America is a violent country

Discussion in 'Latest US & World News' started by Marlowe, Apr 21, 2013.

  1. Marlowe

    Marlowe New Member

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    America is a violent country - 85 people die by bullet every day.

    for example - Last night Two people and a dog were shot in Denver's Civic Center during Saturday's 4/20 pot rally, which drew about 20,000 people to downtown Denver.

    Rapper Lil' Flip was performing when the shootings occurred and aerial footage showed the massive crowd frantically running from the park.

    A man and a woman, both in their 20s, were both shot in the leg, said Denver Police spokesman Sonny Jackson. Their injuries are not life-threatening and they were taken to Denver Health Medical Center.

    Police are looking for one or two suspects involved in the shooting. Investigators do not know what started the argument.

    The Associated Press reported that a dog was also shot.

    http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_23071462/two-shot-at-massive-4-20-pot-rally

    ===

    Having established last week that Two bombs went off and a nation is in trauma, yet 85 die by bullet every day

    Another explosion rocked America. “It was like an atom bomb going off,” said a local to The New York Times. The blast was so devastating that there is still no final definitive count of casualties, but by Friday night, the mayor expected 35 to 40 fatalities. More than 200 people were injured. Fifty houses had been destroyed. Windows were shattered up to a mile away. The images look like a massive bomb had gone off — and in a way, it hadthe modest town of West, Texas — not Boston. A fertiliser plant exploded late on Wednesday night, after a fire broke out in one of the buildings.

    But it was not the main story of the week — the Boston marathon bombings were. In Boston, the explosions were far less devastating than in West and the week’s death toll five.
    The bombs contained a minuscule fraction of the force of the Texas explosion. The main weapons were assault guns that only last week the Senate decided not to ban anyway. But this was an act of terrorism — and the first successful one since a jihadist US soldier killed 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

    Suddenly, an entire nation was fixated and the press corps turned into an almost comical “Don’t panic! Publish anything!” mode. CNN, Associated Press and Fox News all reported either one or two arrests last Wednesday, when there was none.

    A Saudi student taken to hospital for injuries was described as a suspect and reportedly “deported” — in fact he was a victim and no deportation was even considered.

    Right-wing bloggers reported that the suspect was “a dark-skinned male”; some liberals speculated that it was the work of a right-wing extremist. Neither side had a smidgen of real evidence. It was as if some kind of psychological freak-out button had been pressed — obliterating any sense of restraint or logic.

    And that’s because, I think, a psychological trigger had actually been touched: the 9/11 trigger. What else explains the media round-the-clock obsession or a day-long curfew and lockdown of an entire city? Yes, there were good reasons for caution. The suspects had been equipped with bombs and guns; they had murdered a college policeman sitting in his car; they had hijacked a car; and, when trapped, had engaged in a pitched gunfight in the streets.

    But a veritable army of policemen and FBI, armed with serious assault weapons and tanks descended. Robots were deployed along with helicopters and heat-seeking infrared technology. In the final showdown, a massive, mechanised army came face to face with a bleeding 19-year-old hiding in a shrink-wrapped boat. That almost Freudian disparity is worth keeping in mind because the comparison between West, Texas, and Boston, Massachusetts, reveals the power of the terrorist threat to the human psyche.

    Last week shows how terrorism works. It terrorises and the trauma of that terror lies often buried in the psyche for years. Untreated and unaddressed, it can suddenly return, without perspective or rationality. In some ways, this is understandable. Before 9/11, Americans had felt relatively invulnerable to the terrorism that I grew up with in Britain in the 1970s or that occurs routinely as a consequence of the US invasion of Iraq (on the day of the Boston marathon, 65 Iraqis were murdered by terrorist bombs). The twin towers attack was so traumatic that it led the US to adopt the torture techniques of totalitarian regimes and to invade and occupy two countries. Americans lost it. And I cannot say I was immune.

    It changed Americans because we allowed it to traumatise us. Before 9/11, terrorism didn’t have this kind of power. The first bombing of the World Trade Center in 2003 did not “change everything”. Last week, the historian Rick Perlstein noted that at Christmas 1975, an explosion at LaGuardia airport killed 11 civilians. No one was found responsible — and the city of New York was not put under lockdown.

