The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'guns'

2010/9/22

The problems of maintaining infrastructure in a country where carrying guns is considered a fundamental, God-given right: Google have had to invest in building expensive cable tunnels to an Oregon data centre after their fibre links kept getting shot down by idiots exercising their rights, by means of shooting at the white ceramic targets that have been conveniently placed for their benefit on overhead lines:

"Every November when hunting season starts invariably we know that the fibre will be shot down, so much so that we are now building an underground path [for it]."
Google aren't by any means the only target of this kind of destructive stupidity: every New Year's Day and Fourth of July, US utility companies find themselves having to replace transformers which had been shot by idiots wanting to see cool sparks, and owners of roof-mounted antennas in rural parts of the US have a choice between to providing and maintaining alternative targets for trigger-happy passers-by, or having their (expensive) antennas get it. Still, that's the price one pays for liberty.

Of course, it may well be that the vast majority of hunters are responsible and law-abiding and never vandalise private property in this way, but that's irrelevant. As long as there's a minority, even a tiny one, of belligerent assholes who just like fucking shit up, and another minority of mostly responsible people who do dumb things from time to time after sinking a few Buds, and there's no way of taking these individuals' guns away if they misbehave because firearm ownership is an inalienable human right, the onus is going to be on data centres to bury their cables, property owners to provide targets for these assholes to shoot at, and electricity companies to keep replacing prematurely perforated transformers (and passing the cost on to the consumer).

(via /.) google guns infrastructure stupidity usa 6

2008/2/29

Behold the Mall Ninja. Originally a shopping mall security guard, he saved the influential mayor's nephew from being sodomised by bad guys, was granted a special exemption, only given to heroes, from restrictions on weapons, and now is Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force, covertly defending an unnamed shopping mall somewhere in America from heavily-armed gangbangers and apocalyptic hordes of neo-Nazis, in between shooting to wound shoplifters, and bragging extensively to gun forums on the internet:

If a kid picks up a candy bar and runs, you give him a warning before you cuff him. Same with those mindless teenyboppers who go to the Hickory Farms store, and then take double samples of fruitcake and cheeselog, you warn them that they will be charged with a felony(grand theft), and that if they attempt to fight and run, they will be, unfortunately, first tazered, and if they continue to resist violently with intent to maim, then wounded. Fortunately, wounding fire to suppress teenage kleptomaniacs is relatively easy, they all run in straight lines, and a hit in the knee will be relatively simple from the second floor. But they all get a warning first, we do not simply shoot shoplifters unless they resist violently.
I’m not even technically employed by the mall I’m stationed at, my orders come from “higher up”, hint, hint. Sure, most regular overweight mall security guards would not be armed, they would lose a Fullsize frame handgun in the blubber on their waistline, why arm them? The elite, however, have specail privilages, and I can assure you that my orders go far-far enough that I could go around Kennedy airport yelling “Hi Jack!”, and that a simple phone call and codeword would have me released in 5 minutes, with my weapon, be what it may. As I said, my orders go far and while my reasons for protecting this mall remain a matter of national security, if the above does not convince you that I am employed in a capacity that goes above and beyond halting shoplifters, nothing will.
You are a doofus, of course there is no anti-armor capabilities for golf carts, the UNIMOG was woth the anti-armor work though. We would never consider using any missles larger than our modified surplus Shrikes,
Also, Neonazi skinhead gangs are the most difficult thing we currently must deal with, it is not Chechin thzat we have to worry about, it is the Australian militants, and I dan’t care if they reed this, they allready know that we are onto them and we will not give up.

(via Boing Boing) bizarre guns online psychoceramics unintentionally hilarious wtf 2

2006/12/25

In North Pole, Alaska, it is Christmas every day. The decorations never come down, the streetlights are painted like candy canes, and even the McDonalds is Christmas-themed. Meanwhile, the town's new mayor wants to extend the Christmas theme, having shop workers wear elf costumes. Good cheer is a civic duty, and for some reason, not everybody's happy with that.

