Terrorism pays
Mohammed Khalid, that effervescent Islamist MP, wants to gift the five erstwhile Guantanamo detainees BD50,000 (~US$132k) as a “for the suffering and torture they were forced to endure in the US prison camp“.
Huh? Oy! Bub! Listen: when we defended their right to a fair trial we didn’t sign up to make them the luminaries of society. Those men chose to go into a war zone to do goodness’ knows what and they might have participated in terrorism and terrorist activities. These things we will never know now because a trial was not forthcoming and the chat they had with the public prosecutor on their arrival home was not published – as it should have as we have a right to know.
Now you just want to cut them a blank cheque from my money? No way smartypants. They do not deserve this magnanimous gesture of yours. If you want to give them money from your own pocket then that’s completely up to you, but don’t lumber the country with yet another bill just to polish your name in your own circles. This is just not on. And if Saudi chooses to give its own citizens money, a car and even pay for their wedding just because they were in Gitmo for a while, that’s completely up to them and it doesn’t concern us, but don’t you bloody well dare to pull that stunt here boyo.
If the parliament really adopts this brainfart it is as if they accept and even condone terrorism. It is tantamount to announcing to the world that terrorism pays! Wasn’t it you and your ilk who fully supported the Law Against Terrorism in parliament? Whatisitwijyouboy? Double standards is your way of life?
Listen, they made their own beds and now they should bloody well lie in them. They are now free and not thanks to your “efforts” but that of the BCHR primarily and their activist US lawyers. You jammed yourself right in the middle for your own political gains and most certainly not theirs.
So get off that high horse of yours and don’t go throwing money hither and thither, your job as an MP is to ensure that that does not happen not aid and abet it for God’s sake. Get a life will ya!
AGA: “Just so we’re clear, specifically, I am wondering why you don’t develop a term or name for that “type” of Muslim or belief system as exemplified by ul Haq that differentiates that type from the majority or “larger Muslim community which is unwilling to do violence or directly support it . . ..””
OK, AGA. If the Ul Haq faction held a single mosque, I’d call them a fringe group. If they held a few mosques, I’d call them a minority movement. But when they hold nearly half the mosques, I’d call them mainstream.
It is a measure of the Muslim community in England when half of it willingly supports mosques which promote violent and hateful Islam. One wonders how far the remainder of the Muslim community lies from this venomous position. If Islam is the religion of peace, as Muslims claim, why are half of English Muslims subscribing to Islam as a religion of war?
The most obvious explanation is that all this public talk about the religion of peace is so much taqqiya while behind the mosque doors the Muslims covertly foment war against their non-Muslim hosts.
Steve, I would hate to once again point the obvious to you. It might be – and that’s a stretch – that their congregations share their thoughts but not the (Muslim) communities they fall within. As far as my experience is concerned, congregations are a very small part of the population, hence, if they (the congregations of ul Haq and others – take it even to the Red Mosque if you will) believe in the fire and mayhem their criminal preachers preach, it does not mean that the whole Muslim community or the Muslim world at large condones their beliefs or preachings of violence and hate.
Apart from that, you once again demonstrate their ignorance of Muslim facts – “taqiyya” is not practiced by Sunnis and most certainly is not believed in by the Wahabis you referred to here.
I hope I have sufficiently befuddled your mind on these two issues. But persevere, give us some more naive deductions to throw back at you.
Perhaps you all didn’t understand me.
I am NOT disputing that many Americans oppose gun control; and perhaps they have given their position as much thought as I have.
However, Steve’s point was that hand guns save more lives then they take. That is NOT a thoughtful position. Even the NRA doesn’t go that far.
If people wish to continue this discussion, perhaps it would be more fitting on Mahmood Talk.
i’ve had two friends shot in the US by an armed thug, one of them died. don’t tell me guns save lives.
Greetings All,
I’m back from my travels and back on the blog. I know the following will seem somewhat off the track of the topic of this thread—terrorism pays—but bear with me a few minutes and I’ll do my best to tie it back in. Also, I just can’t let such a ludicrous assertion as this pass unchallenged.
A recent exchange between my friend “underthepalmtree” and “Steve the American” went like this:
Steve the American: “The difference between America and the rest of the world is that when imperfections are recognized, we fix them.”
underthepalmtree: “Are you nuts? That’s why we have done such an outstanding job fixing: … our love affair with hand guns …”
Steve the American: “I might point out that handguns save thousands of lives every year and stop many crimes in progress, usually without a shot fired.”
underthepalmtree: “…do you really believe that the net effect of handguns in America is to save lives?”
Steve the American: “Yes, handguns save far more lives by an order of magnitude than they destroy.”
What Steve has done here is similar to what our nation’s political leadership has done all too often in recent years. There is a saying here that sometimes the best defense is a good offense. The political addendum to this seems to be, if that doesn’t work get more offensive.
Let me break down this specific case first.
