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Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

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Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#251

Post by anigbrowl »

cylinder wrote: post #220
anigbrowl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is, and yes I do. I'm well aware that crimes happen on BART, someone was murdered at my local station not long ago. But I don't think that 'lawless' is a good description, although many of my journeys take me to stereotypically sketchy stations or occur late at night. It's because of this subjectivity that I said I hoped the case would turn on a more rigorous definition.

A guy was murdered at your station recently and a girl was murdered randomly at another station less than a week ago. On the same system! And you think this is normal and not an indication of lawlessness? This is not normal! If there were murders regularly on systems outside of the US they would be national events. This is a good demonstration of how we got here.

Nobody was murdered on Bart less than a week ago, and the murder I was talking about was of a girl, not a guy, back in late July. Getting simple facts wrong is a poor way to begin an argument.

BART is certainly more dangerous than other transit systems in other developed countries, because the US in general is more dangerous than other countries. Deplorable as this is, clusters in small sample sizes are often misleading as to statistical trends, and many of the people commenting here seem not to have first hand experience riding BART.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#252

Post by pteredactyl »

mindslight wrote: post #246
pteredactyl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I'm in SF not sure how long I'll last. It's a cess pool. Criminals have more rights than children. There was a crazy homeless guy who would shit everyday in front of a school in Bernal. The police couldn't do anything about it. You are completely right about the fear of political fallout for wanting to uphold the law. It's sad.

> You are completely right about the fear of political fallout for wanting to uphold the law. The erosion of respect for the rule of law is a direct result of the attempt to use law to implement a top-down social design, chiefly the "war on drugs". With policing being a public good, those with the least means should appreciate police the most . But rather their communities were persecuted using the police, and so tho…

I'm not sure I follow or agree with your first premise RE war on drugs. (The 'why')

But I do agree on your initial steps for restoring public faith.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#253

Post by nradov »

mindslight wrote: post #246
pteredactyl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I'm in SF not sure how long I'll last. It's a cess pool. Criminals have more rights than children. There was a crazy homeless guy who would shit everyday in front of a school in Bernal. The police couldn't do anything about it. You are completely right about the fear of political fallout for wanting to uphold the law. It's sad.

> You are completely right about the fear of political fallout for wanting to uphold the law. The erosion of respect for the rule of law is a direct result of the attempt to use law to implement a top-down social design, chiefly the "war on drugs". With policing being a public good, those with the least means should appreciate police the most . But rather their communities were persecuted using the police, and so tho…

Who will enforce traffic laws if not the police? We can't have anarchy on the roads.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#254

Post by diogenescynic »

rayiner wrote: post #233
diogenescynic wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the countries that make obtaining guns more difficult are still much safer. It’s almost like if you rigorously regulate guns and have strict background checks, you can dramatically reduce gun violence... see Japan or Switzerland as proof where you can still own a gun but they don’t have mass shootings like we do here. And no, mental illness isn’t the issue. We have roughly the same amount of mentally ill as o…

That doesn’t prove anything because those countries were also much safer than the US before they had gun control. https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/doc... (page 2). Until 1978, you could buy handguns and automatic weapons in Canada without a license. You could buy rifles without a license until the 1990s. But the gap in US-Canadian homicide rates was the lowest in 1960. And the gap was largest…

Australia didn’t have a single mass shooting after they imposed strict gun control in the 90s. You’re just ignoring the evidence that’s right in front of you. Gun control works—period.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#255

Post by SamReidHughes »

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #234
SamReidHughes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the millions (or hundreds of thousands) of uses of a gun in self defense each year in America, most don't involve shootings.

That has nothing to do with what I was commenting upon. There are no deer or elk to hunt on the BART that I am aware of.

Think of it like having a lot more cops on BART, only with accountability for shooting the wrong guy.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#256

Post by rayiner »

diogenescynic wrote: post #254
rayiner wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t prove anything because those countries were also much safer than the US before they had gun control. https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/doc... (page 2). Until 1978, you could buy handguns and automatic weapons in Canada without a license. You could buy rifles without a license until the 1990s. But the gap in US-Canadian homicide rates was the lowest in 1960. And the gap was largest…

Australia didn’t have a single mass shooting after they imposed strict gun control in the 90s. You’re just ignoring the evidence that’s right in front of you. Gun control works—period.

I'm pretty sure my point was also based on the data. And I submit that homicide rate, which is a well-defined metric that accounts for population differences and has been tracked consistently across the world and has been for a long time, is a much better data set than "mass shootings," which is an ill-defined metric that's subject to various confounding factors. (E.g. it fails to account for substitution of gun homicides with other kinds of homicides.)

