There is great excitement in Kenya tonight, one reads.
A son of Kenya, of Africa, whose father was born within a few hundred miles of Olduvai Gorge, where Lucy, the first human walked. 3 million years later, a son of Africa is again walking with footprints that will change the world.
In this time of darkness, a son of Africa is going to be President of the world’s most powerful country. One almost dares not say it, for fear that some curse will take it away. This is like the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
It has been a long wait, but tomorrow may be a truly great day. There is much peril and many disappointments to come, but this cannot be taken away from us.
Ndio tunaweza.
In Swahili 'Yes, we can'.
Ndio tunaweza, America.
Ndio tunaweza.
Prayin' for ya'.
'Canticle for Leibowitz' is surely the definitive 'after the nuclear holocaust novel' and
SPOILER WARNING (well not quite, because there's no way to prevent someone reading down the thread).
ok I cannot explain what is poignant about the novel without discussing the last scene.
But even thinking about the last scene brings a tear to my eye.
My own gut is that the 'consensus' is massively underestimating McCain's popular appeal.
I can't think of a state (New Mexico? Colorado?-- but against a Senator from a next door state?) that voted for Bush that is likely to be in the Obama camp.
Florida has retirees and ex military people: it will go for McCain.
And so it comes down to Ohio (again). And there, Obama will take the northern rust belt (as Kerry did) and McCain will take the Appalachian fringe. That leaves the southern part: I have been told Cincinnati is known as the most segregated city outside the south, and southern Ohio is certainly Bible Belt.
Try as I might, I can't see how Obama can win this: internet or no.
458 Dave Bell
The London terraced house (brick) was about the worst place to be in an air raid you could imagine.
Brick *fragments* (and of course a brick house, with no wood frame, collapses very easily). It fragments and turns into a really nasty form of projectile.
The 2 Air Raid shelters that were rapidly deployed were
- the one under the dining room table (steel netting that you let down. Name escapes me
- The Anderson Shelter (named after the Minister in question?). A concrete shelled shelter, covered in brick to improve blast resistance
Neither was much use in a direct hit, but the Anderson was pretty good against fragments etc. They removed one in the garden next door last winter: it took 6 Poles with jackhammers a week to demolish the thing, the concrete had settled that much.
The Government massively overestimated the likely casualties from Luftwaffe bombing before the war:
- they assumed bombers could not be defended against, because they were too fast. The Spitfire and Hurricane proved them wrong
- they assumed the Germans would drop poison gas (but they didn't know about nerve gas, a German invention)
- their calculations on bomb damage were quite frankly wrong. I think they based their data on Guernica, rather than on a prepared civilian populace. Guernica was jammed with refugees and was bombed in the middle of the day, not the night.
Also they didn't factor in the fact that bombs drop in 'sticks' and if the first bomb in the stick kills you or destroys your home, the second one can't kill you again or destroy your home again.
The British government ordered 1 million grave markers for casualties of bombing, in advance of the Munich Crisis-- a revealing factor, perhaps, in why Chamberlain backed down. In practice, from memory, the Blitz killed about 50,000 civilians.
The only times bombing ever reached its intended level of killing were:
- Coventry firestorm
- Hamburg firestorm and the other ones achieved (Dresden in particular)
- Tokyo and the other Japanese cities (which were made of wood, and the attack was specially designed and tested by Lemay on a mock Japanese town, to maximise civilian casualties via napalm)
Scott
I have to say I think that's an amazing line of argument.
That we should be glad our next Hungerford killer has access to the civilian versions of military automatic rifles, because that way he can't do something really dangerous. That we should be glad that Thomas Hamilton only had automatic handguns to kill 15 kids in Dunblane, because he might have done something really dangerous with a petrol tanker otherwise.
I don't find that logically credible in the least.
Wild suppositions about a 19 year old kid who raked a shopping centre in Omaha, having been more dangerous if only he had had a Remington hunting rifle, but actually we are really glad that all he had was a Kalashnikov?
On your other point:
I actually think most of these guys do lose the plot, grab what is handy, and go off to kill people. The Columbine killers didn't have access to dynamite, so they cobbled together bombs which didn't work.
On the healthcare point, or the gun control point, it isn't that the one is more popular than the other, or more likely, or what the polls say.
It's that the political ground can move that swiftly. The impossible becomes conceivable.
I don't see it, but I was simply commenting about the ability of the US zeitgeist to change quite suddenly, to turn on a dime.
