Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Horror in Hialeah

The Sun Sentinal reports on the latest murder/suicide to claim mulitple victims.

Regalado, 38, showed up at Yoyito Cafe in Hialeah on Sunday night, just as his estranged wife was finishing her second day as a waitress. Armed with a .45-caliber pistol that he owned, he pulled the trigger nine times, killing Molina and three co-workers. He also wounded three others in a shooting spree that was described by 911 callers as total mayhem.

Do you think when they say "pistol that he owned" they mean legally? If he'd been a gangster or a drug dealer they would have said that, don't you think?

So let's say this terribly sad story exemplifies several things we frequently talk about.

1. a certain percentage of gun owners should not have guns.
2. guns are bad news for women.
3. Florida has a sick gun culture.

11 comments:

  1. > So let's say this terribly sad story exemplifies several things we frequently talk about.

    It seems this story merely exemplifies one thing that Mikeb frequently talks about: extremely rare anecdotal incidents are justification for stripping civil rights of all Americans.

    If them damn colored folk sat in the back of the buss and stayed outta our way then there wouldn’t be no lynchings, ya see?

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  2. "extremely rare anecdotal incidents are justification for stripping civil rights of all Americans."

    Wrong on two counts. These are not rare anecdotal incidents and I don't support stripping rights from ALL Americans.

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  3. Actually, they incidents like that are extremely rare.

    The vast majority of homicides (80%) are committed by less than 1% of the population; Specifically, gang members.

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  4. "I don't support stripping rights from ALL Americans."

    No. You just support stripping rights from all gun owners.

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  5. MikeB writes: I don't support stripping rights from ALL Americans.

    Riiiiight. That's why you make statements like the following:

    That's it. The argument is over. The gun advocates can just go home now and wait for the government truck to come by to collect their guns.

    Sorry if we don't believe you.

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  6. RuffRidr, Please tell me you didn't take "the government truck coming by to collect your guns" seriously.

    You gotta work on that sense of humor, man.

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  7. "...exemplifies several things we frequently talk about."

    So you follow that with links to threads in which your arguments are repeatedly "shot down"?

    Fail.

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  8. MikeB: “Wrong on two counts. These are not rare anecdotal incidents and I don't support stripping rights from ALL Americans.”

    So after you get your infamous 10% implemented, and people still use guns to kill people just as much, what is your next step? Would you have a hard line set where you would not pass but rather admit that it is not working? Or let’s say your 10% confiscation plan does drastically reduce “gun crime”. Wouldn’t you use that as a call to push further?

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  9. TS asks what I'll do when, "after you get your infamous 10% implemented, and people still use guns to kill people just as much."

    I thought the question was after my plan works well, wouldn't I want to increase it to get even better results now that it's proven to work?

    My answers are these, believe them or not. If all my ideas could be implemented and proved to fail, I'd admit I was wrong and go away.

    On the other hand, if all my ideas were implemented and showed good results, I might do exactly what you say and ask for more and stricter laws. But, at a certain point, I think we'd reach an equilibrium in which decent law-abiding people, for the most part, owned guns and criminals and dangerous people couldn't get them, for the most part. Once that equilibrium was reached, I'd be satisfied.

    These are silly hypotheticals, but you asked.

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  10. MikeB: “My answers are these, believe them or not. If all my ideas could be implemented and proved to fail, I'd admit I was wrong and go away.”

    Really? You wouldn’t rationalize its failure with a comment like this:

    “Couldn't the same "many different factors" enter into the second correlation? In other words, the number of guns increased, crime did not increase, therefore we conclude that more guns does not cause more crime. What about the factor of law enforcement techniques, the economy, legislative changes, or even the weather or the alignment of the planets, for crying out loud.”

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  11. TS, I said, "and proved to fail."

    I might turn out to be one of those who can never accept proof no matter how compelling, but I don't think so.

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