Good for this mom.

I remember when I was a kid we (cousins, friends and I) weren't allowed inside during the day in the summer unless it was to eat or the weather was really crappy. If we came inside the house, there had better be a good reason. All our toys were outside, and there were pleanty of activities we could busy ourselves with.

Now I am at an age where many of my friends have kids, and many of them won't let their offspring out of their site for more than a handfull of minutes at a time.

It is easy to talk about how I would raise kids, but I trully hope that I will be a more trusting/adventurous parent.

I think it was a special blend of childishness and foolishness that allowed him to do something so stupid, especially in front of the press. And whether or not he thought he would hit it, he clearly was trying to.

If it is determined that he committed a crime (and it looks like he did) he should pay the appropriate penalty.

However, how much fuss do you think would be created if he had hit a crow or a pigeon? Or better yet, a stink lizard?

#4 posted by Brainspore , March 6, 2008 10:25 AM

'Oh give the TSA a break. Who among us has NOT seen a child with chronic health problems and feared that they might slaughter us all with their sterilized plastic tubes?'

That's the greatest comment I have read on BoingBoing to this date. And I think it will be hard to beat.

This is why I make all pasangers sit in the back and refuse to interact with them in any way.

Safety first.

It annoys my girlfriend, but oh well, it's for the common good.

I personally think we should ban everything that annoys other people based on specious reasoning and threats of safety. That's why I love the TSA.

I've had varying degrees of success with the auto parts store version (of which I am convinced Mighty Putty is just a rebranding). It has worked for some home applications, but I used it to fix a broken car door lock. Someone tried to break into my truck by busting out the lock. I removed the door panel, and was able to put the lock back in place, but the original bracket suffered some damage. I used some of the putty to repair it, and it worked well until the temp dropped below freezing. I suspect that either the putty shrinks, or some other component, and that it let loose.

Oh well.

A former roommate also got the "You are going to have some new clothes."

It also came true for him.

Incredible.

After reading that list my first thought was "Marcus Garvey who?"

After a quick web search I am once again terribly proud of my public education.

That's the greatest thing I ever saw.

This looks like a huge leap forward in the area of peeing on the back of a guy's shoe.

I have been a volunteer working with developmentally and/or physically disabled children for 19 years. It has been my experience that a lot of the people that have very strong opinions on the treatment and care of people with special needs have never had the serious and intimate experiences that occur with hands on interaction.

All people crave human interaction, and many of the most needy do not receive enough of it. I saw no one losing any dignity in that video. I saw people communing and enjoying a visit from a man with a unique and wonderful talent.

I would have loved a balloon hat when I was eight. I believe I will love one when I am eighty, and I know I would love one now.

@ #65 I LIKE STRANGE

For the record, my kids don't run all me.

Wow, I feel so much safer. Thanks DHS, you are really making the world a better place.

A little advice to the DHS agents involved, when going on your last trip, pack something light, because it's supposed to be pretty hot in hell.

If I was my girlfriend or my sister I would be crying right now. And I mean that in the best possible way.

While I believe in respecting another's rights, I feel absolutely no compulsion to respect the actual person without a good reason.

When I get pulled over, I will act in a respectful manner because age and experience have tought me that that is the most prudent course. But that is all I am doing, acting. Someone's choice of vocation is not enough to garner my respect. Be they doctor, lawyer, cop, dentist. I don't 'command' respect from other people based on the uniform I choose to wear, and I think it is foolish to assume that other people should.

Respect is earned. I give many people my respect, and many people I think are just plane a-holes.

Cops do have a tough job, and that job also comes with a lot of responsability. When an officer displays that he is capable of weilding that responsability in a considered manner that is beneficial to the public, then I give him respect. It is a tough thing to do a difficult job well. It is an easy thing to do a difficult job poorly.

Nothing I saw by this man demonstrates any reason anyone should respect him. He immediately chose a showing of force when dealing with children. Children who haven't learned to 'respect' his authority. The same argument for forcing respect has been used to subjugate meeker individuals throughout history. There are several ways he could have handled this situation, and he was pretty quick to choose this path. And there is no way you could convince me that he wasn't enjoying it.

And if I remember from the first thread, he isn't new to the job. So the already specious and flawed argument that he hasn't learned to properly control himself doesn't apply. Not that it should matter. A cop should now how to handle himself when dealing with children on his first day and his last.

This man is an ass. And his shorts aren't helping.

I can all but guarantee that someone is having sex with their gun. Anything can be turned into a fetish, and the more that something becomes controversial/taboo the more it can attract unwarranted attention.

As a wise man once said: "It there is a whole somewhere, someone is putting something into it"

I didn't come up with that, and I just grossed myself out.

