Family of dead armed robber attempting to sue, pushing for stricter gun control laws

[Kittamaru]

But if you're both armed with baseball bats (much less broken wine bottles), the odds are high that nobody's going to die.

This is why I recommend making martial arts a standard class in children's schools. With a few exceptions, most of them are much more effective at defense than offense. The creep wouldn't get anywhere near you with his knife, bottle or bat, and you wouldn't have to kill him. (And no, I don't have a "belt" of any color.)

The reason guns were invented in the 14th century is that they give the attacker an advantage over the defender. Isn't it about time we stopped living in the 14th century?

A valid point mate... though I dare say anyone in my house, threatening my family... I can't say for certain that I WOULD stop until I knew the threat was neutralized... with any luck the limited training I have would keep me from responding with, hm, excessive force... but I tend to get a bit grouchy when my wife is endangered... the whole "blinding rage" thing being blinding and all that.

The problem is, though... how do you change the status quo as it stands? Guns are far too easily smuggled, stolen, and hell even BUILT (my grandfather was a shop teacher at the local high school decades ago... he taught kids how to craft their own stocks, barrels, etc in wood and metal shop class, then they assembled the guns (little .22 hornets) and he took them out to the local firing range to test them... but then again, back then, murdering someone you disagreed with was rather frowned upon by the common man). How would you go about getting "rid" of the weapons? Any kind of law you pass would result in legitimate, law abiding citizens turning them in whilst the criminals, the ones you have to worry about, would keep em...

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

The problem is, though... how do you change the status quo as it stands?

I don't know. There are already too many guns and they are practically indestructible. With proper maintenance they'll last almost forever. There are lots of guns from the 19th century that still work fine.

I guess we need to breed a bacteria that eats guns.

What bothers me, perhaps even more than the wild-eyed gun nuts, is the half-wits in the Tea Party who honestly believe that they need guns to prevent an autocratic government from taking away their freedom. Have these bozos seen the shit the government's got??? They'd never get close.

The government has armed drones that can spot their heat signature through the roof of their house and shoot them in the dark! Or how about just disabling the internet? In less than a week the majority of the population would have no food and no fuel.

These people really are living in the 14th century.

 

[Kittamaru]

That and, more than likely, if the government ever really went full totalitarian on us, the military would be the first ones to go "uh, no fuck that" and take a stand...

 

[Captain Kremmen]

This is more information than I want to give you. One Jpeg.
The information I want to look at is under Burglary Victimisation.
Six times the problem if your property is poorly secured, as opposed to basic or enhanced.
That's in the UK, but I bet that goes for the US too.

Moral.
Buy better locks, windows, have an alarm etc. before you buy a gun.
I'm not particularly against gun rights in the US, as I can appreciate the historical difference between the US and the UK.
If I lived in the US, I probably wouldn't buy a gun, but I would consider it.
Why not get really good locks and secure doors and windows etc, and have a gun just in case?

 

[Kittamaru]

A large part of the problem is home construction - even a good dead-bolt lock is all but useless in some of these cheap houses, simply because there is nothing really reinforcing the doorway. What good is a lock if I can simply kick the door on the hinge side and rip it off the wall? As for securing doors and windows - yeah, it will keep the casual "opportunity" burglar out... but for a while in my area it got to the point where people were using scanners to pick up garage door remote codes and using that to break into peoples homes... though woe betide the poor fool to try that in my mothers house, as the German Shepherd and Beagle/Coonhound dogs we have would probably make a meal out of anyone who entered the house without one of us.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Possibly due to available resources, we seem to make most of our houses from brick,
and our doors are like safe doors.
People die because firemen can't get through them.
Hence the drop in burglaries in the link I gave.
I'm sure your doors must be much the same.
It must be what they are attached to that is the problem.
Perhaps there is more wood than clay in the USA.

A dog with sharp teeth is always a good deterrent,
and a bark says "go somewhere else, or else"

 

[Kittamaru]

Yeah... see, one of the most prominent builders in my area, McNaughton, actually doesn't put a proper frame around the door - the doorway is cut into the existing wall (generally drywall) and then molding is put around it to make it look pretty... looks nice, yeah, but won't stop someone determined to knock it down

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Don't you have building regulations?
Is legislating for secure doors and windows in new builds a difficulty?