Steve took a reasonably valid initial position. Our country does indeed have mechanisms built into our constitution that enable us to evolve in the face of changing circumstances. For examples, see the constitutional amendments that ended slavery and allowed women’s suffrage. Other countries with more rigid constitutions might indeed have a harder time making such changes. However, when challenged he threw out a number of more questionable positions in his defense. {Many Americans, and nearly all of the rest of the world, would have a hard time with the claim “we’re slowly winning in Iraq.”) Then when further challenged on the incredible assertion that hand guns save lives, he not only failed to back down, rather he increased his claim by a factor of ten. This showed plenty of confidence, but very little judgment.
For those of you who care, here’s a mathematical breakdown of Steve’s silliness. If you don’t care, skip ahead to my closing, where I’ll tie this back into the theme.
Let’s do the math for 2004, the most recent year for which I could find the statistics.
According to the Center for Disease Control, 11,624 people were murdered by firearms in that year. The CDC does not break down these numbers by types of firearms, but based on FBI statistics from 2005, about 75% of firearm homicides are committed using handguns. Assuming that a similar ratio held one year earlier, around 8700 of those people were murdered with handguns. So even without Steve’s “order of magnitude” boast, handguns would need to have saved more than 8700 lives in order for their net effect to be life saving.
Of note, this is probably less than half handguns’ actual toll. Another 16,750 people killed themselves in 2004 with a firearm–probably most of those with handguns. Plus handgun-related accidents kill many more each year, all too often children. But I won’t need those numbers to make my point
Steve’s claim was that the two million “handgun defenses” each year save ten times as many lives as handguns take. I won’t challenge this figure too much, except to note that it is likely based entirely on self reporting and therefore probably includes many cases where an individual heard the neighbor’s cat in the night, shouted out “I’ve got a gun”, and then nothing bad happened. But even granting that all two million were actual criminals that were deterred, how do we figure the potential carnage that could have resulted? The only way I could come up with was to use actual statistics on all crimes for 2004. This is probably overly generous to Steve, as murders are more often committed by someone that knows the victim and would therefore be less likely to be deterred; but since I can’t quantify that factor, I’ll ignore it.
According to the FBI in 2004 there were 1,360,088 violent crimes (murder, rape, assault, etc) in America and 10,319,386 property crimes (burglary, theft, etc) for a total of 11,679,474. These crimes resulted in 16,148 deaths (murder & negligent manslaughter); yielding a fatality rate of 0.13826%. Multiplying this rate by the 2,000,000 times that
people allegedly stopped a crime with their handgun yields 2766 lives saved (rounding up). This is less than one third of the number murdered by handguns, certainly not ten times as many.
This means Steve’s contention was off by a factor of at least 30.
Now to head back toward the main point.
America’s approach to the war in Iraq followed much the same pattern, and the world is now facing the consequences.
We took what I still believe was a valid initial stand. In 2002, the sanction regime was falling apart, UN inspectors were almost completely ineffectual, and Saddam remained both committed to building a WMD capability and firmly in power. Therefore, some action by the world community was necessary. But we couldn’t sell it to our own population or our allies, so the administration increased the fear factor. They took questionable defector reports and circumstantial evidence and presented them as facts; claiming that Saddam had WMD stockpiles, was actively developing more, and was in league with al Qaeda.
These claims all subsequently failed to stand up, gravely damaging America’s credibility. This loss of credibility meant that when we honestly stated that we had no intention of stealing Iraq’s oil and no desire for a long term occupation, we weren’t believed. Therefore, the American “occupation” of Iraq and “theft” Iraq’s oil have become rallying cries for militants around the world, especially within Iraq.
We painted ourselves into a similar corner with the detainees, finally getting back to where this string started. We picked up a bunch of non-Afghan folks on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Not knowing what else to do, we held onto them. When challenged, we claimed that they were all terrorists; sometimes based on the “evidence” that they were wearing the same kind of watch as known terrorists. Having made such a claim it then took us years to finally release those against whom we had no real evidence, again building up a tremendous amount of ill-will across the globe and probably creating thousands of real terrorists.
Now having said all that, I really don’t see any obligation for the Government of Bahrain to pay these folks a dime (or a fil). They took a chance venturing into a war zone, and got caught up in world politics. Lucky for them it wasn’t the Soviets that picked them up, or they would likely have ended up with a bullet in the back of the head instead of a delayed return to their home country.
Thoughts?
A Reasonable Man
Thoughts. Actually, I was hoping to avoid gun control all together, but I am waiting for a “fuller response.”
I am trying to understand the “brand“. Under Steve’s approach, I must be guilty of harboring the desire in some measure to label all Muslims terrorists, since I didn’t pipe up and denounce Steve everytime he made this assertion or insinuation over the years I’ve been reading this blog. Its a flawed approach, obvious to everyone including Steve, and I wonder why he uses it.
Steve: “The first problem is that the Saudis will still buy weapons even if they don’t buy from us. The Russians will be happy to sell them all the MiGs and tanks and artillery they want. That would make it a pointless gesture.”
