensical. People love heroes, and you can be sure if the media didn’t insert this into the news cycle, organisations like the NRA would certainly be shouting it from the rooftops. You keep excusing your unsupported arguments by citing unsupported silent conspiracies. I told you earlier that don’t have any respect for that. I’ll be clearer now – I find it contemptible. If you have the data, present it and let stand or die on it’s own strength.

    You’ll have a gun in the car yourself.

    As I said to someone else, please broaden your horizons. That will, at best, certainly get me shot. At worst, I’ll become more acquainted with our local version of the Patriot Act.

  16. The point about Northern Ireland is that the English attempted to DIS-arm everyone, and failed

    I’m just trying to conjure the state Northern Ireland would be in if the Troubles had operated under an NRAish regime of gun access. Can you even begin to imagine the scale of the bloodshed?

    I don’t know a lot about the Troubles,

    No

    Gun control didn’t work, at all. On a frigging island no less.

    A kind of narrow-focus tunnel vision that’s inflexible in its conclusions and highly flexible in how it reaches its conclusions worked just as well for them as it’s working for you.

  17. I suspect the point is moot anyway, a few more like San Bernadino and the issue will go away. You’ll have a gun in the car yourself.

    So make it so easy for murderous people to get guns that everyone’ll want guns to protect themselves. What an amazing business plan. Because this is pretty much pure business isn’t it? Murder Inc ain’t got nothing on you guys.

  18. And the glory of San Bernadino (is that the place with the huge windfarm?) is that by US definitions it’s not even Terrorism surely. It’s just a ‘normal’ ‘guy has a bad day at the office, decides to murder his workmates’ thing.

    From the sound of it, quite possibly done by someone who was about to commit a more classically terrorist outrage, but this one’s just the cost of arguing with someone in the states.

  19. What I am wondering is why the people who believe the NRA’s stories keep characterizing those who hate mass murders or dislike gun violence as “afraid” or “fearful”.

    Surely “angry” or “furious” or “raging and despairing of the loss of life” are more accurate, to say nothing of “logically looking at folly.”

    The description of other people’s actions as motivated solely by fear seems to be a popular diminishing tactic.

  20. Peace: classic projection, maybe? Look at that statement about how a few more terrorist events like the one in California will prompt us to all want to carry guns in our cars. (As if having a gun in the car would even have helped in that situation! And it naturally wouldn’t make road rage incidents any more dangerous, either….)

    I interpret her as saying that if we get scared enough of terrorism we’ll want to carry a gun. Which would imply that her own gun advocacy is also fear-based.

    Me, I look at the proportion of incidents where a gun is used in self defense vs where the same kind of gun in the same kind of household is used to accidentally injure or kill family or friends, or to commit suicide with, and have decided that an actual security blanket is, on balance, a more useful thing to have in the house than a gun. Guns make terrible security blankets.

  21. Hi Cally,

    Off the topic of murder entirely, I thought you’d be pleased to know that inspired by you I’ve now proof-read about 200 pages of Victorian scholarship on Vikings.

  22. NickPheas: Distributed Proofreaders is a lot of fun, isn’t it? It introduced me to the exploration books by Henry Savage-Lander. I was especially taken by “Across Unknown South America”, where he travels through a great chunk of Brasil, much of it in a giant dugout canoe with a bend in it, while his cityfolk Brasilian bearers do things like throwing all the food out of the boat to force him to take them home. In the middle of a jungle, downstream of rapids, a hundred miles from anywhere. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22483

    Then there’s “In the Forbidden Land” where he ventures into Tibet (when it was closed to Europeans on pain of being tortured to death), talks to everyone from bandits to llamas, and literally barely makes it out alive. He also describes being told of funerary cannibalism, which is something I’ve never seen in any description of Tibetan funerary practices. I believe that it’s in that book where he passes along a remark his bearers made: that if he ever found himself in Hell, the first thing he’d do would be to boil water to determine the altitude.
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22210

    The books are prolifically illustrated, which is quite a trick, as he refers to photographic plates, meaning he was taking pictures on glass, not (recently invented) film. Hence the need for bearers (mostly packmule tenders and the like). Amazingly, he even managed to recover some photographs from the Tibet expedition.

