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UK Street Crime Rise Blamed on iPods
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 20, 2006 07:14 AM
from the disarmed-populace-has-nothing-to-do-with-it dept.
from the disarmed-populace-has-nothing-to-do-with-it dept.
CNET reports that the British Government today attributed the country's 22% rise in street crime to iPod robberies. This has hit CNET close to home. Guy Cocker, a CNET (Gamespot) journalist based in London, was mugged last week. The muggers held 'a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head and told him, "we're taking all your stuff"'. CNET's solution to the problem is suggestions on how to conceal your iPod from attackers. These include 'The gaffer tape method,' 'The Coke can method,' and 'The Christopher Walken method.'
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Thank god in a contry (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait...
Re:Thank god in a contry (Score:5, Informative)
The number of guns (and related crime) in the UK is steadily increasing year on year, however thankfully the numbers are still small. The lack of guns in the UK might go some way to explaining the fact that 'only' (ie still far too many) 46 gun related murders occured last year (that figure comes from the same report) in the whole of the UK.
Steve.
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Re:Thank god in a contry (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Thank god in a contry (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple fact is that British people murder each other less than most other countries, regardless of what weapons are used. Guns are irrelevant.
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Re:Thank god in a contry (Score:4, Insightful)
plus, you can't hold up a bank with a blunt object, you cant kill people at (much of) a distance with a blunt object, and you cant take out a room full of unarmed people with a blunt object.
if the american gun lobby is so sure that giving the general population guns will stop the government misbehaving, why isnt anyone storming the whitehouse with uzis, taking out the unelected emperor that stole control of their country 7 years ago?
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Re:Thank god in a contry (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Thank god in a contry (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they are more easily controlled by their gov't, because as long as you give them their precious little guns, they will vote for you and not complain about anything else (mentioning God doesn't hurt either). One good troll deserves another.
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Re:Speaking as one of 'them'... (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, this makes me laugh every time I see this tired old argument.
And I do not say this to mock you. Truly. The concept of keeping the citizenry armed, to keep the government in check.. that's beautiful. I love it.
But do you honestly think that if "they" want to come get you, that your guns are going to stop them?
Do you know what kind of shit they can deploy? You wouldn't even see them coming! What's your Glock going to do against a sonic array? Or chemical attack?
You want to keep guns and shoot them as a hobby, fine, go for it. But don't pretend they give you any extra insurance or autonomy whatsoever against the United States Government; that is a laughable, delusional fiction.
(By the way, your Constitution was written at a time when people had to deal with bears on their property, ferfuxsake! It was a fact of life at the time, the need to own a gun. Not so much now. Crime's at an all-time low.)
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Re:Thank god in a contry (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Guns make it so easy to kill that any retard can do it. That's the ultimate problem. It's the same interface as a camera; point and click.
To murder someone with a knife or club you have to:
Compare that to shooting someone in the back from 10 foot away. Very easy in comparison. That's why people who cannot fight for themselves love guns. They are the pussies weapon of choice. Mine? Check my username... ;-)
In terms of damage, dying from a knife wound is rare. You generally need multiple wounds or a lucky shot to a key artery or nerve. For a club you need to literally cave in some part of their body. A gunshot on the other hand will easilly pass through the rib cage into a vital organ. Or get one in the head to almost guarantee a kill.
America's specific problem is the glorification of them in popular media. Guns are cool apparently. Hell, I'm mostly a pacifist but I'd love to fire off a few rounds on a range if I'm ever stateside. Thanks Hollywood!!
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Some piece of information on the refered username (Score:4, Informative)
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Oh I see (Score:3, Insightful)
The fault of car makers that cars get stolen?
I'm a bit confused.
Re:Oh I see (Score:5, Funny)
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Blaming the iPod? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, now... is this the fault of the iPod and not the punk-ass thugs doing this crap?
Re:Blaming the iPod? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Blaming the iPod? (Score:5, Insightful)
My favourite quote that sums up Labour is "Labour see a problem and a headline, and they address the headline".
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Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Attractiveness or visibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Magnets?? (Score:5, Interesting)
a) Aluminium isn't magnetic, it wouldn't hold the can closed
b) Is it really that good an idea to have a magnet that close to your ipod?