Mahmood: “It wouldn’t. You will have made a stand and made your position known that you do not support oppression. Ultimately, others will do the same too. But if you take the premise as you have that if they don’t buy from you they will buy from someone else so I might as well do it, then where is your integrity?”
We agree on the goal, Mahmood, but not on the method. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. You can not reform an Arab tyranny with sharply worded disapproval or by withdrawing support. If that worked, Saddam would have fallen without an invasion. If we halted the sale of weapons, the Saudis would be free to be as openly belligerent as the Iraqis under Saddam with Russian or Chinese or European weapons.
Steve: “Selling these weapons to the Saudis maintains American influence which exerts some minimal moderating force.”
Mahmood: “Oh yes, another chestnut. Like your influence on persuading the Saudis not to let their citizens fly into your buildings you mean? Or the thousands who are fighting your forces (with your own weapons!) in every spot on Earth not just Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan?”
Yes, the Saudis are wicked and duplicitous savages who can not be trusted and bear a murderous bigotry toward us. Yet, we are better able to apply pressure on them when we are engaged with them than if we are disengaged.
You’ll have to tell me all these places around the world where people are fighting us because I’m at a loss to know what you are talking about. I’m particularly interested to know where anyone is fighting GIs with M-16s, Bradly fighting vehicles, M-1 tanks, or F-16s.
The main fight I know about with foreign countries is their fight to open trade with us, to sell their products on our market.
Steve: [useless Saudi princes]
Mahmood: “Pah, they’re moving more into Eastern Europe now and apparently rather enjoying the new climes!”
Mahmood, if only the main occupation of rich Arab princes was to add to their list of wives I would wish them well. That would be a recognizeable human impulse. The desire to kill people for your religion is an inhuman impulse, a retreat to the morality of reptiles which regard every other living thing as the enemy.
AGA: “What I can’t figure out is why Steve persistently returns to a theme that all Muslims have terrorism in their hearts or some such thing. When pressed, he will soften it a bit, such as, “larger Muslim community which is unwilling to do violence or directly support it, but is indifferent to the violence done if it benefits them,” but he never really lets go of the notion that Muslims generally are the problem.”
AGA, Islam is a religion which promotes terror. Mohammed, the Perfect Muslim, modelled the behavior for modern day terrorists with his attacks on his rivals caravans, his unprovoked attacks on rival villages after dreaming up bogus grievances, his enthusiastic embrace of violence to include assassination of critics and beheading hostages en masse.
Most of the Muslim world was taken by violence. Most of the wars today are Muslims attacking their non-Muslim neighbors. This is an expression of Mohammed’s last words to fight every man until all the world submits to Islam.
The Sep 11 attacks are part of that centuries old jihad which continues where ever Muslims go. The Muslim mosques within sight of the burning WTC burst into celebration at the sight of NYC burning, their fondest dream. The Muslim world in general, with the exception of the Iranian people, celebrated the slaughter which they saw as advancing the inevitable triumph of their religion.
For at least three years in the aftermath of Sep 11, “America” or “Death to America” has been scrawled on the pillars of Mina during the hajj, identifying America as Islam’s Satan and declaring war on us. It is also quite clearly an implicit endorsement of the Sep 11 terror attacks. About two million Muslims do the hajj every year with not a peep of protest at the Religion of Peace’s declaration of war, not even from the Muslims from America. Making war on America is an accepted doctrine of Islam.
Given that, I’ll admit that not every single Muslim is sympathetic to terrorism. No group of people can be uniformly evil. There were even some good Nazis, like Oskar Schindler. I know at least one Muslim guy of Palestinian descent who worked with me at the time of Sep 11 who was a good guy. He could have been made out of honey and sugar. Undoubtedly, where there’s one like him, there’s more.
However, the behavior of the larger Muslim community makes me think he and those like him are the exception, not the rule. First, the Muslim community continuously produces terror plots. These Muslim terrorists prefer to hide in Muslim communities, which apparently are friendly to their extremist views. If Muslims were against Islamic terror, they would deliver these plotters to the police. They don’t.
Very few terror plots are unravelled because decent Muslims inform on them. They are usually discovered from the outside of the Muslim community by non-Muslims. When caught, Muslims do not denounce them for their murderous intentions but rather make every effort to deny or excuse their guilt. These are the acts of a sympathetic community.
When a local Muslim lawyer here in Washington tried to gin up a Muslim demonstration against Islamic terror, only fifty people showed up. When Hezbollah went to war with Israel a year ago, five thousand Muslims showed up to demonstrate across from the White House. That’s the Hezbollah which boasts that its advantage over its infidel enemies is that they love life while Hezbollah loves death. It’s a cartoonishly evil statement. When Hezbollah went to war, the cry among Muslims was “WE ARE ALL HEZBOLLAH!”