    Unusually for a Victorian explorer, he attempts to be culturally sensitive, and doesn’t try to convert his interlocutors to Christianity. Do expect some amount of casual Victorian racism, however.

  23. Me, I look at the proportion of incidents where a gun is used in self defense vs where the same kind of gun in the same kind of household is used to accidentally injure or kill family or friends, or to commit suicide with, and have decided that an actual security blanket is, on balance, a more useful thing to have in the house than a gun.

    Since I’m in the medical field, my calculation is risk vs. benefit. In the case of guns, the risk (my shooting myself or some other innocent person) far outweighs the supposed benefit (self defense). As I said before, self defense is what I pay the police for, and what I expect for that tax money. Also, in the case of self defense, my best defense is to run and hide. In fact that was exactly what we were taught to do in my recent VA Active Shooters class. In essence, they said, “Get the hell out of the way, keep the hell out of the way, and let the professionals handle it.”

  24. Right. One-l lamas. Though having a sensible conversation with a two-l llama would be worthy of a book all by itself….

  25. Cally & Mike, yes, he’d only have been talking to llamas in his South America expedition. (But I don’t recall that he made it into the mountains, so probably not….)

    And manditory Ogden Nash quote:

    The one-l lama,
    He’s a priest.
    The two-l llama,
    He’s a beast.
    And I will bet
    A silk pajama
    There isn’t any
    Three-l lllama.
    –Ogden Nash

  26. You hear so many gun owners assert that crimes are averted by the presence of a gun, you’d think there would be some kind of study or poll among gun owners which includes the question, “have you averted a crime upon your person or household by indicating the presence of, or brandishing, a gun?”

    No, this wouldn’t account for cases where the crime was never attempted because they knew there was a gun-toter, and cases where the gun is fired tend to get into the question of who or what crime was averted vs. committed, but it would be information. Information the gun-nuts want. Information they are SURE would go their way. Information any gun owner would voluntarily and happily provide if it happened to them, because it fits the narrative.

    Has nobody really, truly ever done such a study? Maybe it’s because the cumulative answer might not fit the story they keep telling.

    __________

    I also wonder. Do these people truly live in a place where creeps jump out of the shadows everywhere at every opportunity? Where do they get the experience to be so sure a gun will somehow stop a mugger? Where do they get the experience to be so sure they’ll know what to do on the spot, clear-headed, with leisure to observe, or clearly marked permissible targets?

    In my twenties, I worked in a place where some co-workers got mugged on their way to or from the job, including to or from the bus stop. And while I bussed it TO work, the bus connections were nuisance enough that in the evening, I usually preferred to walk. Half an hour through rough neighbourhood to my downtown home. (When we came to tour the building, our building manager, in a moment of frankness, admitted our apartment-to-be was available, and freshly refurbished, because he’d called the police on a prostitution ring worked out of our floor.)

    So, a regular walk, in many kinds of meh weather, In a city where in winter the sun is setting or set by 5 PM. I was wary, and kept an eye out, and consider it at least partly luck I was never a victim.

    I have NEVER thought I would have been safer if I had a gun. I never even considered pepper spray. And when I’ve considered studying martial arts, it’s been more as an exercise and mental training option and not as anything like self-defense.

    Why not?

    Because I know what sort of training is needed to actually get past freeze/fight/flight response, or force it to permanently switch to ‘fight’. Because the people I know who DID have the ability to fight back against muggers in a real way (that is, unarmed; even the gun owners don’t carry), got that ability via life experience I have no interest in sharing. (Hint: Not just a bit of self-defense training or time at a gun range). Because I know people who’ve studied self-defense and martial arts at the levels I WOULD be interested in trying, who got mugged and it didn’t help.