Valuethinker:
The New York City precedent says that stop and search can be used to reduce street crime, by arresting concealed weapons holders (knives as much as guns). But New York has several times the density of policemen of most American cities, and is geographically concentrated: they used to wait at transit stops and stop suspects. You couldn't do that on American freeways.
Scott:
NYC also has some of the most stringent gun laws in the US (Chicago and Washington DC may be the only cities with worse), to the point where if you pull someone over and they have a pistol, nine-times-out-of-ten they are doing something illegal (if only just carrying an illegal firearm).
Scott. That's actually an argument in favour of gun control, if you follow your own logic.
Make guns very illegal, and then when you pull someone over with a gun, they are likely to be a criminal.
Valuethinker:
The Omaha shooter apparently had an AK47. It's hard to understand from the outside why a civilised country allows its citizens to possess weapons like that*: they're not particularly good for hunting, and they aren't really a self defence weapon (vs. a 12 gauge or a hand gun). If he'd had an ordinary hunting rifle, he might have had a chance to kill fewer people.
Scott:
Or he might have laid down in a truck bed at the edge of the mall and sniped a couple of dozen before being discovered, likely killing more of them (instead of injuring), and possibly killing some police as well.
Again your logic has undercut your own argument.
Or I don't understand the point you are trying to make?
You are essentially arguing
'if we prevent people like this from having access to those kind of weapons, they will commit worse crimes with other weapons'
This is very unlikely to be true. Our 19 year old kid with a Kalashnikov is replaced by our 19 year old kid with a Remington who is a super sniper?
But because he had the Kalashnikov, he did the dumb thing and went into the shopping mall, and only managed to kill 9?
Apply the same argument at VA Tech. Psycho with 2 semi auto pistols is replaced by the Texas Tower sniper?
As I said I don't think gun control is going to happen in the US. But then, I said that about universal healthcare. And I never thought the US would get bogged down in another guerilla war in Asia.
The interesting thing about the USA, for such a fundamentally conservative country, (much more so than Europe in many ways), is that some psychic switch can click, and lo', the country turns on a dime.
52 Susan
The profile of Paul Bernardo is so close to that of many sexual criminals, who begin with violent rape and move on to murder, that it's hard for me to credence that he was innocent. I think, if we could find all of his rape victims, we might find 1 or 2 dead ones, as well.
Myra Hindly comes to mind (Moors murders) as a woman clearly under the thrall of her partner. Ditto the West woman (Fred West in Gloucestershire, and at least 19 murders of young women down the years).
Karen Homolka I don't know (excuse my Ukrainian transliterations ;-). The plea bargain was a mistake, in the sense that the police house search was incompetent (they found the video behind the light fitting, and apparently that is one of the first places you look when doing a house search).
49 fidelio
The situation I describe is true of modern South Africa. You don't drive anywhere (as a white, middle class person) without a gun. You just don't. And yes that increases the risk of getting shot randomly.
I remember a flatmate's brother, who was mouthing off someone in a bar. The guy pulled a gun, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger-- fortunately the chamber was empty.
Israel I believe is getting that way too, although the armed people are mostly (wholly?) soldiers, policemen and off duty soldiers. But certainly most people probably have guns at home (guessing there).
We are getting into the land of Heinlein's 'Door into Summer'. His guess is that the genetic result would be a politer population. Colour me sceptical.
50 re home made guns
I'm not sure about home made weapons, which strike me as beyond the abilities of the average gun owner, but it's essentially irrelevant. The US has porous borders, and 200 million domestic weapons (plus). The guns would flow in, and the domestic supply would meet needs for decades.
The New York City precedent says that stop and search can be used to reduce street crime, by arresting concealed weapons holders (knives as much as guns). But New York has several times the density of policemen of most American cities, and is geographically concentrated: they used to wait at transit stops and stop suspects. You couldn't do that on American freeways.
60 Dave Luckett
We've had at least 2 mass shootings. Hungerford (where the cops diverted motorists *into the path* of the shooter) and Dunblane (14 children killed). Whether the subsequent gun laws have helped I don't know: cheap Eastern European pistols and converted replica guns are apparently awash on the streets, and we've had a number of gang shootings in London this year.
However we haven't had any more mass shootings, touch wood.
The Omaha shooter apparently had an AK47. It's hard to understand from the outside why a civilised country allows its citizens to possess weapons like that*: they're not particularly good for hunting, and they aren't really a self defence weapon (vs. a 12 gauge or a hand gun). If he'd had an ordinary hunting rifle, he might have had a chance to kill fewer people.