I live surrounded by one of the worst neighborhoods in terms of crime in the city of Detroit proper, which I think means that I live in the center of one of the worst areas of the country, if not the civilized world. I, as well as many people I have known, have had plenty of first hand experience with misused firearms, hand guns especially. When a person points a gun at you with questionable intentions it is truly terrifying, and far removed from a theoretical discussion. Do I wish that I had my own gun in those situations? To be honest I don't really know. I survived them without one, and maybe it would have turned out differently if I was armed and tried to return a show of force. I can assure you that I do wish that the other person didn't have a gun. There is no doubt about that.

Another thing I don't doubt is that the other person had no worries about the legality of his weapon, he would have pointed the gun at me regardless. I would venture to guess that a large portion of violent gun crime is not carried out with any fear of the legitimate status of the gun in question.

And as was stated earlier, making a gun illegal will definitely create a black market (which already exists for assault weapons and illegal ordinances), and there are plenty of guns in this world to supply that market. And someone who plans to use any weapon for nefarious purposes has already made the moral hurtle that would make the legality of the weapon pointless. I think a handgun ban would have a very small effect on the criminal populace.

Michigan recently adopted a Castle Doctrine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Doctrine

Since then, there is evidence to support that violent crime has declined. Once again, supporters of the doctrine are using this as a causation. I am not yet convinced that that is the case. A great many things have changed in this state in the past few years. But that data is there.

So making them illegal really mainly effects people that obey the law. True, this could cut down on accidental deaths, but an argument could also be made for more education on the topic. Also, this could cut down on crimes of passion, but I am not sufficiently convinced of this.

Also, as far as we're a democracy so we should just vote on it, that is where the 'is it a right?' thing comes into play. You aren't supposed to be able to have a simple majority vote away an individual's rights. Granted, we do that everyday with the gay community, and we sure keep trying to do it with women. And it looks like as a country we aren't too hot on privacy. And when we say human rights, we really just mean American rights. Ask illegal immigrants and people in Guantanamo, but that is a rant for a whole different day.

If it might be a right, it should be treated with prudence.

#197 posted by Takuan

First of all let me state that I am enjoying this back and forth.

My problem with this argument is that your village example consists of one man's unilateral decision based upon his interpretation of the numbers. Which is a system that has been shown to break down over time. A society as large as ours (and as free as we would like to think we are) requires us to achieve a consensus. To do that we have to persuade others to think like we do. Most often we try to do that with numbers (which are important, as I stated), but in a complex system numbers can almost always be twisted and presented to support whatever our beliefs are. That is because as a creature we don't think in numbers, we think in ideas (the abstract arguments you mentioned). Numbers are something we use to scale things, but not to understand concepts. So, my question about where you stand on the concept of guns and rights was about abstracts, but that is because abstracts will help me understand your point of view a lot better than a cut and dried, here are the numbers explanation.

I apologize if I am beating this into the ground.

@192 Takuan

This post echos my thought.

Teen pregnancy isn't a problem because of teens genitals, nor is the drug problem the fault of drugs. It is a systemic societal problem.

I am bummed out about gun violence not so much about the guns as I am about the desire we have to kill each other. By focusing on guns, which is pee already in the pool, we are diverting energy from identifying and solving the actual reasons.

America is unique (well, almost all countries are unique, except Australia and New Zealand, they are just living a lie). We are young, big, insanely rich and powerful. We have some incredibly high standards of living, and we also still segregate our minorities and trample their rights while patting ourselves on the back for how far we've come. We try to extend our freedom to other countries (sometimes with force, but other times with true generosity), but we still can't agree on a set of basic human rights that we extend to our own citizenry. We all want to make the world a better place, but some of us think that it should be okay to shoot a guy for crossing our border.

What scares me more than guns are the people that either think we are doing just fine as we are, and the people that think a bulk of good can be done by the simple banning of a device.

However, I do understand how someone can see banning guns as a step on the road to recovery. I just happen to disagree with them.

When it comes to the topic gun control I see a lot of gray areas. I would say that I definitely lean towards keeping guns legal, but I can understand a reasonable person thinking otherwise. I am disturbed by people that spout rhetoric and specious reasoning on both sides of the debate.

My question about the potato canon wasn't meant to sound flippant, I was just curious where some people see the lines. I am sure I could make something that could hurl a projectile with sufficient force to kill someone, even if that wasn't the intention of the device. So, if we make guns illegal, when does something become a 'gun' by definition. Does it have to be mass manufactured, or is it size? Is it the ordinance, or the means of propulsion?