  27. @Lenora Rose: Gary Kleck and Marc Getz did such a survey in the 90s. I’m sure there are also more recent ones. However, self-reporting does not seem to be very reliable. For one thing, it’s often not clear the person they deterred was a criminal (and given how often people are scared by such things as a black person sitting in a park, that’s a big problem). People also tend to imagine such cases happened more recently than they did (“telescoping”). All these sources of error lead to results in which nearly every burglary is thwarted by a good guy with a gun.

    More recent and methodologically sound studies have much lower numbers, e.g.

    In 2007-11, there were 235,700 victimizations where the
    victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender

    Which is much less than the NRA’s oft-repeated claim that guns deter 2.5 million crimes a year.

  28. There was a public health study done in Minnesota recently (not by the CDC) looking at suicide. They found an interesting, and disturbing, difference in suicide rates between the Cities and “outstate” Minnesotans. (Why people living in northern, rural areas of Minnesota are termed “outstate” is an exercise left to the reader, since the writer can’t figure it out.) Suicide, outstate, was higher than the urban area, but the factor that seemed to be most significant was the presence of a gun in the household. When you controlled for urban and outstate stressors, such as economic position, or recent loss of job or significant other, the controlling factor appeared to be a firearm in the residence. Because outstate residents were more likely to have a firearm in the house (often for sporting purposes), outstate residents were also more likely to solve stressful situations with a lethal application of lead.

    It is perhaps especially interesting to note that this was a study done from a public health perspective. The exact type of research that the CDC, a branch of the government most adept at this type of research, is prohibited from doing. When firearms are looked at statistically, and from the perspective of public health, they are clearly a menace. No wonder the NRA hates that kind of research. (I have a related rant on exactly why public health is an important and hugely deprecated perspective in public policy in the US. Public health assumes,that a certain loss of person privilege is necessary for the public health. And statistics bears this out. But this leads us directly to the anti-vaxxers, and from there to the nether regions of hell.)

  29. Content note: rape mentioned

    I also wonder. Do these people truly live in a place where creeps jump out of the shadows everywhere at every opportunity? Where do they get the experience to be so sure a gun will somehow stop a mugger? Where do they get the experience to be so sure they’ll know what to do on the spot, clear-headed, with leisure to observe, or clearly marked permissible targets?

    Rape only happens by strangers jumping out of bushes at night which is why women would be raped less if they owned guns… I’ve seen this argument by a couple people talking about how they or their wife teach women how to use guns and other self-defense so they won’t be raped. I’ve asked how you teach women to be ok shooting their father/brother/uncle/clergy/husband/etc before they take the gun away and shoot you with it… I never get useful answers to that question. Nevermind what happens if those close family members who rape you find the gun because they live in your house or have access to it.

    Not living in fear
    I don’t live in fear of guns. I’m angry and sad because so many people are dying for no good reason in our civilized country due to guns used in anger, weak moments of depression, and by accident. There are reasonable ways to cut down 10%+ of these deaths. I’m willing to make getting and owning guns to require registration (like a car), learning gun safety and proving you know it (like getting a license for a car), background checks (common sense), a national database of all guns (cars VIN numbers are tracked – why not guns?), and a waiting period (what’s your emergency? Cars frequently take a few days to buy). None of the above fringes on your rights to own a gun if you intend to use it for legal reasons.

    The 2nd amendment didn’t specify what kind of gun. The founding fathers certainly didn’t mean for citizens to be killing each other (when not at war) and claiming the 2nd amendment gave them that right.

  30. Cat said: “I read a fascinating, if preliminary, report that guns kept at home for self defense purposes are four times as likely to be used in an accidental shooting than a self defense shooting. And seven times as likely to be used in a homicide or homicide attempt than a self defense shooting. And eleven times as likely to be used in a suicide or suicide attempt as a self defense shooting.”