Re:Magnets?? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Magnets?? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Magnets?? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://coke.fluidvision.net/manufacturing.htm/ [fluidvision.net]
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the "Christopher Walken" method? (Score:5, Funny)
Here's a thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh, what a wonderful idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
When walking through dodgy parts of town, best to keep your wits about you.
Pumping loud music through your ears when you should be using your senses for protection and information is idiotic at best.
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22%?? (Score:5, Insightful)
7,457 / 90,747 = 8.2% Rise from the original level
22%? WTF?
Re:22%?? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:22%?? (Score:5, Funny)
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Defeating the object of an iPod? (Score:3, Insightful)
Weapon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary:
TFA:
For all I know an opened glass coke bottle feels exactly like a semi-automatic weapon when it is pressed into the back of a persons head. The words felt like make all the difference.
a Londoner writes ... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone else said, if you've got a real gun in London you're not jacking iPods with it - you're doing something a little larger in scope. However, I'm not sure that this isn't changing with some younger people - gun crime is certainly increasing.
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This guy is amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
"His assailants held what felt like a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head"
Wow, he can differentiate a semi-automatic from a nonautomatic from an automatic, just based on how it presses against the back of his head.
Note how the Slashdot summary changes things:
"The muggers held 'a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head"
It'll turn out to be bogus (Score:3, Interesting)
ian
The one place... (Score:5, Funny)
I give up. Where??
Like blaming the victim... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ipod ppffft (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ipod ppffft (Score:5, Insightful)
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Blaming the iPods is easier than blaming the pols (Score:3, Insightful)
One favorite paragraph:
It is not difficult to guess the reason for the senior policeman's anger. My wife had forced his men to record a crime that they had no intention whatever of even trying to solve (though, with due expedition, it was eminently soluble), and this record in turn meant the introduction of an unwanted breath of reality into the bogus statistics, the manufacture of which is now every British senior policeman's principal task--with the sole exception of enforcing the dictates of political correctness, thereby to head off the criticism levied at them for many decades by the liberal Left--not always without an element of justification. Proving their purity of heart is now more important to them than securing the safety of our streets: and thus Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
Also, nice to see that gun control laws work the way we Second Amendment supporters said they would.
Summary of recomendations (Score:5, Funny)
Here are some of the recomendations from TFA:
If, after following all of the above guidelines, your iPod should happen to be stolen, contact the RIAA as quickly as possible and inform them of all the illegal music you have stored on it, then wait for them to subpeona your assailiant and recover your costs in an out of court settlement.
Re:Bloody Bad Math! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:How About the "Stick a Gun in Their Face" Metho (Score:5, Insightful)
(Before anyone turns this into a matter of gun control alone, note that countries like Switzerland and Norway, with HUGE amounts of weapons in private ownership, including AG-3's in about 1/3'd of homes in Norway, have firearms related violence rates not much different from the UK - it's much more complicated than gun control or not)
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Re:How About the "Stick a Gun in Their Face" Metho (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Solution (Score:3, Informative)
No they wouldn't. You see, over here (UK) we have a bill called the Human Rights Act. What it boils down to is that if you commit a crime then you can avoid jail because it's dangerous and infringes on your Human Rights.
This also means that you could sue the police for shooting you.
Re:The Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because letting people run around with guns really solved the USA's violent crime problem, didn't it?
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Re:The Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
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a light touch with the clue stick (Score:3, Insightful)
Point 1: We were never armed to start with - this is largely an American idea "the right to bear arms" and is not seen in other parts of the world as a good thing.
Point 2: Technically we are subjects not citizens. (We have a monarch as head of state not a president)
Re:a light touch with the clue stick (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's an idea from the English common law, which was preserved in America while England abandoned the traditional rights of Englishmen. Before the suppression of the Jacobites, there wasn't much dispute in Britain that free men are entitled to posess arms for their own defense.
In America, we wrote it into our bill of rights, because having just overthrown our king about a decade earlier, we decided that placing a monopoly on armaments in the hands of government was a very dangerous idea.
