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Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

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Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#151

Post by knowtheory »

Simucal wrote: post #138
knowtheory wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are talking about MIT, not my home. I am well aware of bump keys, and how easy it is to bypass locks. That's what the whole scandal is. Companies are guaranteeing their locks are good for a certain amount of time, and their locks do not live up to their guarantees. But again, we are not talking about my home. I would also love to hear figures on how many mass murderers carry bump keys on them? How many shootings d…

I'm not convinced locks are a sufficient deterrent in stopping people bent on mass murder. What if the attacker simply waited for a class period to end and pick people off walking between buildings? What if they were a student with authorized access to the building? What would prevent an unauthorized person from tailcoating an authorized individual into a building when it is busy? You offer up locks as a solution to…

The claim I am making is not that locked doors will stop a shooter from shooting anyone. I am saying that locked doors will make him less effective at shooting many people.

Once someone decides they're going to take a gun and start killing people, it's non-trivial to stop them. That doesn't mean that we can't reduce the number of people they can shoot at and kill. That's where closing off the avenues that a shooter can take is effective.

And even if someone did wait for classes to let out, firing a gun and killing people at a distance is not easy. You start shooting at people, and presumably they'll scatter.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#152

Post by citricsquid »

TDL wrote: post #133
citricsquid wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere will ever be violence-free. If guns are not the cause of violence and banning them isn't for the better, why is England a less violent place than America? The gun murder rate in England is 0.1 murders per 100,000 people, in America it's 3.2. The problem America has is not exclusively caused by guns, it's a problem with culture too, but it seems strange to argue that connecting the high presence of guns to the…

What happens when you include stabbings and beatings?

A popular misconception is that England has just as much violent crime as America but it's redistributed across other weapons, the reality is that every country counts violent crime differently. If someone were to break into my apartment in England while I was out that is a counted as a violent crime, whereas in America it wouldn't be counted. The only fair way to compare countries is to compare specific crimes (eg: Murder, Robbery) comparing "Violent Crime" doesn't work.

For 2011/2012 there were 549 homicides in England[1], for the same period there was ~14,000 in the US[2]. The population of the UK is 62 million, the population of the US is 313 million. There are 6x more people in the US but 28x more homicides, most of which are firearm related. If you remove the firearm homicides from the America figures they become almost the same as the UK figures (in per 100,000 people).

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/14/crime-st... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-usa-crime-stats...

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#153

Post by zaphar »

fakeer wrote: post #6

Good that the man was not found there(in a sense that no one was harmed). I still would like to understand few things. Of course I shall not be able to understand how it feels to have a gun when you want it(and afterwards take a decision on how to use it. To defend yourself or flash in malls or kill children for fun or out of depression) as I live in a country where having fire-arms is either a luxury for powerful an…

    I mean this just doesn't add up. There's some reason you have police, military, para-military and federal agencies so that citizens don't have to handle this aspect of security.
The original purpose of the right to bear arms in america was to give ordinary citizens the ability to stand up to police, military, para-military, and federal agencies should the government go off the deep end. It can be debated whether that is still a necessity today. However if that is the purpose of the right to bear arms then it hardly serves that purpose if you aren't allowed to bear weaponry that is sufficient to actually stand up to those groups.

The authors of the amendment meant it as just another part of the balance of power.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#154

Post by Yver »

giardini wrote: post #75
rickdale wrote: post #29

I just want to say as an American, I am so fed up with all these gun stories. I understand there is debate about gun control and this and that, but we are having a much larger cultural problem here. The attitude of helping your neighbor or even someone less fortunate is slowly disappearing and being replaced by a fear for protecting what we have, as if someone else is after it. In my mind it's cyclical, if we help th…

"I just want to say as an American, I am so fed up with all these gun stories." Me too. But it won't end soon. Currently every shooting in every city is a candidate for promotion to a national media campaign that is focused on gaining additional restrictions on firearms, especially at the federal level (but also state level: Colorado is at this moment passing new highly-restrictive state firearms laws). Every opportu…

> orchestrated attempt to [...] confiscate all firearms

Are there people out there who can read this and not think that this person is mental?

I can't see a difference between this conspiracy theory and all the others: chemtrails, fluoride, mind control, FEMA camps, Time Cube.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#155

Post by SoftwareMaven »

nickpinkston wrote: post #91
create_account wrote: post #48

"Scene is clear. Call unfounded. No threat to public safety in #CambMA #MIT" https://twitter.com/CambridgePolice/status/30533598012521267...

