More London violence.

[h4rm0ny]

This is very sad and pretty upsetting. I don't know how someone could do this.

https://www.rt.com/uk/443833-crossbow-london-mother-pregnant/

Do we have a general thread on violence in our cities? I couldn't see one else I'd have just added this to it.

 

[h4rm0ny]

wut

According to the husband, the attacker was hiding in his shed and discovered by him there. The husband fled back to the house and the attacker followed him and then shot his wife. They operated on her with the arrow still in her to try and save her baby. Truly horrible.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Absolutely shocking. Was he the ex husband or something?

The attacker has the same last name as her maiden name ("Unmathallegadoo"). So presumably a connection. He's 50 years old so he could be her ex-husband but maybe some other relative.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Well the comments section of that news report is suitably horrific.

Yes. RT comments section is stuffed with some pretty horrible people. Lot of anti-Semitism in particular. RT doesn't mod their comments very much and it covers a lot of geo-politics. So it's a pretty ugly combination. The cost of Free Speech, I guess. :/

 

[h4rm0ny]

Unrelated to the OP story but i have to ask, why are crossbows even legal to own in the UK?

For the same reason "ninja" weapons aren't. It's media headlines. Did you read the dangerous weapons consultation that went round last year? Morningstar legal. Japanese chain weapon, not legal.

Sword with a straight-edge, legal. Sword with a curved edge (katana), not legal. You can buy a sword legally right now if it's hand-made (I know someone with one) but the same sword mass-produced would be illegal. Fun-fact: The cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was renamed to "Hero" Turtles in the UK and in the movie the censors cut a scene where the orange turtle swings around a string of sausages like nunchucks. British Politicians have a real "corrupting the youth" panic mindset. 70% of UK weapons legislation is based in this mindset. If crossbows were called Crossbuko and kids thought they were cool, they'd be banned tomorrow.

The pope tried to ban them once, too (not this one) to prevent the end of the world.

 

[h4rm0ny]

It's awful that knife crime is so bad. The only small consolation is that most of it involves gangs who are willing participants. where it is a tragedy is when innocent people are hurt.

Half these people are just teenagers. They need help. In an environment like that, all sorts of people pick up knives to protect themselves of their family / girlfriend. I think every death is a tragedy. Every life lost is a life that could have turned around, might have been going somewhere, has destroyed the life of their parents, siblings or kids. I'm not meaning to jump on you for this, you said it as only a "small consolation". But I question what "willing participant" means to a young person growing up in such an environment really means.

Honour killing for sure, she shared the same name as her killer before she got married.

The real question is if the Husband was part of it?

The story sounds a little "iffy" to me, he found this guy in the shed, he ran instead of closing the door and trapping him inside and when he got inside the house, he didn't close the door on him and all the while, somehow his wife got shot by a crossbow? You think... he be standing front of his wife, protecting her, especially in a small house they have.

Confronted by surprise by someone armed with a lethal weapon, running seems quite understandable to me. Nor, if he was "in on it" would he have likely opened the shed, screamed for his wife to run as he ran back to the house. Unless it's your contention that the whole scenario was fabricated and I see no reason to think so.

 

[h4rm0ny]

And I hope you realise I'm not doing any of this to my benefit

Well, you kind of are, given that all people are a shared consciousness and clones of each other.

But gentle teasing aside, do you feel better for this belief system and find it a positive way to manage your interactions to the world? And are there identifiable negatives that would cancel it out (refusal to use electricity, expensive "spiritual retreats", tendency to leap off buildings in the belief you can fly). If the former, but not the latter, maybe it's a positive thing. What you talk about in "seeing others as yourself" (I forget your precise wording) is not new. Buddhists, to pick one example, have been teaching to "see the Buddha in everyone"(1) as a spiritual exercise for a long, long time. And it's actually a very positive exercise that I recommend people try regardless of their religious beliefs. But we do seem to have drifted off-topic quite a lot.