    Any violence that can be plausibly ascribed at least in part to jihadist terrorism gets the 9/11 bounce. Forty dead from an explosion in a fertiliser plant last inspected in 1985, devastating an entire community, is not as big a story as five dead and two relatively small internet-formula explosive devices. The jihadist terrorism freak-out is particularly striking when you examine the level of random violence Americans take in their stride. On an average day, 85 people are killed by a bullet. The US has three times more assault deaths than any other OECD country. On current trends, gun deaths will exceed those from car crashes by 2015. Last December, a crazy person gunned down 20 six-year-olds at Sandy Hook elementary school in a quiet suburban town.

    This is a violent country and the violence, because of widespread gun ownership, is much more likely to be fatal. Last week saw the death in the Senate of any legislation to improve background checks for gun buyers. The power of the gun lobby is far greater than Americans’ fear of random violence, even greater than telling the parents of murdered toddlers that Congress had no intention of doing anything to prevent such a thing happening again. And yet two nasty but crude pressure-cooker bombs had the entire country going bonkers. What can account for this?

    One answer is simple human nature. One murder can be accounted for. Once a death toll exceeds three, you notice. When mass murder occurs in a usually safe place without warning and with a potential for catastrophe, our primal natures kick in. That’s how terrorism manages to turn us into irrational vengeance-seekers and scapegoaters, if we do not counter the feeling aggressively. In Sandy Hook, the murderer was white, local and used a gun, making him a familiar and domestic figure. But bombs planted by terrorists — especially suspected foreigners — carry far greater cultural weight in the US since 9/11. Every bomb points to jihadists and a return to trauma.

    source Andrew Sullivan

    None of this fear has anything to do with rationality. The libertarian writer Ronald Bailey recently calculated the chances of an American being killed in a terrorist attack over the past five years is one in 20m. The risk of being struck by lightning is one in 5m. The risk of dying in a car accident is one in 19,000. More strikingly, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that the number of terror attacks in the US in the decade before 9/11 was 41 a year. Since 9/11, it has been 19 a year. And yet our terror panic endures — and even grows.

    The mind is a fascinating thing. One moment of utter trauma and your entire sense of future risk is altered — and you make leaps of assumption that simply repeat the previous trauma. Perhaps the most tragic fact about contemporary America and the war on terror is that more US soldiers are now killing themselves than are being killed in Afghanistan: veterans commit suicide at a rate of 22 a day.

    Many are affected by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by long and repeated tours of duty in profoundly violent areas. The irrational parts of their brains have taken over the rational parts. But PTSD need not be merely an individual disease. It can be a collective one, too. For a while, especially after a truly traumatising event such as 9/11, it can even define a country. And distort its perspective. And corrode its resilience.
     
  2. Dutch

    Dutch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    So?
    10char
     
  3. MGB ROADSTER

    MGB ROADSTER Banned

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    THE best country in the World !!
    Even the palestinian islamic forum here desire green cards...........
     
  4. Alfalfa

    Alfalfa Banned

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    And don't forget it.
     
  5. Idealistic Smecher

    Idealistic Smecher Banned

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    Look at history, things had never been better in terms of violence.
     
  6. Angedras

    Angedras New Member

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    "Rapper Lil' Flip was performing when the shootings occurred"...


    [video=youtube;ihGWxZnF1LU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihGWxZnF1LU[/video]
     
  7. Marlowe

    Marlowe New Member

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    No doubt for economic reasons and hoping minimize the odds of their homes bulldozed - being murdered with weapons supplied by america to SOB Israeli swines .
     
  8. spookytooth

    spookytooth New Member

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    The human race is violent because that is the way it chooses to live and conduct business.America is actually less violent than say the Mid East, or many African nations; or any of the multitude of nations where human rights are less of an issue than in America.
     
  9. Stuart Wolfe

    Stuart Wolfe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Oh, good grief - here we go again. Okay: Let's start with this:

    [​IMG]

    - and end with this:

    'Nuff said.
     
  10. gabriel1

    gabriel1 New Member

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    Britain defines violent crimes much differently than America does
     
  11. Stuart Wolfe

    Stuart Wolfe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It would be more accurate to say certain British posters define what happens in their own country in one light and the same elsewhere in another.
     