Takuan's comment about banning potato guns when they kill as many people as hand guns seems flawed to me because then it just becomes about numbers. And the numbers, while being important, aren't the root of the issue for me. With that logic, you can break down handguns into subcategories. Most gun killings are committed by handguns, so the solution is to ban handguns. But wait, further examination of the numbers shows that revolvers are rarely used for this purpose, so we should just ban semi-automatic handguns. Well, very few semi-automatic killings were performed by sig-saurs, most were by berretas and glocs, so really we only need to ban those models since they are responsible for the lion's share of killings. With some simple data manipulation it is pretty easy to move up and down the ladder of what constitutes a gun that is dangerous to society. Yes, a gloc 9 is way more likely to be used in a convenience store robbery than a flint lock musket, but they are both data points on the same graph. But I do recognize the need to establish boundaries.

And I am not saying we don't already draw these lines elsewhere in our society. I can walk around with a pocket knife, but I would definitely run into trouble if I tried to wear a sword to the grocery store.

Wow, this is still going on.

I would like to posit a question:

I assume many of us that frequent boingboing are tinkerers/makers. Last year I made a potato canon. I would imagine that many of us wouldn't have a problem with that. There have been several videos/instructables linked from here about them.

I built mine quite large, so it is definitely not an instrument of surprise, but I assure you that it could be quite lethal if mishandled.

I didn't have to make mine as large as I did, many others have made them smaller. I could probably make it even smaller than theirs. Some people even make theirs out of metal.

At what point would a potato gun become unacceptable to most people in favor of banning guns?

I am not baiting with this question, I am genuinely curious.

@150 TheMagus

Come on, I've seen Australia's future, it's looking pretty bleak there when the oil runs out. There are going to be ambiguosly sexualized crossbow sporting bike freaks, self-stylized Ayatollas of Rockin-Rolla, and appearantly only a handfull of V8s.

True that there will be no guns in BarterTown, but you guys are going to have to deal with the Thunderdome and that MasterBlaster weirdo. Also the Bust a Deal spin the wheel seams a little harsh.

Best of luck though.

I almost forgot about this:

Two days ago I signed up for a blogspot blog. I really can't imagine why anyone would want to read my musings. It is really more of an experiment for me and a couple of friends to play with. I am not encouraging anyone here to visit it, especially because there isn't much there yet (save for one picture that won't be described here).

The reason I am bringing it up is because of what I named it:

http://iamgoingtoshootyouintheface.blogspot.com/

I realize that that can be seen as somewhat tasteless. And it is. It is just something that me and my friends have said to each other for years during only the most mild of disagreements (such as picking a fast food joint).

example:

Beergood: Hey, let's order shots.

Squid: I'm not drinking shots tonight.

Beergood: I am going to shoot you in the face!

I guess gun violence really is pervasive in our society.

No harm no foul.

Guns have taken one major toll today, my productivity. I have barely accomplished anything in the last three hours. At least it has been enjoyable. Now I gotta go fix some 'puters. See you all around.

Also, everyone knows that you don't hunt high fructose corn syrup with a hand gun. You need an AK-47.

@101 Patrick Dodds

I don't think you read my post correctly:

"I am not even sure if I have any ammunition in the house. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't know where it would be, it's just I don't remember if I have any left."

I am stating that I know where my gun is, and where my ammo case is (both are safe and secure). I just don't remember if I exhausted my supply.

So your nephew is more than welcome to come by and play.

Also, not that I am aligning myself with JLBraun's arguments, but when you say:

"@97, JLBraun: That little "even" - I'm trying to work out if it was deliberate. Let's say it was and I won't rise to the bait. "

That is kind of a passive aggressive way of taking the bait, and then dismissing it with a certain smugness. Sorry, but I think it read kind of crappy.

This discussion was more fun when it wasn't so mean spirited, which is why I doubt that the issue of gun violence will be resolved any time soon.

@Patrick Dodds

Howdy Neighbor!

I don't believe that I ever mentioned needing a gun for my own safety. I do have one, and I suppose I would use it if I had to. I would rather rely upon my dogs barking to ward off trespassers, and calling 911. I am not even sure if I have any ammunition in the house. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't know where it would be, it's just I don't remember if I have any left. I haven't shot the thing in over three years.

I do find your anthrax argument to be a little silly. I realize that you were probably playing hyperbole for comic effect, but to equate guns to anthrax is stretching it a little bit.

As I said before, we do need to live in a nation of laws. Some things are given up to protect the general safety of the public. And it does suck for the people that have to give those things up. I just think that banning something is a very serious matter.