However I don't see the US changing on this point any time soon. Even if say, a terrorist group did use AK47s that they bought commercially (as I understand the law, they could only buy a semi-automatic version, and converting it to full auto is a serious piece of gunsmithing). They would buy them at a gun show, I would think, as again as I understand US law, ordinary gun checks don't apply at gun shows. The IRA used to use Armalites (civilian M16s) so acquired from the US market (although at least some were also stolen from National Guard arsenals).
"Friends of Eddie Coyle" by George V. Higgins remains my point of contact with the US gun trade (the Robert Mitchum movie ain't bad, either), although it is over 30 years old, now.
www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/george-v-higgins/friends-of-eddie-coyle.htm
worth it for the language alone (Boston Irish).
* I believe also Finland does, a legacy of the civilian defence force. Don't know about other European countries, although Germany certainly not.
41 Ingvar
I believe the US is at over 1 gun per person.
From memory, there are something like over 150m handguns in the US, let alone shotguns and rifles.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/ihavearightto/four_b/casestudy_art29.shtml
The BBC website article implies only 60m Americans own guns. However I believe the number of owners to be much, much higher-- perhaps 50% of American households.
Handguns are, of course, disproportionately used in crimes over rifles and shotguns. In fact there was a Frontline episode a few years ago 'Ring of Fire' about how a disproportionate number of handgun crimes were committed with the products of a small group of manufacturers in a valley in Los Angeles: basically cheap, automatic (semi auto) 'Saturday Night Specials'.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/ring/
Heh, in Ystad, Inspector Wallender doesn't even always carry his gun ;-).
2 Lance Weber
I think that SAC has been replaced by 'Strat Command' (USSTRATCOM).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command#History
18 Jim McDonald
The etiology of these events seems to be changing. There seems to be increased selection by the perpetrators of situations where they can lock doors, etc, to maximise the death toll a la VA Tech, and Columbine also I believe.
So therefore issues re situational awareness.
In 'The Tipping Point' Malcolm Gladwell talks about the suicide cults amongst Polynesian adolescents-- a serious and well-documented problem.
It's undoubtedly true that there are mass phenomena: apparently light plane crashes go up after a major plane crash.
So possibly that is what we are seeing here, with recent mass shootings. One deviant trips, and dies in a blaze of glory, and others are inspired by his actions.
(AFAIK there has never been a female mass murderer. Female serial killers are rare enough, and usually in the thrall of a dominant male character (Paul Bernardo and Karen Homulka, and the Yorkshire Moors murderer here).
I suppose we could count the growing trend towards female suicide bombers (Tamil first, then Chechnyan, now Arab) as female mass murderers, but the motivations of suicide bombers are different-- many seem psychologically quite healthy, even in an enlightened, quasi-religious state. Perhaps closer analogies to the female members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other terrorist organisations.
1. The Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) link with mass murder has not been fully explained.
In the early days of Prozac, there was such an incident. The relatives of the victims sued (the gunman was on Prozac) and lost.
I know enough about the SSRIs to know that we really have no idea about all the effects on behaviour of changing your neurochemistry in that way. Their use exploded so quickly, because of an apparently lower side effect profile than their predecessors (the tricyclics and the monamine oxidase inhibitors MAOIs) and, cynically, because they have become such a huge stream of profits for pharma cos, that we don't know the full side effect spectrum.
A certain number of mass murder cases have occurred (including, I believe, VA Tech) where the assassin was on an antidepressant (SSRI). Correlation or causation? We don't know. And of course each SSRI is idiosynchratic: Prozac is not Seroxat etc.
2. We are getting towards the Israel world. Where every shopping mall has armed guards (searching bags on the way in in the Israeli case).
South Africa, probably the most violent country in the world that does not have a formal civil war (ie excluding Somalia, Congo, Iraq, etc.) is also in that stage. So too I believe is Brasil.
If there are 40,000 shopping malls in the USA, and each needs an average of 3 armed guards 16 hours a day 7 days a week, then that is 1092 guard-days per mall per year, or about 4.333 man years. So say 160,000 armed guards at 252 working days a year each.
Say we double that to provide a similar level of security in schools and colleges.
