Daily Archives: 26 August 2013

Why are we droning exactly?

WHY ARE WE DRONING, EXACTLY?

Honest question here. The policy is so magnificently, impossible, devastatingly reprehensible, it’s hard to imagine the dynamics within the military bureaucracy which support it.

Here are my guesses escalating up the conspiracy spectrum:

1. Some soldiers and officers are looking for job security in their specialty. They enjoy blowing things up, and can’t hear anything else above the sound of their awesomeness.

2. As I’ve written before, when the military has two ways of solving a problem, it’ll choose the way that involves paying large sums of money to a military industry.

3. There are psychopathic people in this world (including a world leader or two) who openly preach death to all Arabs. Droning is part of that campaign.

4. Someone is promoting an inter-civilizational conflict, either because “war is the health of the state,” or because they want the Middle East in turmoil.

Other guesses welcome.

Harvard study reveals gun control counterproductive

open quoteOnce again, a study from an organization that you would never accuse of being “gun-loving” or “right-wing” seems to disprove the myth that the availability of handguns increases murder rates. In fact, it doesn’t.

The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides. Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates.

Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high. In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the “gun-ridden” United States, cites the study. ”Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.” In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high.

The study revealed several European countries with significant gun ownership, like Norway, Finland, Germany and France – had remarkably low murder rates. Contrast that with Luxembourg, “where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.”close quote (Read more)