The problem among Muslims is that the most radical position is considered the most authoritative while moderation is considered inauthentic. The whole Muslim population has a bias toward radicalism.
For example, take a look at this video shot by a student member of the Muslim Student Association at the University of Arizona. As an aside, I’ll point out that the MSA is a front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of most Muslim terrorist groups, which has instructed its members in the U.S. to “understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
In this clip, the Muslim yahoo berates an American Muslim chick at length for not wearing a hijab. Now the Approved Solution is for her to tell Mr. MSA that how she does her religion is none of his *$% business and to stick his objections up his $%^&. However, she seems at a loss for an answer, making excuses and defering to his more radical view as righteous. Clearly, the moderate view carries no weight in the Muslim community.
Now, this girl looks like a sweet, cute American chick who wouldn’t harm a fly. However, if she found out that Mr. Radical Muslim was up to something, would she take action and turn him in or defer to his superior piety? I set the odds at 90% or higher that she would just zip her lip and play dumb about any knowledge she had about a crime in progress by a brother Muslim. She’s completely cowed by him.
This is a microcosm of what’s going on in the Muslim community, where strongly held extremism trumps weakly held moderation.
ammaro.com: “i’ve had two friends shot in the US by an armed thug, one of them died. don’t tell me guns save lives.”
Were either of your friends armed? Do you think it would have made a difference to the thug when he picked his victims if he knew they were armed? Criminals will freely admit that their biggest fear is a citizen with a gun.
I’m telling you: Guns save lives.
Mahmood: “… their congregations share their thoughts but not the (Muslim) communities they fall within. As far as my experience is concerned, congregations are a very small part of the population, … it does not mean that the whole Muslim community or the Muslim world at large condones their beliefs or preachings of violence and hate.”
A good point. It’s fair to assume there are free-floating Muslims not attached to a mosque or non-observant, a population that may be greater than observant Muslims regularly attending mosques. Even so, extremist factions holding large numbers of the mosques does not argue for the peaceful character of Islam.
Mahmood: “Apart from that, you once again demonstrate their ignorance of Muslim facts – “taqiyya” is not practiced by Sunnis and most certainly is not believed in by the Wahabis you referred to here.”
I realize that taqiyya is predominantly Shia doctrine, but the 12th century Sunni theologian Al-Ghazali ruled that it was acceptable:
“Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish it through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible…, and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory. …One should compare the bad consequences entailed by lying to those entailed by telling the truth, and if the consequences of telling the truth are more damaging, one is entitled to lie…”
I might point out that the Wahhabi war against the rule does indeed approve of taqiyya. For example, the Al Qaeda manual explicitly instructs terrorists to shave their beards, lose their thobes, avoid the mosques, and dress like the infidels to execute their plots. It required quite a bit of taqiyya for the Sep 11 skyjackers to take their seats on their targeted airliners. They didn’t exactly advertise their true intentions, did they?
CAIR is a front for the Wahhabi lobby and its entire function is to perpetrate taqiyya for its Saudi paymasters.
Mahmood: “I hope I have sufficiently befuddled your mind on these two issues. But persevere, give us some more naive deductions to throw back at you.”
If you insist, Mahmood, I will deliver some more. You know your happiness is my primary concern.
Mahmood: “Because he’s Steve and doing what you suggest would damage his brand, which is essentially the mirror image of ul Haq and his lot.”
Mahmood, Mahmood, Mahmood, such cynicism does not wear well on you. I can assure you that I have no desire for the reciprocal of Ul Haq’s vision of a Muslim world. I don’t demand a Christian world or a democratic world or a world where the US rules every hearth. I’m very happy to let other people live their lives as they see fit. However, I object to Muslims seeking to impose their backward and wicked religion upon me and killing en masse to make it happen. Where Islam impinges upon my liberty, you can fairly call me an extremist.
underthepalmtree: “Steve, you poor misguided man.”
Yawn. I’ve seen liberal self-righteousness before. It’s boring. It’s so much easier than thinking, though, isn’t it?
underthepalmtree: “According to the CDC, (Center for Disease Control) more than 4,300 young people (under 24) were murdered by firearms in 2004; another 2,163 took their own lives using guns.”
This is a rather simplistic argument and a wrong one. It’s true that people are killed with handguns in the US. It’s also true that people are saved by handguns in the US. Your argument is unbalanced because you do not include both pro and con. Even worse, you refute that anyone can possibly be saved by handguns, a self-evidently false position.
First, the number of guns is increasing in the US, yet the number of gun homicides is decreasing along with the general decline in violent crime. If your assertion that guns cause crime was true, then there should be more gun homicides. Your own stats rebut your argument.
Second, it’s hardly convincing that guns cause suicides. A suicidal person is not going to be stopped because he can’t find a gun. There are dozens of ways to kill yourself. Lack of a gun is not an obstacle to suicide.
