[GPSCC-chat] Guns

Sat Jan 19 20:56:07 PST 2013

       If anyone knows about research on this, I'd be interested.  I 
think I remember hearing reports that suggest that Great Britain had 
fewer homicides in the past when the police carried only night sticks 
than they do today when police (and therefore more thieves and robbers) 
carry firearms.


       Today's Mercury News has a story about "Luis Ricardo Hernandez, 
26, who is being held in Santa Clara County Jail on $1 million bail in 
the death of 36-year-old Christopher Soriano of San Jose.  Hernandez was 
a maintenance worker at the Summer Breeze apartments when on Dec. 31 he 
and a supervisor reportedly tried to perform a citizen's arrest on 
Soriano, who they suspected of burglarizing cars at the complex. In an 
ensuing physical confrontation, police said, Hernandez shot Soriano, who 
later died. ... According to authorities, Hernandez's maintenance 
supervisor at the apartments on Lewis Road noticed a truck and 
remembered it being around the time of previous burglaries. The 
supervisor told investigators that based on what he felt was inadequate 
police response to prior calls, he didn't believe officers would come. 
He enlisted Hernandez's help to detain the driver, since identified as 
Soriano, until they could get police to show up." 
(www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_22404350/supporters-rally-petition-san-jose-man-charged-murder) 


       Based on this report, I think the situation could have been 
handled better using cameras than a firearm:  First take pictures of the 
truck, especially the license plate.  Then start taking pictures of the 
alleged burglar -- from a distance -- while calling police.  Continue 
taking pictures, and don't try to confront the guy:  He could have been 
armed, and there's no point in risking your life to protect property -- 
especially of relatively modest value.


       However, individual protection seems NOT to have been a primary 
motivation for the second amendment:  "A well regulated militia being 
necessary to the defense of a free state, the right of the people to 
keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."  The defenders of the second 
amendment seem bent on suggesting guns are necessary to protect 
individual liberties from encroachments by the state.  The best research 
I know on this is Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) Why Civil Resistance 
Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia U. Pr.).  
They led a collaborative effort that created a database representing a 
consensus among leading experts on violent and nonviolent change efforts 
in the twentieth century focusing on campaigns that ended between 1902 
and 2006.  Their experts identified 105 nonviolent change efforts and 
218 violent movements.  Full or partial success was achieved by 53% of 
the nonviolent campaigns but only 26% of the violent efforts.  Success 
in virtually all cases was achieved in large part through defections 
from the established authorities, and the leaders key supporters were 
more likely to defect when confronted with nonviolent resistance than 
violence.  Moreover, the nonviolent successes were followed years later 
by an improvement in Freedom Scores from Freedom House of 2.68 vs. only 
1.52 for violent change efforts.


