Commuter shot in rush hour

[Cymric]

Karlos wrote:
There have been about three fatal shootings within five minutes walk from here since 2001 :-/

Five minutes..? Beat this: about three months ago my next door neighbour was shot at close range, and then stumbled/fell bleeding two stairs to the ground floor hallway, where he died shortly after. I can still see the cleaning stains on the pavement where the police scrubbed away his blood. The entire apartment (3 stories high) is now devoid of people: everyone moved out. My girlfriend heard his muffled cries, but when she came to me, puzzled about what she heard (there were two walls and about 3 m of air in between), asking me to come and verify, they had already died away. We weren't sure what to make of it until 10 minutes later, our front door was barricaded by very serious policemen. Our downstairs neighbour wasn't allowed back into  his own house and had to sleep in a hotel. We had to lean out of the window to ask the police to allow us out of our house to go shopping.

Now for the really weird part. My GF spoke to her friends about this totally unexpected homicide. One of them has a friend who works at the 112-call department (that's the European 911), and that friend was the best friend of the man who was shot, and had to accept the call of his untimely and very unnatural demise.

Small world.

As of this day, we still don't know what the reason for the shooting was, and despite the wide-eyed shock reaction of many of my friends and family members, we have treated it as a fluke of statistics, and have not made any plans to move out early because of it. It did make me wonder about the fragility of human life a little, but all in all, it just... happened, and that was basically it. My mother still vehemently disagrees with me.


(Apart from that, there have been 3 Amsterdam mob shootings about five minutes' walk away from where I live. It's rather strange to know that a cafe on some street corner was run by a 'pal' of a local bigwig, now in prison for extortion.)

Somehow, I'm always reminded of Bruce {bleep}burn's If I Had A Rocket Launcher...

[Cymric]

X-ray wrote:
As I said in another thread, the current laws disarm the law-abiding citizen so that only the criminal has a gun. This means that the criminal has automatic superiority of force over you and me. This is a fundamental problem that has to be addressed before you ask whether a person would want to carry and want to draw, in the first place.

I remember bringing home two pictures from the hotel I stayed at while I was in Cape Town (SA, of course) about 7 years ago. They were pictures of the entrance, and were, apart from the season (foliage) the same. They were shot within one year of eachother. The only difference: a little metal plate with the picture of a security company on it and the ominous words Armed Response underneath. I doubt things have improved much since I was there.

In any society, someone who does not abide by the law will always have an advantage over the rest. That is correct, and cannot be adequately addressed. We make do with police and law, but that's always after the fact. On the other hand, if we just give in to some right of defending ourselves or others with the use of firearms, trusting that people will act responsibly, I am at the mercy of idiots who begin 'playing' with such hardware because it's 'cool' or 'phat'. I'm also at the mercy of people I don't trust to pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions are on the sole to make judgement calls in difficult situations---roughly about 99% of the general population. Even simple arguments like making errors in traffic can spiral wildly out of control if some party is agitated and not in a state to think properly. (Here in the Netherlands a current hot issue is bodily harm of paramedical personnel. Apparently, at times the bystanders (usually family) are so high on adrenalin that they become very agressive if the paramedics don't do as they expect them to do. Now imagine someone like that carrying a gun.)

I'm not even sure I would be able to make the right judgement call, much less have the nerve to actually pull the trigger with the intent to incapacitate another human being. A rabid idiot of a human being intent on harming me quite badly, I fully realise, but even then.

I have the luxury of living in a country where firearm deaths for 'innocent' bystanders---i.e., not related to fights between criminals themselves---is relatively low. I'll take my chances of becoming an innocent bystander, allow the criminals access to guns, and live with the consequences. I'm more scared of the general population having access to firearms than I am of a criminal acquiring one and threatening me with it. In other words, a variation on 'nasty things happen to other people'.

By the way, X-ray, while I in some way applaud your courage for actually drawing and preparing to use a firearm, realise that your 'score' of 3 to 0 means bovine excrement: all it takes is for that 0 to become a 1 by meeting someone who is prepared to call your bluff. Of course, you may feel happier that you at least, if you'll pardon the pun, gave it a shot.

[Cymric]

X-ray wrote:
I haven't experienced the 'phat' or 'cool' angle of some idiot producing a firearm. I think that might be the province of the rap music video. The reality is that a licensed firearm carries with it several legal responsibilities and this is taken to heart by the majority of licensed gun owners. The same applies to vehicles and drivers.

Yet there are always people who drive while drunk, exhibit annoying behaviour like clinging to your rear bumper, speed excessively, 'follow' you when they think you've done something to annoy them, and so forth. That's not acting responsibly.
 

I think we fundamentally disagree on the issue of bearing arms. I prefer to entrust my defense to myself, rather than leave it to the whims of Lady Luck.

Indeed. That's why in civilised states we have democracy so we can vote on the issue. Were I born and bred in South Africa, my views on the matter would almost certainly be quite different. I didn't point out for nothing that I have the luxury of living in a quiet little corner of the world.

Well, the three individuals I saved (one of which is myself  ;-) ) attach a slightly more favourable interpretation to that score than 'bovine excrement.' Of course, the criminals involved are probably attaching the quality of equestrian excrement to the fact that I was armed on those occasions. Certainly, without that firearm I might not be here to post at all. 3-0 is certainly better than 0-1.

My apologies, I could have phrased that better. My defense: it was 2 AM. What I meant was that each time you decide to pull your weapon, the score is reset to 0-0. Situations are not comparable, the people are not comparable. The fact that you survived three tight spot is not a guarantee that you will survive the 4th, 5th, nth. 3 times 1-0 is certainly better than 1 time 0-1, I cannot argue with that. Just don't get overconfident because of that somewhat alluring and not-quite-statistically-correct 3, is all I'm sayin'.

[Cymric]

X-ray wrote:
Perhaps we should push for the confiscation of vehicles and only ride bicycles?

Not a bad idea, actually. For starters, it would work miracles on the general health of the population; it would vastly improve the air quality in cities; it would reduce serious traffic accidents to minimum (although we'd see a lot more severe head injury and nasty abrasions affectionately referred to as tarmac rash); we can finally spend all that money on proper public transport and proper bicycle lanes with tarmac instead of stone tiles which always turn the road into an obstacle course for an MTB after a few years; we'd get windtunnels with favourable wind direction to help get us from city to city; a lot less CO2 in the atmosphere, and because of the reduced dependency on oil, more stable geopolitics; ... .

I suspect a major global conspiracy as to the cause why we haven't gotten rid of this stinking smelly cow yet  :-P .