The trouble with these are a good Metric, I mean Oscar Pastorius could have used his leg to beat his girlfriends head. They think it was a cricket bat, but no one will ever know. I didn't even know about this until I began looking for his name. Afterward, they think he shoots her. My belief was to cover up the evidence of the beating.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...end-Reeva-Steenkamp-cricket-bat-shot-her.html

kv

 

The trouble with these are a good Metric, I mean Oscar Pastorius could have used his leg to beat his girlfriends head. They think it was a cricket bat, but no one will ever know. I didn't even know about this until I began looking for his name. Afterward, they think he shoots her. My belief was to cover up the evidence of the beating.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...end-Reeva-Steenkamp-cricket-bat-shot-her.html

kv

I am all in favor of banning the game of cricket. World wide.

Do it for the children!

 

Somehow cricket didn't take to North America. I understand they have a more elaborate form of rounders instead!

 

I am all in favor of banning the game of cricket. World wide.

Do it for the children!

Oh, I forgot:

Everyone knows that the game of cricket had, as its origin, a superweapon to destroy the entire universe.

Need I say more about how evil this game is?

 

Breaking out that data is really important, because there is a really big skewing factor at play in several places.

Take suicides. Is it really surprising that people that commit suicide are more likely to do so with a gun if they have access to it? No. So it should not be surprising that a higher fraction of suicides are committed with a gun among populations that have greater access. But the real question is whether significantly more people commit suicide BECAUSE they have access to a gun, or would they have committed suicide some other way had they not had access to a gun.

About 25 years ago Time magazine was on the anti-gun warpath and put out an issue that included a picture of every person in the country that had committed suicide during a particular week (which was around a bit over 500 people). They spent a great deal of time harping on the fact that right about half of those suicides were by gun (overwhelmingly handguns) and that most of those people would still be alive if guns weren't so freely available. Yet in that very same article they pointed out that half of Americans had easy access to a handgun. Hello! That means that half of the population didn't and since an equal portion of the population didn't commit suicide by gun, it's very hard to claim that any significant fraction of people that killed themselves with a gun wouldn't has simply chosen a different method if one weren't available -- just consider that for every person that didn't have easy access and went to the trouble to get one to kill themselves was someone that had easy access that chose some other method. To highlight that, studies done in several countries, including Canada and Australia, following the enactment of significantly stricter gun laws found that suicide by firearms declined but that suicides by other means, such as hanging, increased and that the overall suicide rate wasn't significantly impacted one way or the other.

More fun with numbers.
Looks like your right about the suicide rate:

The US falls just slightly above the middle. Maybe because the guns work better.
And that it is a private decision.

Not so much with homicides where the big difference is guns:

I think with Homicides other people influence your decisions.
The one I don't understand is Chile. I guess they have a high rate of domestic violence (50%?), but I don't know why or if that translates to more deaths.
Edit:
Guess I was to hard on Chile. They are the safest in South America.

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-gun-control-debate-ignores-black-lives

Mass shootings, unsurprisingly, drive the national debate on gun violence. But as horrific as these massacres are, by most counts they represent less than 1 percent of all gun homicides. America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.

Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men.

Avoiding that fact has consequences. Twenty years of government-funded research has shown there are several promising strategies to prevent murders of black men, including Ceasefire. They don’t require passing new gun laws, or an epic fight with the National Rifle Association. What they need — and often struggle to get — is political support and a bit of money.
...
To liberals, gun violence among African-Americans is rooted in economic disadvantage and inequality, as well as America’s gun culture and lax gun laws. Conservatives, meanwhile, often focus on black “culture.” “The problem is not our gun laws,” a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote last year about Chicago’s murder rate. “Nor is it our drug laws, or racist cops, prosecutors and judges. The problem is black criminality, which is a function of black pathology, which ultimately stems from the breakdown of the black family.”

 

From the wiki article on Daniel Moynihan:

"Writing to Lyndon Johnson [in 1965], Moynihan argued that without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, which would cause rates of divorce, child abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s), leading to vast increases in the numbers of households headed by females and the higher rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of child abuse that are associated with them."​

Out-of-wedlock births have since risen from 25% to 75% in the black community.

 

This proves Daniel Moynihan right and it breaks my heart.

 

They wouldn't dare broadcast that today.

 

They wouldn't dare broadcast that today.

Not in a million years, even Fox news would censor it today. Moyers is solidly in the "left-wing" but he nailed it with this program.

 

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2...un-used-paris-terrorist-attacks-came-phoenix/

 

Moyers is solidly in the "left-wing" but he nailed it with this program.

I haven't watched it yet, but one thing that intrigues me is that the family destruction problem was in clear view before the "war on poverty" which followed Moynihan's urging to Johnson. There's plenty of evidence that the "war" accelerated the trends and made things worse, but it looks like things were headed south even without throwing gas on the fire. And out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed in the white population as well. Another victim of the war, but maybe a trend that would have played out anyway?

The destruction of the family may be the biggest problem our culture faces going forward into the next few generations. The internet may replace education as we knew it, but I don't see a good substitute for family.