       Spencer


On 1/19/2013 8:08 PM, Caroline Yacoub wrote:
> I'm with John on this one.
> Caroline
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: John Thielking <pagesincolor at yahoo.com>
> To: "sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org" <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>; Brian Good
> <snug.bug at hotmail.com>
> Sent: Sat, January 19, 2013 10:54:25 AM
> Subject: Re: [GPSCC-chat] Guns
>
>
> This is not a trivial issue (guns).  I'm not sure if I sent the following
> article to the list or not.
> This is from my web site www.peacemovies.com, which has had the homepage
> replaced with a 1 year anniversary of the SOPA strike page until next Thursday
> in solidarity with Aaron Swartz who committed suicide last week because he was
> indicted for 13 felony counts carrying a maximum 35 year sentence for simply
> downloading a few million articles from a pay per view site for free.
>
> John Thielking
>    
>    
> What Does Gun Violence Have To Do With Movies?
> by John Thielking
> 12-15-12
>
> The massacre in Connecticut this week has left people devastated and some are
> looking for answers. Does boycotting violent movies (or realizing that there are
> nonviolent alternatives available) offer any hope of creating a mandate for
> change/gun control/ poverty elimination? This author says an emphatic Yes!
>
> A recent debate with Steven Argue brought up the fact that there are two sides
> in the debate over whether violence in movies and video games significantly
> increases violence in the real world. Jonathan L. Freedman wrote a report
> published by The Media Institute (a movie producer funded outfit) located here:
> http://www.mediainstitute.org/PDFs/policyviews/Freedman-TelevisionViolence.pdfthat
>   tries it's best to debunk the notion that violence in movies is significantly
> associated with violence in the real world. He claims that as little as 28% of
> the published studies on the issue show a positive correlation. However, while
> he is good at criticizing the other side for doing sloppy science (such as not
> being able to eliminate experimenter demand effects and achieve a perfectly
> double blind experiment that uses violent and nonviolent movies), he himself
> neglects to do a formal meta-analysis of the entire set of studies that he is
> reviewing. If there are 28 studies with 100 subjects that show a positive
> correlation while there are 72 studies with 10 subjects that do not, then it is
> quite obvious that the balance of the evidence shows a positive correlation.
>
> On the other side is Craig A. Anderson PhD of Center For Study Of Violence of
> Iowa State University, who has his own vested interest in that his career
> depends upon him continuing to find problems with violence in movies re:
> violence in society. In his latest work (written by a panel of experts from the
> organization that he heads), available here:
> http://www.israsociety.com/pdfs/Media%20Violence%20Commission%20final%20report.pdf
>
> it is claimed that no less than 3 formal meta-analyses of the possible
> correlation between violence in media and violence in the real world show a
> positive correlation. In that same paper the panel writes that while there is a
> positive correlation between media violence and increased indicators of violence
> in experimental trials, this does not translate into as strong a correlation
> between media violence and criminal activity. That is a different level of
> violence not addressed by most of the studies.
> The bottom line is this: A 2009 on the street survey of what kind of movies
> people want to watch showed that 1/2 of the people want to watch a nonviolent
> movie, 1/2 the people don't care one way or the other, and only 2 or 3 people
> out of 35 want to watch a violent movie or seek out violent themes such as
> horror movies as their favorite. In light of the latest school shooting in
> Connecticut, it seems that one route to diminishing gun violence is to make sure
> that the box office receipts match the survey results. If that ever happened,
> all the politicians would start running scared every time someone wanted to
> start a war or if there was any kind of gun violence anywhere in the USA. Every
> trick in the book would be thrown at the problem until it was solved. Not all of
> the problem has to do with gun control. Some of it has to do with income
> inequality and general economic insecurity. We should be solving those problems
> too. But we need something to signal that we have a mandate. If 75% of box
> office receipts went to movies such as Eat Pray Love and Dolphin Tale, we would
> have just such a mandate. Let's get cracking!
>
>
>
>
> --- On Sat, 1/19/13, Brian Good <snug.bug at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> From: Brian Good <snug.bug at hotmail.com>
>> Subject: [GPSCC-chat] Guns
>> To: "sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org" <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>
>> Date: Saturday, January 19, 2013, 10:13 AM
>>
>>
>> I don't know the Green Party's position on gun control, but the lack of chatter
>> on the issue here increases my confidence that that the issue is trivial and
>> Obama's recent aggressive activity is a mere smokescreen so he can make his
>> supporters think he's progressive even while he's caving in on social security
>> and medicare.
>>
>> My view about guns changed when I was living in my car for weeks and months  in
>> the National Forests and in Manhattan.  My initial terror that some nut might
>> attack me at 3:00 am turned out to be groundless--the only people who ever
>> bothered me were streetsweepers who wanted my car moved so they could hoover the
>> leaves up, and police in Chicago and NYC checking to see that I wasn't dying of
>> a drug overdose.   I came to suspect that my personal security rested on the
>> fact that only a totally crazed person would even consider bothering me because
>> they had no way of knowing if I had a gun or not.  Thus I came to regard guns as
>> peacekeepers.
>>
>>
>> Yes, guns sometimes fall into the hands of nutjobs.  If some nut wants to kill a
>> lot of people, many schemes are practical even without guns.  I was surprised
>> recently to find my thinking echoed by a prominent South Bay peace activist who
>> said that though he will probably never own a gun himself,
>>
>> he supports the 2d amendment.
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
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