    See, this is my problem Cat. How is it, in your world, that a “self defense shooting” is a desirable end to a situation? Intruder getting shot is a failure condition. You screwed up.

    I addressed this bit of propaganda earlier. In what universe is the purpose of having a gun in the house to SHOOT an intruder? You do not want to shoot the intruder. In fact the very last thing on Earth you want to do is shoot the intruder. Because he’s a human, and he’s looking at you. His death will stain your soul for the rest of your life.

    Everybody seems to know this instinctively, except people who hate guns and love gun control. You’re all very happy to assume I’m some kind of slavering beast, finger on trigger, aching for the chance to legitimately kill somebody. This is known as dehumanizing the enemy. Me being The Enemy. Those of you with even a scintilla of self awareness need to admit this. The rest are unconscious and therefore unreachable.

    Something else that none of you seem to want to talk about is the aftermath of a shooting event. Even the most righteous shooting, where you saved your own life plus your family’s lives, and you have video, and the perp is a known nightcrawler… you’re going to jail. You’ll be there the rest of the day, probably overnight. All your shit is getting gone through by men with muddy boots and bad attitudes who aren’t your friend and want to bust you for something, anything, because they will get an attaboy from their boss. DAs hate self defense shooters, and the process is the punishment.

    Everyone with a brain knows this, except y’all. It is a very large part of every gun course I’ve ever been in, which is more than ten. If you shoot a guy, even 100% in the right, your life is over. The legal bills will strip you of every dime you ever made or ever will. That’s a given. One name pops out, the evil White Hispanic George Zimmerman. Take a look at what that guy has been through since he shot cute little eight year old Trayvon Martin who was innocently walking with ice tea and skittles.

    Now ask yourself, would he have been further ahead just to let cute little Trayvon cave the back of his head in and live with the brain damage? Would his wife and family have been better off if he’d just died on the sidewalk? It’s a non-trivial question, I recommend it to anybody who thinks shooting an attacker is a good idea.

    With that bit of background, let us now consider your study, Cat. It is entirely typical of the studies I’ve been raging on about. It makes me angry that people like yourself are so appallingly ignorant of study design that you wouldn’t laugh when you see it.

    Headline: “Appendectomies kill dozens of people every year!!!” Because yes, people do die occasionally following appendix surgery. So if you only look at who dies and disallow any discussion of benefits, it looks bad for surgeons. Which is f-ing stupidity, I’m sure you’ll agree. To make it look really bad, include in the list those who died of issues completely unrelated to the surgery, like medication errors, heart failure, brain tumor, car accident, whatever.

    That is what this study is. By defining success as “a self defense shooting”, and failure as an accident, or a murder, or a suicide, the authors create some numbers that support their political argument. Problem is, it’s f-ing stupidity.

    The causality of murders, suicides and accidents are all -different- and cannot be conflated. Self defense shootings are rare and undesirable events, which gun owners go to great lengths to avoid. Even the reviled George Zimmerman did not fire on his attacker until the guy was sitting on him, beating his head into the pavement.

    To recap now for the weak minded among you, who appear legion, we have a study which improperly conflates three failure conditions with three different causalities, and compares them to another failure condition which they label as success. Get it?

    ALL the f-ing literature in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, etc. is of this provenance. To the point where, as I said before, the NAS concluded that all of it taken together proved nothing. The CDC is banned by congress from pursuing the issue because they were paying public money for studies like this one, which are pure BS and therefore do not constitute -evidence- of anything. Except professional misconduct, anyway. It was a scandal and still is.

    But here’s Cat, telling me I’m some sort of bad/wrong person because this study proves… what now? I would love to see one of you supposedly superior intellects break that study down and explain what’s being measured, who is in the sample, what can be concluded from the data, and if the paper’s conclusions and claims have any relationship to the data at all. Because I’ll tell you right now, sight unseen, that they don’t. It’s bollocks Cat, and you fell for it. Lock, stock and two smoking barrels.

