[quote=“anansi133, post:165, topic:43057”]
don’t seem to have had the kind of big crazy murder fests
[/quote]Yep.
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Among fools. Grown men don’t necessarily fight back on principle in situations where the responsible course of action is to consider more than your manly pride & be responsible for those around you as well as yourself.
Consider how military people reacted when GWB stupidly uttered the words “Bring it on”. They essentially said “No, we will defeat the enemy on our terms, not theirs” because that is the responsible, prudent course of action. Schoolyard bravado is something to be abandoned in the schoolyard.
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Erm, that’s not how I’ve read it. From what I gleaned, they WOULD search, but, folks with valid permits would by law be allowed to keep their weapons. Added to to post from the local in this thread, it seems that a good majority of folks have permits. And having an armed audience wasn’t something Ms Sarkessian felt comfortable with.
Come now, that’s just silly. If someone starts shooting, nobody is going to give a damn if they’ve got a permit or not. That’s an illegal act, Highly illegal as it turns out, and they’ll be responded to pretty much identically, permit or no.
All that’s being said here is that they can’t stop people who are going about their business lawfully. The state of the law in this particular venue is one that the speaker isn’t comfortable moving forward with.
I honestly don’t get the outrage toward the venue. Is the point that standing laws and rights in this location should be suspended by the authorities without any actual legal right to do so, for the comfort and safety of this one controversial speaker? That can’t be right can it? Seems like the university was forthcoming about what powers it did and didn’t have, took what measures it could legally employ for her protection, but informed her of what it could not control, legally or logistically, and armed (no pun intended) with that knowledge, Ms Sarkeesian made a personal cost/benefit analysis of the risks and canceled.
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Probably better safe than sorry, and to avoid liability if something did happen. I dunno, ask @dweller_below as he is the one who posted first hand knowledge.
Should there be threats of violence surrounding a speaking engagement, and should the speaker go forward, you can be assured that there would be victim blaming if violence occurs. It’s ingrained in the culture. In addition, keep in mind that the bar for civil suits is a lot lower than for criminal prosecutions. The families of the victims would go after whomever they felt was at fault, up to or possibly including a dead speaker’s estate. This is the US, after all.
Do I agree that it would be right to blame victims? No, not ever. It’s morally repugnant. Would Sarkeesian feel responsible had she carried forward and violence occurred? Very possibly. It’s a calculation of what one can live with when making this kind of decision.
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Grown men don’t necessarily fight back on principle in situations where the responsible course of action is to consider more than your manly pride & be responsible for those around you as well as yourself.
Agreed- Just acknowledging that there’s still a sense of pressure to do the opposite. Strong enough that I’m a little angry at her for cancelling, even when I know I have no right to be.
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This is what I’m referring to:
Sarkeesian took to her Twitter account to confirm that cancellation, stating “police wouldn’t take steps to prevent concealed firearms at the event” and “requested pat downs or metal detectors after mass shooting threat, but because of Utah’s open carry laws, police wouldn’t do firearm searches.”
(emphasis mine)
That’s not outrage toward the venue you’re seeing. At least not from me. Being quite familiar with Utah my response was more of a “yeahhhh that sounds about right.”
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Would it really keep the audience safe? There might be fewer casualties than otherwise, but a stalker, especially a suicidal one, who’s truly determined to go on a rampage/massacre is not likely to be stopped by the knowledge that the place is filled with other armed people. And if the person has the relevant permit, they’re in.
After all, the Fort Hood shooter killed 13 and wounded 30, and the Washington Navy Yard shooter killed 3 and wounded 12. I assume both facilities had plenty of armed good guys on hand.
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Most of the time guns are not permitted on base, only by MP’s, which are typically out at the perimeter. The MP:soldier ratio is much lower than police:civilian for the most part, so you’d be surprised how few guns there are on your typical post.
Yeah, Fort Hood was the thing that killed the “good guy with a gun” argument for me. I’d still like to believe it on principle, but it’s pretty hard to argue with that example.
Yep, and I certainly would not want to be in an auditorium with a 1:1 ratio of people to guns if a shooter did draw and begin firing indiscriminately. Talk about your recipes for friendly fire deaths as everyone drew a sidearm and began looking for someone with a sidearm.