That's doable. Easier in Israel, and South Africa of old, because you had so many men around with military training. Carrying a 12-gauge or a H&K submachine pistol around whilst wearing an Army-strength Kevlar jacket isn't the same as the guy in McDonalds with a .38 on his hip.
balanced against that would be the accidental shootings resulting.
3. I'm a militant gun control person. But in the US that is just not practical: there's already far too many guns out there. It's not even practical, I suspect, to talk about doing away with 'military type' rifles-- you can't really distinguish them from hunting rifles. Or even heavy calibre semi-automatic pistols, like the VA Tech shooter used.
So does 'permit to carry' do anything?
Should we all (when visiting the US) arm ourselves?
Can a 'freely constituted militia' of such people guard schools, shopping malls etc. safely?
Against terrorist organisations, it only needs to be probabilistic. If there is a 20% chance, say, that your flight has an armed civilian on it, the chances of a 9-11 are much reduced. Ditto putative gunmen attacking the Mall of the America-- say 7 gunmen with AK47s and grenades. Say there are 20,000 people in M of A on a normal Thursday evening. Then 20 or 30 with guns is going to complicate the plan immeasurably.
We might call this the 'Flight 93 Defence'.
However the security risks and complexities for local law enforcement are large. The press says the response time to the Nebraska shootings was 6 minutes, longer than usual-- that's pretty fast, even so.
Maybe the solution is that CWPs have to wear a certain set of clothing or hat, to ID themselves. Longer term, we could use an RFID tag, so the police gun would flash an error light if they point it at a CWP holder.
This opens up the risk that the assailants disguise themselves as CWP holders, or that the mad gunman is a CWP holder. You'd certainly need to have stringent background checks.
Although the risks of these sorts of events are very low, we may be evolving towards the world where we consider these sorts of measures.
I keep thinking of that scene in Total Recall, where to get on the mass transit system you have to be screened for guns.
And as Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Security constantly warns us, the focus of terrorist (or madman) attack will simply shift.
999 Midori
OK, sorry. Just so you know you have a famous namesake ;-).
Midori
Idle question.
I am guessing you are not the famous Midori of 'Master Han's Daughter' fame?
I mean the writer (and practitioner) about sex and former fetish model?
If you google Firehorse Productions you will see of whom I speak (not a particularly work-safe site).
Vt
955 Linkmeister
Just writing by accessing your unconscious thought processes can often be the best way. Your subconscious (which is really one of many processes going on in your brain, which vote periodically to decide on what your 'conscious reality' is) has powers conscious thought often doesn't have.
I suspect this is more or less what happened in '9 Princes in Amber' by Roger Zelazny. 9 books later, he had somewhat trapped himself.
As a writer you then have to take some risks, I think, and blow some credibility by fixing the mistakes.
Dave Luckett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle
says 3.9kg fully loaded-- so not so much difference-- I was wrong.
Wiki says 8m M16s made, I thought the number was much larger (20m) including foreign variants (Canada, Singapore, etc.). Enough to give 'plausible deniability' if supplied for covert ops.
Wiki says over 100m Ak47s, I have read a number of 200m.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47
Kalashnikov now says he wishes he had invented something with more peaceful uses. Like the T34 Tank, the Katyusha Rocket Battery, the heavy mortar, the PPsH submachine gun family, and the 130mm artillery piece (which still, I believe, outranges the NATO 155mm standard issue), it was an example of the Russian WWII and post ability to engineer simple weapons of extraordinary effectiveness. Then I am reminded that in the early days of Operation Rolling Thunder, the US kill ratio against MIG21s was actually lower than 1:1-- partly a function of bad doctrine, but still.
The price of an AK47 is a very interesting number, as it tells you a lot about expected conflict in an area (the price rises, before the shooting starts).
I believe current Iraqi law allows 1 AK47 per household (which in and of itself, would be something like 7 million AK47s).
252 Dave Luckett
I don't think many people think the M16 is not inferior to the FN in terms of durability and tendency to jam.
However the FN FAL is *heavy*, I think, by comparison? And so is the ammo?
I doubt supply chains can deal with 2 main types of infantry round, easily.
I think it comes full circle. The M16 (C4 in the latest incarnation?) is hardly ideal, but it is relatively cheap and in wide use. It's very unlikely that the users will shift. Of course the Kalashnikov will remain far and away the world's most popular rifle (10X as many as the Armalite have been manufactured, I believe, and they are more robust, so more will still be in use).
239 Greg London
My point was about how, compared to other weapons systems, small arms haven't evolved as fast.A 1945 main battle tank has no utility on a modern battlefield, but a 1945 rifle or machine gun might.