  12. Marlowe

    Marlowe New Member

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    Stu - can you produce stats of UNREPORTED crime figures ?

    remember the old saying -" There are three kinds of lies... - lies , d-amn lies + statistics "

    see this :

    http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/lies.htm

    Nuff said ... (wink)

    btw - you might like to add "Public relations" (hehehe)

    .....
     
  13. gabriel1

    gabriel1 New Member

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    no it wouldn't. the official statistics of violent crime in the two countries cannot be compared because they are not counting the same crimes
     
  14. Marlowe

    Marlowe New Member

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    Its always a matter of proportionality - innit ?

    fact remains incidence of gun crime -victims killed
    with firearms are lower in UK + throughout Europe than USA .

    However I accept that you're doing your best to defend a rather hopeless situation in america.
     
  15. Stuart Wolfe

    Stuart Wolfe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Can you?

    And the fact ALSO remains that on the article I quoted, the UK is number one in violent crimes, while the US is somewhere around 14th, give or take. I'll well accept we have a high gun rate here. Can you admit the sins of the UK?

    Still don't have an answer on how you can tell Talon - and by extension, every US poster - to clean his own house before commenting on others, while the reverse does not seem to hold for you.
     
  16. Albert Di Salvo

    Albert Di Salvo New Member

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    America isn't one country. It's really five different countries held together by custom and a dead idea. It's not possible to have so many different peoples all together and not have strife.
     
  17. Marlowe

    Marlowe New Member

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    I think it'll be fair to say that most British are far more alert /aware what's happening in their own country + the world , than most americans - who rarely venture to the next county/or state , and satisfied lapping up whatever the local News fed to them by + Fox news.

    Here's the limit of average american :

    [​IMG]


    ,,,
     
  18. Albert Di Salvo

    Albert Di Salvo New Member

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    American public school teachers have failed to teach most Americans to be inquisitive or capable of reasoning. That is one of the primary reasons for the low caliber of the American public.
     
  19. gabriel1

    gabriel1 New Member

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    American PARENTS have failed.
     
  20. Albert Di Salvo

    Albert Di Salvo New Member

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    What you meant to say is that "most" American parents have failed. That's to be expected because most American parents are products of American public school where they were taught by unionized public school teachers who let them down.
     
  21. Marlowe

    Marlowe New Member

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    Dear Wolf - none of us are without "sin" . some are just more so + carry a bigger burden of sin/ more sinful than others.
     
  22. Mayor Snorkum

    Mayor Snorkum Banned

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    A word for people who think there's some other place in the world better than the US:

    Leave.

    If you don't live here, what do you care for? The Mayor doesn't live in England, they could have a murder rate of 0.00000 or 100,000 per hundred thousand. All the same to him.
     
  23. Stuart Wolfe

    Stuart Wolfe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Which is like really nice and all Marlowe, except I don't watch FOX, have been about the US and to quite a few foreign countries as well. But you still haven't answered why you can tell posters not to comment on the UK while you in the UK can comment on other countries. Hmm, isn't there a word for someone who holds other people to a higher standard than they hold themselves to?

    I mean, now you've gone from bashing the US because of high gun rates, and when someone shows you that the UK has problems just as bad if not worse than our own - and from your own country to boot - you then go off on a rant about how dumb Americans are. It's a nice deflection away from your own OP when you got challenged by it. Predictable, but amusing nevertheless.
     
  24. gabriel1

    gabriel1 New Member

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    as were parents in all the other advanced western countries. try again
     
  25. alexa

    alexa Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    We include all kinds of things in violent crime that you do not. Here are real statistics.

    You will see the UK rates for homicide, rape, assault, burglary and vehicle theft. On assault we appear to be high with England, 3rd, Scotland 1st, that will be Glasgow and NI 28th.

    For the US Homicide 3rd
    Rape 4th
    Robbery 8th
    Assault 17th
    Burglary 13th

    The US had much less assault than either England and Wales or Scotland and a little less burglary than England and Wales and Northern Ireland but unless I have made a mistake on all other categories was significantly higher. Oops England and wales were just above you on robbery.

    The situation is made more difficult in that the UK records it's crime rates by countries, England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

    http://www.civitas.org.uk/crime/crime_stats_oecdjan2012.pdf
     

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