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Huh. so the 1:1 gun ratio didn’t really deter the shooter? Who’d a thunkit?
Interesting. So perhaps not the best examples.
Still, like @FunkDaddy I would not want to be in a crowded auditorium with as many guns as people when a lone rampager opens fire. Does not sound substantially safer to me than the same auditorium with only one armed person.
My guess is that the only real protection provided by that 1:1 ratio is a deterrent effect, which becomes irrelevant if the rampager is suicidal. It might also reduce the scale of the tragedy, but IMO it cannot entirely prevent it. It might even make it more likely by making it easier for the rampager to get inside in the first place.
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Fair enough, I’m responding to a lot of posts, but, happened to isolate out yours for quoting. How bout this:
Not to single out this person either, that sense seems to pervade a lot of the comments here.
The question of if authorities, be it the university or the police, SHOULD be authorized to disarm folks seems kind of irrelevant to me. The process to change that is out of scope, both in time and process, to enable her speaking. And folk in this location have made that decision for themselves, at least for now. Like all decisions, it’s got a tradeoff, but, that starts getting into dragonfood territory.
What I don’t understand is, given that’s the current state of things, why the ire (not from @manybellsdown but more generally) with folk who are simply relating what efforts they can and cannot take, both legally and logistically? It would be one thing if they refused to call in outside agencies to help, or, wern’t following up or even recording what threats were made and passing them on for investigation. That to me would be a “callous lack of concern”. Taking all reasonable efforts, as constrained by law, even if those efforts are as a result insufficient (and we’ll never know if they were or not, as it turns out), can’t be classified as a lack of concern to me.
As to not searching at all, I think perhaps there’s a fair amount of noise to signal, and possibly some conflicting info. The quotes I have above, both actually re-quotes from the poster quoting them (The second is actually the university president, as quoted by @dweller_below) both have at least plausible motivation to put a positive spin for their position, and they possibly conflict on that point, but, possibly not. Again, we’ll never really know now, since it’s not going to happen, which is sad.
This fantasy of, “an armed populace is a polite populous” has really got to stop. Disproving this fallacy costs lives. I think there have been enough such deaths to put that to rest.
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It seems I misread you earlier; we seem to be in basic agreement.
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Yeah, you should think of military bases as modern day examples of someplace like Wild-Wild-West Tombstone, where guns were taken at the border.
Ugh, I fully anticipate this will be moved for topic reasons, but,
This doesn’t mean what you are saying, or, it doesn’t to me, and plenty of others. The way I heard it described best, and, I’ll have to paraphrase and possibly mangle it, so, any inelegance is mine:
Guns (and arms in general) as protected by the 2nd Amendment are not Anti-Crime devices, they are Anti-Tyranny devices. If they should happen to be useful from time to time for the former, that is simply a happy accident.
IOW, It’s not the average Joe on the street who needs to be kept polite, that those deaths are for. It’s for keeping the ones with suits and american flag lapel pins and $300 haircuts (at least that’s their common appearance today) polite and in line.
Glad that’s working out so fabulously.
On what planet does having everyone walking around with pistols or hunting rifles do a single damned thing to keep government overreach in check? Are people going to take up arms against the NSA, IRS, FDA or USPS, let alone any branch of the military?
The absurdity of the anti-tyranny argument can only mean one thing: people want their guns for self-defence, hunting, just because they like and enjoy them, or to commit violent crimes. Those are the actual options I see.
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Who said it’s limited to just those? And, frankly, having done a tour of duty in places where the populace was generally armed, but mostly small arms and IED’s, and not particularly happy to have us around, I can say it makes one very polite.
Wow, the FDA and USPS? I kinda would have gone with the FBI, ATF, Secret Service, US Marshals,and possibly even the CIA before going with the ones you’ve listed. Hell even Park Services have some armed rangers. The day the FDA is the final line of defense is one when government best seriously consider giving in to demands.
Are people going to take up arms? I really hope not. Things will have gotten pretty bad by then. It’s a final fail safe. The fire suppression system that gets activated that will destroy plenty of property but hopefully puts out the fire and saves some of the data, even at the cost of much of the equipment. And you’re right. It’s a shitty way of preventing tyranny, with some really lamentable costs, it’s about the worst system of doing so. With the exception of just about every other method available.