I also wouldn't be thrilled about my neighbor having a grenade. I did make my share of dry ice bombs when I was a kid (and adult), and they sure were fun. Fireworks are also pretty great. I just can't see any practical purpose or need to own a grenade or anthrax that outweighs the danger of an accident happening. If you could convince me that you were in fact safe/qualified enough to handle a grenade I probably wouldn't have a problem with it (but I doubt that will ever happen). But the margin of error for a grenade is pretty small, and the margin of error with anthrax is so small that it practically doesn't exist. I realize that I am standing on a slippery slope, but I can see a case being made for gun ownership. And as long as I can see a practical case being made for the legality of something I am not to thrilled about the idea of banning it.

Kickyfast has a strong point with this:

"I think you can feel the power a gun gives over life and death, and that is what you are attracted to, not aesthetic beauty or sport."

And I suspect that he is correct in a lot of cases.

I wonder if Mark knew what he was starting with his simple post.

When someone tries to tell me (or anyone else) that something is not neccessary based on their own opinions of personal conduct I am reminded of my Grandmother. I has many conversations with her when I was younger about how it is wrong to impose your beliefs on others.

I do believe that we need to live with a system of laws that protect the public good.

But here is a list of a few things that many people find unnecessary based on their own personal beliefs.

Guns
Gay Marriage
Recreational Drugs
Premarital Sex
Sport Utility Vehicles
Integrated Schools
Abortion
A Free Press
Chemistry Supplies
Profanity (which I happen to love, and would miss greatly)

We could all live like the Amish, they seem to be doing alright. But I think I would kind of resent being told to do so, based on the fact that anything else is 'not neccessary'.

It is poor science to look at a complex system with a ton of variables (let alone compare two such systems) and single out one variable as the cause of a complex effect. It is hard enough to compare two cultures in terms of generalities, but to then try to pinpoint one specific point were the two diverge is almost impossible.

Do Americans kill a lot of each other?
Yes.

Are guns used in a lot of those killings?
Yes.

But that isn't nearly enough to create a complete causation. There are most likely deeper reasons why we kill each other. Maybe we have more guns than most other countries (per capita) because a lot of us just want to kill each other? That is about as reasonable an assumption based upon the facts.

Trying to control a problem that is poorly understood is a very difficult thing to do, especially when passions overtake rationality (on either side). The same thing is happening with our drug culture (a culture that I sometimes enjoy, by the way). We've made most drugs illegal, and done are best to forcefully deter drug use, but it still remains a 'problem'.

I guess what I am saying is that I think blaming murder on guns is like blaming obesity on silverware. Perhaps it is easier to find evil/illness in an object than to admit it comes from us.

As for Gun-Toting-Buddhists, as far as I know Buddhists have a long tradition of discipline and defense. Guns are nothing more than a logical progression. I think I would feel a little more comfortable with a Buddhist having a gun than someone of a more reactionary faith (not trying to point any fingers here).

I am pretty sure I could kill you with my potato canon, but that isn't why I made it, or why I still have it. But I would also be hard pressed to explain any other reason to own it that doesn't also sound a little silly. I mean really, when will I ever have a practical reason for getting a potato over 200 yards away in a matter of seconds.

But it is an interesting machine built for a very narrow purpose that can provide much entertainment. So can a 12 gauge shotgun (or any other gun, for that matter). By the very nature of being an inanimate object no machine can have intentions of its own. It is the user that gives it purpose.

Also, that guy sure is fat.

This is meant to be a tungue in cheek, but is still all entirely true.

I was an aerospace engineering major at the University of Michigan from 1992 till 1997. The computer lab in the aerospace building was almost always full, as well as were the labs in almost all the other engineering buildings. The atmospheric and oceanic sciences building was across the street from the aero building, and a little out of the way from other buildings. And deep within its heart was a small and mostly unused lab. I don't remember who found it, but the half dozen of us aeros that knew it existed didn't tell anyone. So we were practically gauranteed a computer whenever we needed one. We just had to snake our way through the bizarrely small and winding corridors of the atmo building.

The only other people that ever seemed to be there were a small cadre of asian atmo students. As a matter of fact, the only people I ever saw in the building were asians. And I never really spoke to any of them. They kept to themselves, spoke their own languages, and didn't seem to mind the small handful of spectacled pasty aero nerds that ocassionaly used their lab. In my five (yes, five) years as an aero student I don't recall ever meeing anyone from the atmo program anywhere else.

I often thought about the fact that the atmo building was located out of the way, its internal architecture was weird/confusing and all of the residents appeared to be reclusive asians. This led me (and others) to theorize that asians are trying to learn how to control the weather. Rememer, this was over 10 years ago.

Chilling.