Third, your implicit assumption is that more guns means more gun homicides across the population. That’s false. As another poster noted, gun homicides occur mainly among the criminal population, or, more specifically, in the illegal drug trade. As Lott notes, almost all gun homicide victims are criminals having a police record of one or more arrests. In New York City, 38% of homicide victims test positive for cocaine in their blood. The Washington, DC police chief here said that if you analyze encounters that end in a shooting death, you can’t predict at the outset who will be the perpetrator and who the victim. That’s because in a charged encounter between criminals, it’s hard to tell who will shoot first.
Your argument to ban guns would fall on the wrong population, which is the law-abiding citizens who do not shoot anyone. The criminals do not obey the laws. The guns they use in their crimes are illegally acquired now. If you banned guns, they would ignore the ban just like they ignore the existing gun laws now. They would have no more trouble acquiring prohibited guns, which can be made in a simple machine shop in anybody’s garage, than they have acquiring prohibited drugs.
The young people cited in your gun death homicides are largely 19-year-old gang-bangers and drug dealers shooting each other. These are not kids in the suburbs shooting each other because their Dad has a gun in the closet. They’re young criminal predators preying on each other with stolen guns.
Fourth, your gun ban, in the classic fashion of liberal solutions, would inflame the problem rather than solve it by disarming law-abiding citizens while leaving the criminals armed, giving them the monopoly on violence. When Australia abruptly made handguns illegal, they suffered a spike in gun homicides. The criminals no longer had to worry about their victims defending themselves and so ran riot.
Fifth, a gun ban is a rather typical liberal overreaction. There are about two hundred million guns in the US. One in 13,000 is used in a gun homicide. Your solution is to ban those 13,000 legal guns while leaving the criminal in possession of his gun. It’s akin to banning all automobiles because one in 13,000 cars is involved in a fatal wreck.
underthepalmtree: “I am sure that their parents would be quite comforted to hear how you saved two women from “harm” with your handgun.”
I was asleep in my bed one morning when I was awakened by women screaming. When women are truly in peril they let loose a scream from the gut, not one of those fun movie screams or squeals you often hear. You’ll know it when you hear it.
I looked out my apartment window to see two women treed in the second floor landing opposite me by a van idling at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light (that was stupid) and pulled my .357 from beside my bed. The women looked over at me. There was a pregnant pause for a couple heartbeats, then the van slowly pulled away.
I ran outside, gun in hand, and the two women ran right to me. They were thirtysomething moms who liked to walk early in the morning. The van began following them on the street. They turned into my apartment complex. The van followed. They turned again. The van followed. The ran up the first flight of stairs they saw and screamed their heads off.
I don’t know exactly what the intentions of the guys in the van were, but it was nothing good. My gut feeling is that they intended to kidnap these women and rape them. After that, who knows what would have happenned. Maybe some hunter would have found their bones and clothes wrapped around a fenceline a few years later.
The police were there fast, within five minutes, but that’s a long time in a crime like this. Those women could have been taken in the van and down the freeway a mile or two in that time. Had I not had a gun handy, I think that situation could have turned out very badly. However, that’s exactly where your prohibition on guns would lead. Your snarky comment demonstrates you could care less about their lives.
underthepalmtree: “I will pray for you Steve, that no one that you love comes to harm in the crossfire.”
I’m not impressed by your demagoguery that God is on your side nor by your presumptuous assumption of moral superiority, the mark of ideologues. It’s the hamburger helper of argument.
Your comment also illustrates your cartoonish understanding of how guns are used in crimes. Criminals don’t shoot it out with their victims. Just like predators everywhere, they search for weak victims. An armed victim is the last thing they want. Criminals don’t stand and shoot it out with anybody. They run at the sight of a gun. They’re opportunists who are looking for an easy mark.
underthepalmtree: “However, I am not going to spend one more minute of my time arguing with someone that is SO out of touch with reality.”
Take care to not talk to yourself, then.
underthepalmtree: “Everyone else…..please do not believe that “Steve the American” represents the views of most of my thoughtful countrymen.”
Actually, support for the Second Ammendment is so strong in the US that the Democrats don’t even bring it up in their election campaigns anymore. It’s political poison to oppose the right to bear arms in America.
And by the way, UTPT, if you want to be considered a thoughtful person, you have to actually deliver thoughts that support your positions. Demagogic rhetoric doesn’t count.
a reasonable man: “Many Americans, and nearly all of the rest of the world, would have a hard time with the claim “we’re slowly winning in Iraq.””
Many Americans, and nearly all the rest of the world, are poorly informed. Here’s what’s really happenning in Iraq, as revealed by David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert. Ramadi was written off as hopeless a year ago. Now our troops can walk around without body armor. Fallujah was a terrorist stronghold once. Now former insurgents are patrolling with US GIs against Al Qaeda.
I might also point out that citing popular opinion as proof of an assertion is a logical fallacy, the argumentum ad populem.
a reasonable man: “So even without Steve’s “order of magnitude” boast, handguns would need to have saved more than 8700 lives in order for their net effect to be life saving.”