If you can kick down a door, criminals will do just that.

 

[Kittamaru]

Don't you have building regulations?
Is legislating for secure doors and windows in new builds a difficulty?

If you can kick down a door, criminals will do just that.

We do have building regulations, but they are pretty lax around here... it's probably why Harrisburg is such a hotbed of drugs and crap... cause people can get away with stupid things like that. Hell, I've watched them building houses... they'll get the framing up, go home, it rains overnight, then they come back and tyvek it... yeah, great idea, lets just seal all that moisture into the wood... *sigh*

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Start activating.
We aren't cleverer in the UK, it's just that our houses are built like the sensible piggy in the fairy story. Out of Brick.
And now we have these new multi-lock doors.
Burglars in the UK are becoming extinct.

 

[Kittamaru]

yeah... but unfortunately here in the USA it's all about building a house you can sell for as much as possible using as little actual money as possible

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

5 in every 100 households were victims of vehicle crime in 2011/12 compared to 20 in every 100 households in 1995.

We have undergone the same quantum improvement here. The reason, of course, is electronic interlocks. It is virtually impossible to steal a car without a key these days. Even if you break a window and release the parking brake, the transmission is locked in "Park" and there's no way to push or tow the car. You need a winch and a truck to load it onto.

Street hoodlums don't have these resources so they have been put out of business. The only cars that get stolen today are expensive ones that are worth the investment in equipment. They're loaded onto ships and sold in countries with lax law enforcement.

Neighboring Prince George's County, Maryland (population 800K, the most affluent black-majority municipality in America), used to have one vehicle theft per hour. Now it's less than one per day.

If the wholesale value of your car is less than about $40K, nobody's going to bother stealing it. The profit is not worth the risk.

A big, sturdy SUV might be an exception. A warlord in a place like Sudan can't drive a Bentley on those miserable roads.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

If you have secure windows and doors with good locks, burglars will generally leave you alone.
Cars, same thing. Most of those now stolen are old cars.
A gun might be some reassurance, but it should be low priority.
An exception, I'd say, is if you lived in a remote area, and had a very nice house with valuables in it.
You would be a target, and have little police protection.
Even in the UK, many people in this situation have a shotgun for "sport purposes".

 

[The Marquis]

Some cases are not so cut and dried 'bad greedy lawyers' cases.

Actually, most of them are. They are because lawyers can profit from prosecuting such cases and will actively seek to do so, and because the lure of easy money is often enough to offset the life of a child.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The simplest solution to this problem is to ensure that those engaged in criminal activity, their families, or anyone personally associated with them, can not personally profit from this type of lawsuit, nor seek direct compensation for any personal expenses incurred.
Watch the courts free up. Not because the lawyers would stop chasing the proceeds... but because the families would suddenly realise the lives of their criminal offspring weren't worth that much effort after all, if they can't get a mansion out of it.

I'd even be content if the proceeds of such lawsuits went to a designated charity instead.
Maybe Medicines Sans Frontiers would make some real money, instead of seeing some stupid redneck mob become overnight millionaires because their worthless offspring was shot while attempting to rob someone actually contributing to the society in which they might have been so much more if only they'd taken advantage of it.

The purpose of such laws is to ensure that institutions and individuals pay for their transgressions, or perhaps more accurately to ensure that they pay attention to the measures required to prevent them.
Where the system has failed, is in allowing personal profit from it. Ensuring that the proceeds went elsewhere would still achieve the original purpose without giving rise to the kind of frivolity and selfish bullshit in such prevalence in the western world.

Rodney King died in his own mansion, snorting coke in a pool, because of the laws you support, while Hong Lee sweats in his corner shop day and night in competition with WalMart to support a family, perhaps even dreaming of the day frustrated and cornered police decide to beat him up because he spat on them while being arrested for driving dangerously while high on whatever artificial means he might be using to give his life some semblance of meaning.
Your taxes paid for that.

I'm willing to bet Cynthia Kelly was just a little peeved at herself for not having married King six months earlier. I'm quite surprised some imaginative lawyer didn't think of some way to convince a court her loss was the result of him not coping with the payout he received from the legal system he used to kill himself, and that her personal pain and suffering resulting from his death, and the states failure to prepare him for sudden wealth, was worth a few million.