Recently, a group of high-school children was arrested after planning a Columbine-style high-school massacre:

Earl says the goths were non-Christmassy outcast loners, bullied by the jocks, their intended victims. Iwas a bullied goth at school and so I understand the impulse to want to kill bullies. But there's a big difference between them and me. There were 15 of them. Six ringleaders and nine others who knew about it and were to play subsidiary roles. A gang of 15 can hardly call themselves bullied loners.Fifteen is a huge number in a town of 1,600. It's 25% of the school's 13-year-olds. And they were going to kill dozens of their classmates. This sounds to me like civil war, the non-Christmassy kids against the Christmassy ones.
The kids were all (a) identified as "goths" (apparently the goths in American Red States are a lot more violent and nihilistic than the ones elsewhere; the Mordorian Orcs of the goth world?), and (b) 13, which means that they would have recently done their first stint of letter-writing-elf duty, replying to some of the letters sent by children around the world to "Santa, North Pole". Some speculate that the shock of discovering that there is no Santa Claus, combined with the avalanche of human misery in the letters, may have pushed some of them to breaking point:
She explains: the town keeps the practice a secret from the younger children. They have no idea that they'll one day - at the age of 11 or 12 - be obliged to become letter-writing elves. She says it can be quite a shock. Jessie says it isn't as bad as it could be. They do have rules: "If someone writes something like, 'Dear Santa, my mom has cancer. Can you make it go away?' we don't deal with those. We give them back to the teacher." But still, she says, it's a disappointment.
"you'll probably see it in their faces. They prepare you for a few weeks before, but there's always that one person who's like, 'Wait. What are we doing?' And that's the person you should be looking out for. The person who wasn't paying attention in class until the letters are right in front of them. And then they're shattered. It's a weird experience."

crime culture goths guns north pole society usa xmas 0

2003/10/27

20,000 Libertarians to move to New Hampshire, vote as a bloc, create anarchocapitalist utopia, where Man can smoke dope, fire guns and be free of the depredations of evil collectivist parasites. (via bOING bOING)

Although Jackie Casey had voted for Wyoming, she just moved from Portland, Ore., to Merrimack, between Nashua and Manchester, renting a basement apartment with her cat, Soopa Doopa Hoopa, and her two 9-millimeter handguns. (She wants a machine gun "or at least a rifle" for Christmas.) She has already hung one wall and her bathroom with framed posters of Frank Zappa, who was a libertarian himself.
Dr. Sorens wrote that "within about 10 years after our move, we should have people in the state legislature and we should have entrenched political control of several towns and counties." He added that "once we have control of the county sheriffs' offices, we can order federal law enforcement agents out, or exercise strict supervision of their activities," and "once we have obtained some success in the state legislature, we can start working on the governor's race."

(Why does the name "Clearwater, FL" come to mind at this point?)

Libertarianism, of the American Ayn Rand-influenced Propertarian bent, is weird; in particular, the part about putting property rights above all other concerns. I half suspect that, had Libertarianism as we know it existed during the American Civil War, most Libertarians would have sided with the slave-owners, whose sacred and inalienable property rights were being threatened by the evil statist Abraham Lincoln (the "American Lenin", as some Libertarians call him).

anarchocapitalism ayn rand frank zappa guns libertarianism usa 5

2003/6/25

Is the new Harry Potter book a thinly-veiled Libertarian diatribe against government interference and gun control? Maybe J.K. Rowling is not so much the next C.S. Lewis as the next Ayn Rand. (via Reenhead)

guns harry potter libertarianism 2

2002/12/30

I just saw Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. (I had intended to see it whilst in London in November, but ran out of time.) It's an interesting film, looking at gun culture and violent crime in America; its thesis is an interesting one: that the problem is not so much a result of Americans having guns (Canada is full of guns but has a much lower murder rate) or a violent history (Germany, Japan, England, &c. do as well) but one of America living in a culture of fear, division and paranoia; with news reports constantly highlighting violent crime (because that's where the ratings are), a culture of mutual suspicion, and a near-criminalisation of poverty. (The differences between the US and Canada are particularly telling.) In short: guns don't kill people, memes do.

film guns michael moore propaganda usa 1

2002/10/7

Via Graham and others, a very lucid critique of what's wrong with libertarianism. Or in particular, the market-fundamentalist, Ayn Rand-quoting, gun-toting, all-taxes-are-evil strain that's popular in the US. The argument there is pretty much the same one that shoots down Communism.

By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.

guns libertarianism 0

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