Of the two million gun defenses of a crime, if 1% stopped a crime from progressing to murder, that would save 20,000 lives. So I’ll retract my order of magnitude claim, and retreat to guns save as many as are killed. I could make the argument that in a well-armed community, violent crime is suppressed along with murders.
a reasonable man: “Plus handgun-related accidents kill many more each year, all too often children.”
Nonsense. The “children” cited in such argument are 18 and 19 year old criminals. More young children drown in buckets of water or from being caught between mattress and headboard in bed than are shot to death.
a reasonable man: “Steve’s claim was that the two million “handgun defenses” each year save ten times as many lives as handguns take. I won’t challenge this figure too much, except to note that it is likely based entirely on self reporting and therefore probably includes many cases where an individual heard the neighbor’s cat in the night, shouted out “I’ve got a gun”, and then nothing bad happened.”"
The two million figure is John Lott’s estimate of total gun defenses in the US based on study of police reports in a representative sample of the US. My estimate of how many lives are saved out of this two million is speculative. However, it’s ridiculous to claim no lives are saved from violent crimes stopped at the onset of their perpetration by brandishing a gun.
It’s also very telling that an ardent opponent of guns has never heard Lott’s two million estimate before, revealing an unfamiliarity with the other side of the gun control debate. You haven’t done your homework.
a reasonable man: “According to the FBI in 2004 there were 1,360,088 violent crimes (murder, rape, assault, etc) in America and 10,319,386 property crimes (burglary, theft, etc) for a total of 11,679,474. These crimes resulted in 16,148 deaths (murder & negligent manslaughter); yielding a fatality rate of 0.13826%. Multiplying this rate by the 2,000,000 times that
people allegedly stopped a crime with their handgun yields 2766 lives saved (rounding up). This is less than one third of the number murdered by handguns, certainly not ten times as many.
This means Steve’s contention was off by a factor of at least 30.”
Your math is garbled because of bad assumptions. First, you included property crimes like burglary and theft in your base of crime. These are non-violent crimes. Burglars are seeking to avoid the owners of the homes they burgle. There is very little chance that the criminal and victim will confront each other, so there is not much chance that a burglary will progress to a murder. Including these non-violent crimes waters down the death rate of violent encounters where a gun could save the victim’s life.
If you more correctly use that violent crime number for the base you’ll find that deaths occur 1.18% of the time a criminal actually confronts his victim. I believe the rate may be higher than that, assuming that murder and manslaughter account for 100% of the deaths. Obviously, some crimes escalate from robbery to rape to homicide, so there may be some overlap in these categories.
So, using your figures, 1.18% of two million is 23,600 lives saved by brandishing a handgun at a criminal. That’s pretty close to my guesstimate of 1%, but a little better. Thanks.
a reasonable man: “We took what I still believe was a valid initial stand. In 2002, the sanction regime was falling apart, UN inspectors were almost completely ineffectual, and Saddam remained both committed to building a WMD capability and firmly in power. Therefore, some action by the world community was necessary. But we couldn’t sell it to our own population or our allies, so the administration increased the fear factor. They took questionable defector reports and circumstantial evidence and presented them as facts; claiming that Saddam had WMD stockpiles, was actively developing more, and was in league with al Qaeda.
These claims all subsequently failed to stand up, gravely damaging America’s credibility.”
Hate to break this to you, Mr. Reasonable, but the US found dozens of WMDs immediately after the invasion and have continued to find them ever since. We’ve never stopped finding them. As of about a year ago, it was up to 500 WMDs found. How does 500 = 0 in your world?
Dulfer also found a covert network of WMD labs still engaged in low level production for purposes of research and/or terrorism. Saddam’s lieutenants said that Saddam was committed to producing WMDs full scale as soon as the inspection regime lifted.
Saddam was informally allied with Al Qaeda. There was contact between them going back a decade before Sep 11, 2001. Their representatives met in the Sudan, a meeting which was published in the Arab and Western press before Sep 11 was even dreamed up. Iraqi agents were caught in Pakistan returning from meetings with Al Qaeda. And of course, an Iraqi agent facilitated and attended a meeting with two of the Sep 11 skyjackers plus Binalshib, an Al Qaeda plotter of the attack, in Kuala Lumpur. That’s a connection with Al Qaeda.
You might just consider that Saddam tried to assassinate ex-President Bush in Kuwait with a car bomb, shot hundreds of missiles at our aircraft patrolling the UN-mandated no-fly zones, and put out bounties on the death or capture of our military people. Those are provocations which you omitted.
a reasonable man: “This loss of credibility meant that when we honestly stated that we had no intention of stealing Iraq’s oil and no desire for a long term occupation, we weren’t believed. Therefore, the American “occupation” of Iraq and “theft” Iraq’s oil have become rallying cries for militants around the world, especially within Iraq.”
Please, Mr. Reasonable, be reasonable instead of so naive. What America does or doesn’t do has little relation to its perception by the world. America is used as a boogie man in most of the world for base reasons.