Orouboros.

You wonder why there is so much anger out there. I suppose the real question is: Why aren't you angry? Why do you defend the existing laws rather than thinking of ways to improve them?

Stop supporting it.
Change it.

 

[Bells]

Oh please..

It's not as cut and dried as that.

You see everything in black and white. There are grey areas. Refusing to deal with them or even acknowledge them and ignoring them altogether don't make them go away.

 

[The Marquis]

Oh please..

It's not as cut and dried as that.

You see everything in black and white. There are grey areas. Refusing to deal with them or even acknowledge them and ignoring them altogether don't make them go away.

You're right, I jhave a tendency to do exactly that.
Basically, that you might get a few samples of injustice as a result of applying laws in black and white by far will offset the absolute bullshit courts have to deal with on a day to day basis. "Mitigating circumstances" and "emotional damages" are two of the applications of law most easily taken afdvatage of by anyone with a good lawyer. It's ridiculous.

Thing is, Bells, you're the one complaining so often about how those with the money to be able to afford the best defences are the ones taking advantage of law for personal gain. Yet those two specifications above are two that any high-priced lawyer is able to milk to the utmost, while those with public defenders are unlikely to get a look in on them.

Heard the latest one?
Remember the little girl who got thrown off a bridge by her father? Of course you do.
Guy's gone to jail for life. It should have been over. A crime was committed, punishment administered.

But, no.
Now, she's suing .. someone... because there were no suicide prevention barriers on that bridge. The claim is that the father would never have been able to throw that little kid over the rails if they had been. I suppose the assumption is that he lacked the imagination to figure out how else he was going to kill her.

Do you think it was the mother who initiated this? Hell, no. This is a lawyer, seeing an opportunity, creating a pretext, then playing up the "emotional anguish" angle for all it's worth, and then getting in the ear of a grieveing mother... who presumably is now greiving a ittle more than she was a year or so ago. No chance to just get on with her life... now she's in court again, dragging it on even further, now there's a few hundred grand n the offing.
Now. Assuming she has a case, will this money be put to anything useful? NO. She'll win, end up rich, pay off the mortgage, install a spa bath overlooking the river and spend her life in luxury. The lawyer will pay off his BMW. In the meantime, a city council or whatever will wind up a little poorer, but rather than that money going into some road repairs or a hospital wing, it'll end up in the hands a of grieving mother who was probably on her way to acceptance of life before some dude in a suit came knocking on her door.
It's bullshit. It's all bullshit. And I'm sick of hearing about it.

Here's the alternative.
Lawyer comes up to woman's door, assesses the situation. She says yes, I'd like to make someone pay. Council gets sued, money is won, and then used to put up the damned suicide prevention rails, rather than someone who should have been strong enough to go on with life without getting her house renovated.
Lawyer gets paid. Guy's in jail. Mother gets some satisfaction because someone paid (you'll note how carefully I'm avoiding the use of the word "revenge"... on anyone who gets in the way, not the perpetrator).
How fucking hard is it to understand?




... several years later, a family dies because the money that might have been used to upgrade a section of road was used instead to pay off a mortgage and a lawyer's Mercedes.
That's the price of a child's life.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Cars, same thing. Most of those now stolen are old cars.

You can't steal a new car. They have digitized interlocks so you need either the key in the ignition or the right sequence of high-frequency beeps.

Even if you smash a window and release the emergency brake, the transmission is still locked in park and you can't move the shift lever. So there's no way to push or tow the car to a place where you can work on it in private. You have to have a truck with a winch so you can haul it off to your shop. But still, without the key it's not going anywhere.

You need some really expensive high-tech equipment to bust that kind of security. Street hoodlums don't have these resources so the job falls to the organized crooks that employ hackers who can bust the security codes. Or the chop shops who will tear it down and sell the parts.

Prince George's County in Maryland, right across the river from my county, used to log one car theft every hour. Since the Digital Age, it's dropped to one per day.

Even in the UK, many people in this situation have a shotgun for "sport purposes".

Most American gun nuts insist that a shotgun is useless as a defensive weapon. Apparently they're wrong about that too.