Although there are some really nifty small arms prototypes out there, what I have been told is that the cost of reengineering the entire US military stock (2 million or so weapons, including National Guard?) is so daunting that it won't happen anytime soon. A C4 at a couple of hundred dollars or some H&K wonder at a couple of thousand (with new ammunition)-- that money just won't get spent.
Remembering the problems the British had with their current rifle (I'm writing L41A5 but that might be completely spurious) it's perhaps hardly surprising that countries don't change their main combat rifle very often. It has taken nearly 20 years to get the weapon to a serviceable state.
Basically the world seems to be divided into Armalite countries (US and its allies-- Israelis seem to carry them now in preference to the Galil) and Kalashnikov countries (the rest). With some European holdouts (like the UK).
Terry
Thanks for all the grift. I'm not sure anyone (non US) would agree with your view of the BAR ;-). But I am a prisoner of my sources ;-).
236 Terry
I don't think anyone thinks the AK47 and descendants is an accurate weapon.
But it is universal, familiar, robust, and works in all kinds of hostile environments. All of which characterises Afghanistan.
In addition, it is the soldier as much as the weapon. Afghans tend to be crack shots, at least compared to many other third world armies.
I had thought the M14/AR14 was 7.62mm? that was the whole point, it was great for shooting at people 300 yards away, but not for Vietnam, where the typical engagement was 50 yards or less. And the ammo was heavy to carry in 100 degree heat and 100% humidity. Also your average ARVN soldier probably weighed 110lbs and was 5'4" tall, not a big lug of an American GI.
On support weapons, I guess you are commenting on the infamous Squad Automatic Weapon? The US Army seems to have a predisposition on these things: the Browning Automatic Rifle in WWII and Korea, instead of a proper light machine gun. My impression of the SAW is that it seems to fit that mold.
My understanding is that all assault rifles, basically, are descendants of the SG44, which Hitler was opposed to, until he was persuaded that it was really a form of sub machine pistol (it's not, but don't tell the Fuhrer). Both Kalashnikov and Stoner (and the FN Arsenal in Belgium) derived their rifles from it (so, too, did the Israelis with the Galil).
230 Terry in Germany (and Greg in London and others)
Thanks for the info.
Isn't it amazing that weapons introduced in 1939 still have a place? Technology doesn't always move that fast.
I do know that some British special forces units did or do use the Bren for some purposes: I believe sniping. So lending credence to the accuracy point. (which isn't to deny your direct experience).
The Army tampering with the M16, which was 'imposed' on them in preference to their preferred AR14 with the heavier 7.62mm ammo, is a famous story, leading to the deaths of many soldiers in Vietnam. Well documented in James Fallow's 'National Defence' if nowhere else. I think the Ordinance Bureau substituted the Olin Mathison Cap&Ball powder for the IMR577 pounder which was originally specified? Olin had a long history with the Ordinance Bureau, so one suspects the usual mix of bureaucratic chicanery. I think they found one Marine unit, where all the dead were crouched over their M16s, trying to unjam them.
I did read that the Afghan troops were being equipped by some US Army contractor with the M16, rather than the AK47. So in some sense the argument still goes on (the costly, not particularly robust M16 derivative, rather than the cheap-as-chips, impossibly robust AK47 which is nearly universal in that part of the world).
To this day, one of the best ways to have a fight on the internet is to resurrect the old 7.62mm (AR14) v. 0.223 (5.56mm) (M16) calibre debate: stopping power and penetration v. light weight round.
226 Stefan Jones
He was at work on a novel about The Crater, the attempt by the Union Army to break the lines outside of Richmond in the winter of 1864 by tunneling under the Confederate position. The explosion was devastating (and a complete surprise) but Ambrose T. Burnside happened to be in command, a general with an ability to snatch defeat out of the jaws of any situation. The (black) regiments sent forwards clambered into the Crater, and were duly massacred by Confederate troops around the rim of the position.
'Not this August' is not a bad rendition of military combat with 1950s technology, based on his experiences in WWII and, presumably, press reports of Korea. It's the best 'America taken over by the communists' novel I know of (other than Robert Heinlein's 'If this Goes On' which is about a theocratic dictatorship) (I haven't read the Sinclair Lewis one 'It Can't Happen Here').
For all that the Soviets are as you would expect them to be, in the age of Stalin, it's not a jingoistic war novel, anything but.
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