Look at Saudi Arabia. We stuffed their pockets with cash and lifted them up out of abject poverty and disease and they make the most venomous propaganda against us of all. America has a bad reputation in the world because we get horrible local press because local rulers want to pass the buck for their problems to us or want to create an external enemy to consolidate their power. Read the Third World press and you will be astonished at its dishonesty only to be more astonished at how the gullible Third World masses believe the craziest crap that is fed them.
a reasonable man: “We painted ourselves into a similar corner with the detainees, finally getting back to where this string started. We picked up a bunch of non-Afghan folks on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Not knowing what else to do, we held onto them. When challenged, we claimed that they were all terrorists; sometimes based on the “evidence” that they were wearing the same kind of watch as known terrorists. Having made such a claim it then took us years to finally release those against whom we had no real evidence, again building up a tremendous amount of ill-will across the globe and probably creating thousands of real terrorists.”
First, you might sit back and question your impulse that everything is America’s fault. Doesn’t it strike you that it is the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s fault that it is hard to pick out the fighters from the civilians because they refused to abide by the Geneva Convention and identify themselves at combatants? The GC was invented just to avoid these kinds of problems. By contrast, nobody had any trouble figuring out who the American combatant were. They wore uniforms.
The US has carefully examined its prisoners at Gitmo and released most of them, of whom a couple dozen have gone back into the terror business. I’d say we’ve been too lenient.
Nobody misses the kind of people we kept in Gitmo, like the guy who says the first thing he wants to do when released is drink American blood. Many of the Gitmo prisoners don’t want to go home because they will be leaving a rather clean, well run prison for a real dungeon back home. Their home countries see them as troublemakers they don’t want.
a reasonable man: “Now having said all that, I really don’t see any obligation for the Government of Bahrain to pay these folks a dime (or a fil). They took a chance venturing into a war zone, and got caught up in world politics. Lucky for them it wasn’t the Soviets that picked them up, or they would likely have ended up with a bullet in the back of the head instead of a delayed return to their home country.”
You’re still making the assumption they’re innocent. They’re not. All the innocent guys were sprung years ago. They’ve been releasing the guilty guys who were too small a fish to worry about for the last few years. Now Gitmo is down to a hard core of terrorist scumbags, mostly Saudis. They should die in prison.
and calling us reptiles actually makes you better?
I would say “shame on you Steve” but I know that would be a wasted exercise as you have no shame. This allegory plainly show your motives and your thought process. It is simply a wasted exercise to engage you.
so according to your twisted view of reality, everyone needs to carry a gun. everyone needs to go out, and buy one, so we can all be saved. those who don’t have accurate aim, those who are clumsy, and those who cant afford them.
ammaro.com: “so according to your twisted view of reality, everyone needs to carry a gun. everyone needs to go out, and buy one, so we can all be saved. those who don’t have accurate aim, those who are clumsy, and those who cant afford them.”
My point is that if you ban guns, then you are simply disarming the innocent and giving the advantage to the criminals. If you are under threat, the state is wrong to deny you the means to defend yourself.
or giving them more of a chance of shooting themselves by accident
Ammaro,
I am sorry for the loss of your friends, but bad things happen to good and innocent people sometimes.
As someone who has been a victim of violent crime, I am glad I had a gun available on one occasion and wished I had on another.
People do have accidents with guns every year even those that have used them for years or have taken shooting lessons or hunter saftey courses; it’s why they are called accidents. Not much different than having an accident with a car and killing yourself or someone else. In America we have about 40,000 people a year that die in car crashes; maybe we should ban the use of automobiles too right along with guns.
I realize there are plenty of countries who get along perfectly fine without gun ownership; America isn’t one of them and probably won’t be for a very long time.
Steve: Your post isn’t really responsive to my “just so we’re clear” comment.
The thrust of your post is that the examples of “radicalism” you’ve identified are necessarily representative of the community as a whole. In my experience, that simply is not the case. I have yet to meet (face to face) an “activist” that I actually liked. I don’t care what side of the issue, whether its abortion, some environmental issue, animal rights, hunting rights, gun rights -the NRA (“jack booted thugs”), what not, the “leaders” and those motivated to sacrifice their ordinary lives for the cause are all too often “extremists” overcome by the singular importance invested in their cause. Moderates, at least in my experience, don’t go out and protest or demonstrate.
I’m not sure whether the anticipation generated by your characterization of the video from the Muslim Student Association from the University of Arizona created a let down for me, as I expected to see “berating,” and I actually thought that the exchange was entirely appropriate. Not much of a debate, from a substance standpoint, both assume that the hijab is the way to go, and while the “chick” at times seems to be trying to say that it is not necessary from a religious standpoint, she appears to concede that it is more proper and something Allah desires. But, so what? I don’t consider her to be an example of the “moderate” view, since to my ears, it sounded like she was saying that she was not strong or disciplined enough to wear it. That’s not a moderate view, its more the absence of an independent view. (I wish that she would have said that the valuable jewelry is under lock and key due to the actions of criminals and that the problem rests with them, not the jewels or those who would display them. But, that’s my view.)