-jcr
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Re:a light touch with the clue stick (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:a light touch with the clue stick (Score:5, Informative)
What happens in a fist/knife fight? You can fight, or you can run (well, most of the time). What happens in a gun fight? You let the bullets fly. Shooting first is best, as every cowboy western duel has taught us. Guns are almost a 100% guarantee that more situations will come down to an actual fight, and that more people will be hurt. If they have the drop on you, you're equally SOL if you have a knife at your throat or a gun at your head. Yes, some hardened criminals have guns around here as well - but they're usually after bigger fish than the few dollars in your pocket. Your average street thug or wacko doesn't have a gun - and if they do they're very much so wanted by the police. "Shots fired" actually get real attention here, and with modern communication you can expect the cops to arrive in a timely fashion.
What happens in a fist/knife fight when it is a 300 lb rapist versus a 100 lb girl? Guns are equalizers, they give anyone, man, woman, elderly, the ability to defend themselves. An armed society is a polite society. Anyone who has a concealed carry permit can tell you that being armed increases ones awareness to not get in such a situation where you might have to defend yourself. Most criminals don't have a death wish and don't want to get shot. Over 4 million times per year, armed citizens use their weapons to defend themselves from criminals. In the vast majority of these cases, the criminal flees once they see their target is armed.
The world has moved on since the Dark Ages. Your (or any other witnesses) cell phone is a more powerful tool than the gun in almost every situation. There are really extremely few situations where you would have time to pull out a gun, and where the gun would be more efficient than the police. Either you have no time at all and would be shot, or you have run off, barricaded or hidden yourself somewhere and the police will arrive in time. It was a different time when you could be all alone on the farm in the countryside, and noone would help if you screamed off the top of your lungs.
There are a few problems with relying on the government to protect you. Firstly, the average response time for a 911 call can be 5 minutes or higher. A criminal can mug you, rape you, or break into your house in far less time. If someone attacks you on the street, you won't have time to call 911 and wait for help. The idea that you could run and barricade yourself until the police come to rescue you is both rediculous and dangerous. There have been many cases where someone heard an attacker breaking into their house, they called the police, but they never came. Most famously, in 1981, this happened to three women who were brutally and repeatadly raped [healylaw.com] in their Washington D.C. home because the police never came. They sued the city, but the courts ruled that the police are not required nor responsible to respond or help any invididual, their duty is only to protect the public at large, meaning to catch and punish the criminal after they already robbed/raped/killed you.
Do you own a fire extinguisher in your home? I assume you do, because it is a tool that can be used to save your life and your property. You could just rely on 911 and call them for even small fires that you could put out yourself. But then again, a small fire could grow and burn your entire house down before the firefighters arrive.
2) Guns protecting "the people" from the government Sure, a bunch of guys with handguns could be the core of an army in 1776 or thereabouts. Maybe even well into the 19th century. Look around, there's fighter jets, bombers, tanks, artillery, mechanised infantry, machine guns, destroyers and battleships. Hundreds of thousands of men like that died on a single day in WWI, they'd last even shorter today. The closest thing they could mount to a defense would be trying to lead a guerilla war, but they couldn't hold any ground. Any armed revolution that wa
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Re:So who is to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
The GPs point was that even if you have a situation that may be favorable for increasing crime rates, the crimes are still committed by PEOPLE. If you have a libertarian bent, or if you belief in human autonomy at all, then in any given crime you blame the criminal FIRST.
There's a belief out there that those with a more liberal bent tend to eclipse personal responsibility and act as though being poor somehow makes you less responsible for your own actions - less human. The response from those with a more conservative bent (e.g. me) is that if you're poor you have more to gain and less to lose from crime, but this means you have incentive to commit a crime. Having incentive to commit a crime is not the same as being forced to commit a crime. And so I, and many others, would consider the mugger to be responsible for the mugging.
So poverty - which creates incentive - really should be listed as a separate issue then the personal responsibility of those who commit the crimes.
-stormin
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Re:So who is to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's beside the point - no, you are not being "forced" to commit crimes. However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.
That does not mean that they are not responsible. However it's just downright stupid to point the finger at the choices of individual criminals for the crime rates, which is what I responded to. The criminals are responsible for their individual crimes, not "street crime" in general.
Society is responsible for the conditions that drive these people to make these choices, and poverty is the largest single driver for this kind of low level crime.
If you want to discuss a single crime, then sure, we can discuss the choices of that criminal. But as long as the issue is street crime in general, the criminals individual choices are not relevant.
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