The Politics Of Gene Wolfe

brunians at brunians.org · 18 Mar 2009, 06:46 · from 2009-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:46:51 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) The Politics Of Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <BLU120-W29C3E32A000E0E1A80BD4286990 at phx.gbl>
References: <404335.12840.qm at web32405.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<355245.30897.qm at web37601.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<11723.67.142.130.31.1237347649.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<BLU120-W372D3BF4525E725B48D02E86990 at phx.gbl>
	<4440.67.142.130.31.1237353001.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<BLU120-W29C3E32A000E0E1A80BD4286990 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1670.67.142.130.31.1237358811.squirrel at brunians.org>


> I am not a gun control activist, but I am not emotionally invested in
> thinking that people on either side of the issue take the stance they do
> due to ignorance, fear or just generally being Bad People.

There has to be some degree of ignorance of history for people to even
think it is a good idea.

Also we swim in a sea of propaganda, or most of us do. It is amazing,
really, how good the propaganda is, especially for those who consume TV as
required.

>> > It surprises me that nobody has brought up the urban/rural divide on
>> the
>> > gun issue. I think there are definite, pragmatic reasons why
>> city-dwellers
>> > all over seem to be in favor of gun control in greater proportions
>> than
>> > their rural counterparts.
>>
>> No there aren't. Washington DC has 400,000 people. Tucson AZ has 400,000
>> people. Tucson AZ has, like, twenty, thirty murders a year. There is a
>> thriving drug trade in both cities, a minority majority in both cities,
>> and Tucson has also *huge* amounts of illegal humans coming through as
>> well as guys who will come up the fifty miles from Mexico to steal cars
>> to order.

> I am not at all certain what your point is with this passage.

I had thought that the high number of murders in Washington DC was well
known. Apparently not. There were 181 in 2007: an improvement over the
early 90's.

Most of these murders were committed with firearms.

The question is, how can this be? Guns are illegal in DC. How can there be
any crimes committed with guns at all if guns are illegal there?

Please address this question.


>> >                                 And personally I don't think it would
>> be
>> > unreasonable to accommodate both parties by limiting those who can
>> carry
>> > firearms in dense urban areas while leaving the rural areas alone.

>> This would make sense if the murder rate in Tucson was higher than it is
>> in DC.

> Tucson and Washington DC have similar populations, but Tucson sprawls out
> over three times the area of DC. Population density is kind of an
> important part of the point I was making.

So you think it is because people are all crowded together? I think it is
because you have disarmed the honest ones.

People in Switzerland are very heavily armed, and I believe that their
cities are pretty densely populated. Hardly any crime there at all.





.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net