    Here’s the same study design: 1985, New England Journal of Medicine, “Protection or peril? An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home.” Kellerman and Reay.

    It is a farce, and you are a sucker if you believe it. Read it and begin to understand the extent to which you have been mislead.

    Or don’t. Ignorance is bliss, so they tell me. Certainly it’s much easier to mock and fling poo, yes?

  31. I thought I had lost all respect for The Phantom until I read this latest. Turns out there was more to lose.

    Certainly it’s much easier to mock and fling poo, yes?

    Considering that’s pretty much all you do, yes, apparently it is.

  32. @Shao Ping et al.

    I’d just like to say what a pleasure it is to discuss things online with people who engage honestly, who think about what is said and respond to it, and who treat their fellow posters with respect, an assumption of goodwill, and generally good humor.

  33. The 2nd amendment didn’t specify what kind of gun.

    It doesn’t even specify ‘gun’ – it refers to the ‘right to bear arms’. That in turn is derived from the 1689 English Bill of Rights (a consequence of the Glorious Revolution aka lets swap monarchs because we don’t like the current one – no seriously we believe in monarchy but just not this guy because he is a git). That included this proviso:
    “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law; ”
    http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp
    (It is also where ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ gets coined)

  34. The one-l lama,
    He’s a priest.
    The two-l llama,
    He’s a beast.
    And I will bet
    A silk pajama
    There isn’t any
    Three-l lllama.

    Three-L lllama, that’s a fire.

  35. It doesn’t even specify ‘gun’ – it refers to the ‘right to bear arms’.

    “You, ma’am, you may bear a revolver. But you, sir, a butter knife. You over there, a shillelagh, and you one of those tricky bolo things. No, not the robo-tank, the string with the balls on it.

    “You, buster, you get a morningstar. You, a lance.

    “Who’s next?”

  36. @Phantom

    Now ask yourself, would he have been further ahead just to let cute little Trayvon cave the back of his head in and live with the brain damage?

    No, actually it would have been better for George Zimmerman to listen to what the dispatcher told him and not approach Trayvon Martin at all. That way, Trayvon would still be alive, and Zimmerman would not be some asshole who got away with murder acting out his insecurities and neuroses on Twitter.

  37. Yeah, having lovely thoughts about MidAmericaCon II. Delusional gun boys with poor impulse control every where.

    @redheadfemme

    If the troll wants to show his true colors, let him. He’s doing us a favor. He’s shown himself impervious to a real mountain of evidence that shows the more guns per head, the more deaths, and seems to consider Stars and Stripes part of the evil lie-brahl media. Pretty soon he’ll start talking about the “cucks” and we’ll at least know he has some concern for black bodies…

  38. @Phantom: “In what universe is the purpose of having a gun in the house to SHOOT an intruder? You do not want to shoot the intruder. In fact the very last thing on Earth you want to do is shoot the intruder.”

    So you want a gun, but you can’t stand the thought of using it. You just want to wave it around to scare the imaginary intruders lurking in every shadow. Why not just get a non-functional replica? Same effect on the intruder, zero chance of accidentally blowing your own damn foot off. Come to think of it, blue security blankets are a lot cheaper, and they have the added benefit of actually being useful once in a while. If your feet get cold, you can use the blanket to keep them warm.

    Even the reviled George Zimmerman did not fire on his attacker until the guy was sitting on him, beating his head into the pavement.

    You conveniently forget to mention that Zimmerman initiated the confrontation by disobeying the police dispatcher’s instructions by getting out of his car and actively pursuing Martin – who had done nothing even slightly wrong at that point. If Zimmerman had minded his own business instead of deciding to play vigilante, he never would’ve been in any danger from the Evil Black Kid Armed With Deadly Skittles.

    Speaking of which – what about Trayvon Martin’s right to defend himself? When did that go away? A weird stranger with a gun starts stalking him, he responds with nonlethal force, and the paranoid, murderous stalker’s the one in the right? How in hell does that work?

