Woman shot dead by drug gang after following Waze app's directions to wrong destination

Once, apple maps instructed me to drive up a 30m cliff.

This is an understandable human error, especially with addresses in a foreign language, so visitors to a country should be reminded by car hire companies to be vigilant.

That said anyone who drives into woods, a lake, a river, the sea, off a cliff really needs to spend more time looking out the window when driving and less at the satnav.

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The ā€œreported by usersā€ part is the problem. Itā€™s no stretch to guess that many an app user would report an area as ā€œunsafeā€ simply because of its demographics. There are publicly available crime statistics sites that could be useful. But youā€™d need to be able to turn them off; as it is, Google Maps often tries to steer friends around my neighborhood instead of straight to my house.

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Yeah, something similar happened to me at least once. I was going to a convention center to attend a massive event and somehow Google Maps directed me through a residential area and directly to a tall wallā€¦ The wall was from the convention center but I couldnā€™t just jump it, LOL. I had to ask people in the neighborhood to please guide me out of there and direct me to the front of the convention center. It costed me more or less one extra hour to fix the messā€¦

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Basically, some decades ago there was a campaign of disarmament. Cops and people whose work needs guns (usually military personnel and security cops) have gun permits. Some people keep (illegal) guns at home or in the car but you just know about them when tragedy strikes (people have this habit of shooting people that disagree with them in fights). I know for a fact there was a HUGE drop of cases of kids stealing guns from parents and accidentally shooting someone or themselves. In fact I canā€™t remember reading about it for some twenty years at least.

Of course drug dealers donā€™t obey laws. They steal from the army or simply get them through the frontiers the same way they get the drugs. And they like heavy shit like AK 47sā€¦

Make no mistakes, itā€™s not the entire country that is dealing with stray bullets but the poorer areas concentrated in the skirts of the city. The whiter areas live in a safe bubble.

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Unfortunately, this is not right.

Several states have Open Carry laws, which donā€™t require a permit, and a few even have Concealed-without-Permit laws!

I am a firearm owner and I would like to see more regulation.

ETA - I assumed youā€™re in the States. Apologies if I was wrong.

Boundegar asked about gun laws in Brazil. This is what we have here, not in the USA. The only people I see open carrying in Brazil are cops and soldiers (and drug dealers, but thank my lucky stars only in the news)

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Apologies, I somehow overlooked that. Thanks for correcting me.

No problem sweetie. We had a plebiscite about gun control in 2005 and the Stature on Disarmament was established in 2003. Civilians can have guns but they must justify it to Federal police or Army, proving they need it (usually cases where someone lives isolated, like in a farm and needs guns for protection against animals) and register it. They require a permit from Federal police to buy ammo and the gun must be carried unloaded. The ammunition is marked and registered too. The government buys unregistered guns and the Army destroys them in disarming campaigns.

We have our fair share of conservatives that want to extinguish the Stature on gun control defending the right of citizens to buy and have guns in north american fashion but I think the problem here is corruption + a failure from all three spheres of government to solve the security issues. More guns will only bring more deaths.

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Do you know what the exact definition of ā€œunloadedā€ there is?

I ask because you can carry a gun here with a full magazine and an empty chamber and that is ā€œunloadedā€. Itā€™s not ā€œloadedā€, legally here, until you chamber a round.

Must it be fully empty (including the magazine/clip)?

No idea, as I donā€™t have much contact with guns (my dad has a Taurus .38, heā€™s retired from Air Force and kept it, but I never even got near that revolver) I never had interest in reading the specifics of the law regulating it. Itā€™s online, tho.

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I did google for it a fair bit, but I didnā€™t find the exact definition.

Itā€™s interesting to me that here and in other states, a ā€œloaded gunā€ is one with a cartridge in the chamber, and in others itā€™s a gun with a magazine with cartridges in it, whether one is chambered or not.

It makes a big difference to gun folk.

But I get that youā€™re not into that. Totally cool.

Thanks. :smile:

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I had something like this happen to me once. I was on my way to a funeral and the gps directed me into an apartment parking lot. The church I was trying to go to was on the other side of a big chain link fence.

Iā€™ve also had more mundane stuff like it telling me to make a left turn over a dividing island. Sigh.

Bottom line is you need to execute some good judgment and not just blindly follow what the lady in the box is telling you to do.

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Loaded, yes or no?

There are six chambers, three of which have rounds in them. So if you spin the cylinder and close it without looking, russian roulette style, is it loaded or unloaded, or does the position of the current chamber make a difference?

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Yes. Thatā€™s a loaded gun.

Six chambers, and >0 has a live cartridge. Thatā€™s a live hot weapon.

But regardless, you treat it as live hot when you handle it.

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Yes, even if you know for sure that it has zero rounds.

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The question here is not gun control. The drug dealersā€™s weapons were illegally acquired anyway. The real problem is that many parts of big Brazilian cities are outside civil society control. They were places where police only enter to shoot down some bandits (and bystanders) and get out the fastest they can.

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Can I respond as someone who lives in a city where that was the norm, and we have (mostly) fixed it?*

The concentration of poor (and thus exploitable) people is a major cause. Require every neighborhood to create a certain percentage of subsidized housing, move everyone who is willing to a new, safer environment (yes, the subsidies will cost the government, but there will be savings as well, especially if you consider life and safety issues), and then tear down the favelas.

There will still be problems, but having entire areas where police are afraid to even enter will be (mostly) gone.


*Arguably we might have fixed it entirely except for the NIMBY (not in my back yard) mentality of middle class whites who fought every attempt to make every neighborhood and suburb more of an economic melting pot.

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