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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (152631)	11/24/2004 7:50:33 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

OT Note that the system could be something like a GPS position recorder and 360 deg video collar worn by the gun handler with an electronic trigger interlock (wireless) which simply requires the system be logging data to enable the gun. That might solve some of the problems, but it would be more expensive, heavier, and more likely to fail. If the failure mode is that the gun works if the system fails than you can have people making it fail, if the failure mode is that the gun will not fire if the system fails then you have people getting robbed, killed, and/or raped because they can't use their guns. but somehow 20K+ lives/year seams to slip by with many arguments about why inaction is the preferable approach 1 - There is not "inaction". There are a lot of police, there is homicide investigations, there is community policing plans, there are thousands of gun control laws (which may do nothing or do more harm then good even when simply measured by how they effect the murder rate). 2 - Inaction is usually preferable to a negative action. You have to way the pluses and minuses of each action rather than dash off to do something without considering if it will be useful, or whether it might be problematic or even counterproductive. A great sci-fi story could be written about a smarter Osama, who uses deep moles in the USA to kill 3K/yr through what looks like random gun violence, and the nation sleeps on... No terror glory in it, but the mastermind has a plan! Heck, I'd buy the book. It wouldn't accomplish anything. Terrorist wants terror, not a slight increase in the murder rate. Also it would be a hard thing of Osama and Al Qaeda to accomplish. If they were going to make attacks using guns they would do better to do something like what the "DC snipers" did, in several places at once. It wouldn't kill 3000, but it would cause more disruption then randomly killing 3000 over the course of a year over the whole US. Another really scary possibility is something like Beslan. Tim