Gun control may reduce homicide rates somewhat, but the typical justifications for it are just bad statistics. Pointing out that Canada and Australia have gun control and much lower homicide rates, for example, ignores the fact that those countries had much lower homicide rates than the U.S. before gun control as well. Any analysis that ignores that basic fact is complete garbage.

Likewise, there is a correlation between gun ownership rate and homicide rate internationally, but that's driven in large part by the U.S. having so many homicides and so many guns. Gun ownership rates vary dramatically inside the U.S. too, but leaving out a couple of outliers (Louisiana and Mississippi), there isn't much of a correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates within the US: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Househol.... Five U.S. states have lower gun ownership rates than Canada and France, but all have higher homicide rates. Meanwhile, 9 U.S. states have much higher gun ownership rates than Canada and France, but similar homicide rates. If gun ownership rate was a dominant causal factor influencing homicide rates, you'd expect to see much higher correlations among U.S. states.

And even then, correlation is not causation. Higher violence may cause higher gun ownership rates. Or there may be other factors. What distinguishes Iowa from Louisiana, which have similar gun ownership rates but vastly different homicide rates? Or South Dakota and Mississippi, or Oregon or South Carolina, all pairs of states with similar gun ownership rates, but vastly different homicide rates?

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#257

Post by vikingcaffiene »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #255
vikingcaffiene wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has nothing to do with what I was commenting upon. There are no deer or elk to hunt on the BART that I am aware of.

Think of it like having a lot more cops on BART, only with accountability for shooting the wrong guy.

I misread your initial comment as saying that guns have uses besides self defense (which I actually think is true). So my comment probably didn’t make a ton of sense without that context.

I get the logic you are putting down here. But I think you are overlooking the fact that people are panicky and stupid in group settings. Give em all guns and a reason to panic in tight quarters. It doesn’t add up man.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#258

Post by xsmasher »

burfog wrote: post #244
School-Cotton wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have the numbers to back this up, but I strongly suspect that if the true cost of driving (both in terms of environmental destruction and massive land use and construction cost for roads and parking lots) were reflected in the price of cars or gas, people simply wouldn’t be able to afford the luxury of a private commute, and mass transit systems would be able to compete even without any public funding at all.

For cars, the roads really are free. Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight. Normal cars effectively do nothing to roads. The damage comes from buses, fire trucks, UPS trucks, FedEx trucks, bucket trucks... and more trucks. Switching all that to rail is completely unreasonable. Fire departments getting around on rail? So we need the roads anyway, and cars don't wear them out. Cars do not i…

Road damage is only part of the story.

How many lanes would we need if there were only trucks on the road? We build massive road capacity to subsidize car use.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#259

Post by SamReidHughes »

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #257
SamReidHughes wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it like having a lot more cops on BART, only with accountability for shooting the wrong guy.

I misread your initial comment as saying that guns have uses besides self defense (which I actually think is true). So my comment probably didn’t make a ton of sense without that context. I get the logic you are putting down here. But I think you are overlooking the fact that people are panicky and stupid in group settings. Give em all guns and a reason to panic in tight quarters. It doesn’t add up man.

Last I checked -- and I don't feel like googling it so bear with me if it's not true or on shaky ground -- it's generally been found that concealed carriers are less likely to shoot innocent bystanders than cops. So I'd compare the following situations: is having a lot more cops bad? If not, then replacing them with non-police is better, in terms of shooting innocent bystanders. We already have a lot of states where you're allowed to just, like, carry a gun, and it turns out to be no big deal.

I think the better counter-argument is that bad people could carry guns, and have a lot more opportunities to use them. But this is based on the assumption that my first sentence in this post is correct.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#260

Post by burfog »

xsmasher wrote: post #258
burfog wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For cars, the roads really are free. Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight. Normal cars effectively do nothing to roads. The damage comes from buses, fire trucks, UPS trucks, FedEx trucks, bucket trucks... and more trucks. Switching all that to rail is completely unreasonable. Fire departments getting around on rail? So we need the roads anyway, and cars don't wear them out. Cars do not i…

Road damage is only part of the story. How many lanes would we need if there were only trucks on the road? We build massive road capacity to subsidize car use.

The vast majority of roads are narrow. The wide ones are extreme outliers. It may seem otherwise if you judge by the portion of time you spend on each type of road, but most roads are quiet little empty lanes.

So, on average, we don't really have more lanes than the minimum.

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