On 7/21/2015 3:53 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:07:45 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/21/2015 11:32 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Tue, 21 Jul 2015 08:01:06 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/20/2015 3:36 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 15:07:21 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

More likely we want to be able to defend ourselves.

See above.

I did. You don't think people should be able to defend themselves? My
reluctance to kill is less than my reluctance to be killed.

No, you have a perfect right to defend yourself. And if you have to,
it's time to move.

Easy to say assuming unlimited funds and options.

No, you don't need unlimited funds and options. What you need is the
good sense not to plant yourself and your family in a shooting
gallery.

It was what I could afford.

Nonsense. There are plenty of safe places that aren't expensive. That
was your choice.

I chose what I could afford. That didn't include safety as the highest
or only priority.



In the real world, not
so much. For that matter, the number of safe places to move to is
dropping rapidly.

I can suggest a few if you're interested. Crime rates for nearly every
town in America are published online.

Oh, good, and you're willing to help subsidize this move of course, or
should I just use money I don't have?

You shouldn't have planted yourself in a dangerous place to begin
with. You're on your own.

I didn't plant myself in a dangerous place. I bought what I could afford
and security was only one of the factors involved. If security hadn't
been a factor, I could have spent far less.


The rest of the world can do what it wants with DDT.

Not if the program gets US funding, which many do.

WTF? So we're responsible for malaria in Africa? We're supposed to
fund their mosquito repellants because of our domestic decisions? Let
them get their DDT from India -- they still make it -- and have China
pay for it.

We already give millions for malaria abatement. Bill Gates gives
millions more.

But not using DDT, which had almost eradicated malaria until Rachel Carson.

Horse****:

"The program was successful in eliminating malaria only in areas with
"high socio-economic status, well-organized healthcare systems, and
relatively less intensive or seasonal malaria transmission".[33]

So it was used successfully in areas where the need was less critical,
but it could be used.

"DDT was less effective in tropical regions due to the continuous life
cycle of mosquitoes and poor infrastructure. It was not applied at all
in sub-Saharan Africa due to these perceived difficulties. Mortality
rates in that area never declined to the same dramatic extent, and now
constitute the bulk of malarial deaths worldwide, especially following
the disease's resurgence as a result of resistance to drug treatments
and the spread of the deadly malarial variant caused by Plasmodium
falciparum."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

More right-wing mythology. This has been known for close to 50 years,
David. And it wasn't even USED in sub-Saharan Africa! You're still
regurgitation bull**** that was demolished a half-century ago.

So we don't really know how successful it would have been if it had been
used where it was most needed.




Of course, this ignores that the
vast majority of legal purchases are never used in crime.

Gee, ya' think? How did this ridiculous idea become part of the
discussion?

"The point is that you aren't paying attention to the stats. According
to the FBI, the average time between a legal gun purchase and its use
in a crime is 2-1/2 years."

The way you state this, it implies that any legal purchase is used in a
crime on the average 2-1/2 years later. I know that's not what you meant
to say, but that's the first inference I made.

If that was what I was saying, that would mean every gun in the US was
used in a crime. What kind of nut would think that?

And if you knew that's not what I meant, then what is all of this
gum-flapping you're doing?

Because I could see the point your awkwardly worded sentence was trying
to get at.


I would have said "According to the FBI, the average time between the
legal purchase of a gun used in a crime and that use is 2-1/2 years."

How can you make a legal purchase of a gun used in a crime?

Maybe you want to try re-wording that sentence.

OK. "According to the FBI, the average time between the legal purchase
of a gun subsequently used in a crime and that use is 2-1/2 years."

Added one word, even less ambiguous than your original awkward sentence.

This depends on what you mean by easy. No security system will stop a
determined thief, the best it can do is slow him down or make it too
much trouble.

Check out the security requirements and the gun-theft rates in
Switzerland. Doing there, what most people do in the US, would land
you in jail. And their gun-crime rates are much lower than ours.

Nah, comparing different societies to the US just demonstrates that
they're different societies. Far more variables than just gun thief
rates and gun crime rates. If I compare crime in Milwaukee to most
European cities, the numbers are similar if you ignore the areas where
most of the blacks and Hispanics live. That's an endemic social problem
that doesn't translate in comparisons.

David