"Call unfounded" - I wonder if that means they got a prank call or maybe someone saw some geek costume with fake gun/armor

When I hear college, body armor and "rifle", I think paintball.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#156

Post by jere »

nickpinkston wrote: post #91
create_account wrote: post #48

"Scene is clear. Call unfounded. No threat to public safety in #CambMA #MIT" https://twitter.com/CambridgePolice/status/30533598012521267...

"Call unfounded" - I wonder if that means they got a prank call or maybe someone saw some geek costume with fake gun/armor

About a year ago, a student's umbrella was mistaken for an assault rifle at the university where I work and we were on lock down for hours. http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/10387437/

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#157

Post by knowtheory »

aero142 wrote: post #147
knowtheory wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not really. My problem is having a massive untrained population of gun owners. If I could have a reasonable certainty that if you owned a gun, you were trained to use it safely, were required to store your firearms safely, and were responsible/liable if your firearm was lost or stolen, I would be perfectly happy for you to own a gun. But this discussion invariably comes down to "gun-rights" folks asserting that a…

I don't understand this argument. There are not numerous cases in the US where people were trying defend themselves with good intentions, but due to their lack of government approved firearms training, they injured someone else. Do you feel threatened by your neighbor's lack of gun training? They are just going to start shooting randomly at the darkness and hit you?

Really?

Because I can think of two off hand that made the news since Newtown.

http://cjonline.com/news/2013-01-08/man-accidentally-shoots-...

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/boy-3-killed-playin...

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#158

Post by Anechoic »

notdrunkatall wrote: post #59
fakeer wrote: post #6

Good that the man was not found there(in a sense that no one was harmed). I still would like to understand few things. Of course I shall not be able to understand how it feels to have a gun when you want it(and afterwards take a decision on how to use it. To defend yourself or flash in malls or kill children for fun or out of depression) as I live in a country where having fire-arms is either a luxury for powerful an…

>But I still don't understand that how can guns be allowed in such a manner when they don't let you handle a gas cylinder at a public place or a take a metallic fork on an air-plane. "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." -Thomas Jefferson You can't fight tyranny in government with metallic forks and ga…

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Apocryphal? From http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/strongest-reason-pe...: "This quotation has not been found in any of the writings of Thomas Jefferson."

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#159

Post by khuey »

sigzero wrote: post #111
BSousa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, it was a supposition ;) I can understand having a license to own a gun (My dad owns a hunting rifle, and a handgun that was an inheritance from my grandpa which will possible pass down to me) but I was watching some news a couple weeks ago where they were showing a hearing on the senate (I think) and the people that went to talk there were defending that changing the laws to allow some guns but not others…

The government really has no jurisdiction to determine how I exercise my RIGHT to keep and bear arms. I don't need to explain to you or anyone else for that matter why I want or think I need an AR-15.

Would you apply that same logic to a strategic nuclear weapon? If not, where is the dividing line between a nuke and an AR-15, and who and what determines it?

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#160

Post by phaus »

knowtheory wrote: post #132
phaus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locks are deterrents in the same way that a software firewall is, they only work when you are viewed as a random target. Most people are excessively lazy, so a random criminal, might not want to take the 15 extra seconds it would take to break into your house. If, however, someone had a reason to break into YOUR house specifically(could be as simple a motive as you having a really expensive car parked in your drivewa…

Agreed, but the mass murders that we've seen in the past several years do not typically (I'm not aware of any cases at least) involve lock circumvention. Additionally the process of circumventing a lock requires time, effort, at least a little practice and familiarity with the tools, which most of these guys do not invest into their murder sprees. Whether a lock can be broken is a different matter from whether a lock…

I agree that there hasn't been a precedent for mass murderers circumventing locks, but that's partly due to the fact that mass murders typically occur in public, where doors are kept unlocked for the most part.

Some lock circumvention techniques take almost no skill, and no time at all. I've seen cipher locks that cost thousands circumvented by lightly tapping the housing with a rubber mallet or sticking a paperclip through a gap near the LED to create a short. I've seen people open locks with a piece of toilet paper or a key that was milled using a photograph taken of a key-chain on someone's belt from across a parking-lot.

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