AGA: “Steve: Your post isn’t really responsive to my “just so we’re clear” comment.”
I’ve already responded to that post, #99. I was responding to your #97.
By the way, Mahmood, I appreciate these numbered posts. I didn’t appreciate them until I posted on blogs without them. It gets confusing. This layout for your blog works pretty well, too. I like that banner up top. It looks pretty professional. Obviously, black type on white is the preferred template. My white on black blog gets reader complaints for being hard on the eyes. The only thing I think you could add is a preview box, though I haven’t really missed it since you have the HTML code in those quicktags.
Steve,
I’ll start by admitting that you’ve impressed me with the sheer volume of material you can pump into this blog, 60+ paragraphs in one day by my rough count. You’re obviously committed; more on that later.
Now in response to your comments on my posting from the last week—which wasn’t really seeking your response, just using you to make a point—I’m going to make one more attempt to drag you back into reality.
Here’s the exchange I find most curious.
a reasonable man: “This loss of credibility meant that when we honestly stated that we had no intention of stealing Iraq ’s oil and no desire for a long term occupation, we weren’t believed. Therefore, the American “occupation” of Iraq and “theft” Iraq ’s oil have become rallying cries for militants around the world, especially within Iraq .”
Steve the American: “Please, Mr. Reasonable, be reasonable instead of so naive. What America does or doesn’t do has little relation to its perception by the world. America is used as a boogie man in most of the world for base reasons.”
My point was that we have enough people out there that hate us already; we hardly need to be giving them any more recruiting material. Your comeback was essentially, ‘people will hate us no matter what we do’, missing my point entirely. Unless you assume that every single Muslim in the world already hates America and is willing to die to harm us, then it remains in our best interest to avoid encouraging the fence sitters to move into the hostile camp and those already in the hostile camp to move toward a desire to martyr themselves against us. When we needlessly squander our credibility, this task becomes more difficult.
Which brings me to my next point; believe it or not, I’m not an ardent gun control supporter. I actually think it’s a bit of a lost cause. The handguns are out there and there’s no magic wand to make them all go away, no matter how desirable such a state might be. My heart burn was with your claim that handguns save more lives than they take by an order of magnitude.
However, in order to refute your claim I did do a little research, and Lott’s findings are far from universally accepted; folks other than Steve might find the Brady Campaign’s site on him interesting. I especially liked the parts where he admitted to posing as one of his own students to praise his work and his claim that a computer crash wiped out the only record of the critical survey showing that 98% of the time guns were used to deter crimes without a shot being fired.
Steve, I know very well you won’t go to this web site as you’re sure to dismiss the Brady Campaign as just another mouthpiece of the brainless left. But you don’t have to, because the only thing you said about gun control that matters is this: “So I’ll retract my order of magnitude claim, and retreat to guns save as many as are killed.”
You can retract your claim, and I’m glad that you’ve seen at least that much reason, but the fact that you made the claim in the first place is the problem which I’m attempting to illustrate here. If you had any credibility left with members of this forum before your foolish claim, a certain percentage of it is now gone. The more often you’re caught out in such an exaggeration or misstatement, the faster that credibility evaporates. Pretty soon it will all be gone (if it’s not already); and without credibility among your audience, debate is just meaningless noise.
This makes me wonder why you bother. As I mentioned earlier, you’ve clearly put a lot of time and effort into this blog. Are you expecting to accomplish anything other than making people angry?
I wouldn’t normally care how a complete stranger chooses to amuse himself, but you’ve proudly identified yourself as an American while you rant and rave. I fully support our nation’s commitment to free speech, and would never seek to censor you within our borders. However, when you enter an international forum, I believe some modicum of diplomacy is in order.
When you speak as “Steve the American” to people who may never meet an American in the flesh, you speak for all of us. So when you play fast and loose with the facts and blindly throw out one generalization after another, you’re just confirming the insidious propaganda of those regimes that seek to cover their own shortcomings by blaming all their countries’ ills on the ignorant bigoted Americans.
So once again, why bother? I found out the other day that you maintain your own web site. I have to wonder, are you paralleling the efforts of those who destroy sacred Shia sites in Iraq in an effort to provoke sectarian conflict? Are you merely hoping to provoke outrageous anti-American responses that you can quote on your site?
No matter your motives, I’ll ask you one last time to reconsider your tone—or at least your volume.
Now, I’ve been around long enough to know that the likelihood of you following this advice is slim. However, I’ve also met enough people from around the world—who generally have both wisdom and common sense—that I can rest easy that most of your audience will see your silly bluster for what it is, and simply ignore it.
Peace,
A Reasonable Man
That was quite succinct and reasonable, Reasonable Man. Well said!