    Ignorance is bliss, so they tell me.

    And you certainly have taken that advice to heart, haven’t you?

  39. @Rev Bob

    As to where Martin’s right to defend himself goes, and how that works, I think the Phantom has said enough for us to know his view and the possible source of it. At one point or another, enough of the Puppies have as well.

  40. just like to say what a pleasure it is to discuss things online with people who engage honestly, who think about what is said and respond to it, and who treat their fellow posters with respect, an assumption of goodwill, and generally good humor.

    Second this. I’ve learned lots of stuff here on File 770 from fellow filers whether I’ve agreed or disagreed with them.

    @Phantom

    How is it, in your world, that a “self defense shooting” is a desirable end to a situation? Intruder getting shot is a failure condition. You screwed up.

    It beats being shot by the intruder.

    I agree the aftermath of shooting someone in self defense is terrible. I feel pretty safe in saying most of the other filers your arguing with would agree. Just one of the reason why we won’t be buying guns for self defense. Duh.

    1. What is the point of having a gun for self defense if you aren’t prepared to use it?

    2. Pointing a gun at an intruder but not shooting the intruder is supposed to do what exactly?

    More questions
    1. Please explain how arming every American over 18 would stop things like 350 mass shootings in not a full 12 months yet.

    2. Explain how a country where many whites already think it’s ok to shoot blacks/women because they are afraid/control issues are going to be ok with legally arming blacks/Latinos/Asians/women? And yes if you want looser gun control you have to give it to All citizens not just SWM ones.

    3. Do we start teaching kids about gun use in school? At what age? Kindergarten? 7th grade? 9th grade? Why for what age you pick? Do you think we can do it better than we teach sex education?

    I’ve thought about all of the above. Putting guns into more people’s hands doesn’t seem to me to solve any problems. Every time we loosen gun control gun deaths go up. Most 1st world and 2nd world countries have stricter gun control and less deaths per 100,000. I prefer that even total asshats live.

    Yes I’ve taken gun safety classes. I’ve used rifles and a number of handguns thanks to friends and family. I’ve surprised people with how well I shoot. Taught my mother’s boyfriend to treat me with respect after I kept hitting the bullseye with each shot with a gun I’d never touched before. Very handy as I disliked that guy. Keeping the clay pigeon I’d shot through the center hanging on the wall at the office changed how people treated me – I became scarier. I cried the day that broke in a move.

    Doesn’t mean I like guns or think people should own them. They are dangerous in the wrong hands at the wrong time. I know too many people who have been killed/hurt in accidental shootings. Like a toddler who found the gun in the top dresser draw and grazed his head this past year when he accidentally shot himself. Or friends who knew people who were shot in mass shootings because some guy got angry. Or friends of abusive (ex-)spouses who shoot their partners because control issues.

  41. Kurt Busiek on December 4, 2015 at 2:33 pm said:

    It doesn’t even specify ‘gun’ – it refers to the ‘right to bear arms’.

    “You, ma’am, you may bear a revolver. But you, sir, a butter knife. You over there, a shillelagh, and you one of those tricky bolo things. No, not the robo-tank, the string with the balls on it.

    “You, buster, you get a morningstar. You, a lance.

    “Who’s next?”

    Now be fair – I’m very much in favor of social equality. Everybody gets the same government issue pointy stick.

  42. Given that The Phantom earlier explicitly pointed out that the San Bernardino shooting was done by a couple of radicalised Muslims can I point the hypocracy of the GOP killing a bill in congress that would have stopped people on the terrorist watch list being able to buy guns. And that it is known that over 2000 guns have already been bought by people on that list. If you want to keep America safer, why not start by stopping people you don’t let on planes for fear of what they may do from owning guns?

  43. tintinaus: they figured out that some people on the terrorist watch list aren’t Muslims?

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