(1) Whether or not this includes dogs, is an open question.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Licence open carry Swords, you go get trained and accessed over the course of a year in combat and ethics/honour and Psych evaluations, you pass you get a licence to carry a sword and buy combat insurance to cover the legal costs should you have to act in public to protect either yourself or another member of the public.

I used to know someone who carried a sword. Sharpened it themselves and had a sleeve for it in the back of their coat. He pulled it out on two people who were following him and which he suspected were going to mug him.

Don't know what happened to him. We lost touch.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Yet the police consistently say they dont want guns... have you even seen the bloody police in the US? It's a miniature armed militia at this point with some of them, once able to (not sure they can now) forfeiture anything they liked if they could ratchet up a reason for it. Escalation ends in one way, more of it and more dead police.

The US has on average around 50 deaths a year for police officers (which is small obviously), the UK has around 1-2 a year for any event.

Looks to me to be pretty ****** way to control things.

One's view of the US police shouldn't be too distorted by media and selective coverage. The USA has a population of 323million, overwhelmingly in urban areas and several hotspots for want of a better term. Chicago, areas of Washington and LA - all distort the picture dramatically. Yes, the US police are certainly more authoritarian and they are also routinely armed. But it's not accurate to say that any of these incidents would suddenly have become death by police.​

 

[h4rm0ny]

Licence open carry Swords, you go get trained and accessed over the course of a year in combat and ethics/honour and Psych evaluations, you pass you get a licence to carry a sword and buy combat insurance to cover the legal costs should you have to act in public to protect either yourself or another member of the public.

Half joking...

https://www.rt.com/news/444724-sword-robber-canada-jewelry

 

[h4rm0ny]

7 times more likely for police officers per 100000 people to be killed because of firearms vs any reason whatsoever in the UK.... is pretty damning that arming police does nothing but make for a worse situation.

First, please link to your source. Second, "killed because of firearms" - is that you trying to say killed BY firearms? Because if so, the police not having guns isn't going to change that. Thirdly, I said people get a distorted idea of US policing because of atypical hotspots that the USA contains - it has far larger and denser inner cities than most of Europe - and because of the exaggerating lens of the media. I stand by that. You don't seem to be addressing what I actually said but rather using my comment as a leaping off point to make some different argument about arming the police.

 

[h4rm0ny]

One of these is right, and there's no practical difference between "because of firearms" and "by firearms"... unless you're really nitpicking beyond any sense.

The difference was clearly explained. Disarming US police is unlikely to reduce the number of them killed by firearms. They're not typically shooting themselves.

 

[h4rm0ny]

I am thinking of all the different sociological and psychological factors which cause children to become involved with crime and gangs and you call me an apologist.

J-Hus isn't a child though. He's a 22 year old man. He's well into the time of life where personal responsibility is to be expected, not "society made me do it". He is the one who chooses to have gang ties that increase the likelihood of him being in a violent confrontation a hundred-fold.

Same here I've never stabbed anyone, I do IT support lmao. Again you are thinking in your bubble

You do this thing where if someone doesn't share your view, you declare that they must be ignorant / privileged and simply not have your greater experience. Some of us have lived in some pretty rough areas and we somehow still manage to believe in personal responsibility and making better life choices.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Are you actually ill ?

You are saying someone murdering someone "is not wrong" ? You literally have no recompense from that, you have just totally invalidated any possible opinion you could have on the matter.

Blazed seems to be of a mind that there is no free will, that our path is determined by circumstances both environmental and inherited and there is no room left between these things for an "I" that makes its own choices. A mindset that removes personal responsibility and culpability from any discussion. A society that rejects personal responsibility and culpability is a weak and dying society. Societies that don't believe in these things will be replaced by societies that do; and individuals who do not believe in these things will not enjoy the success that is enjoyed by people who do.

Simultaneously with preaching that we are trapped in a world without choice, Blazed also preaches he/she has the way out for us. Neglecting that for those of us who do accept personal responsibility, we're not trapped.

 

[h4rm0ny]

The evidence for freewill is weak. There is actually more proof that there is no free will.

Proof of a negative is logically dubious. But regardless, I never said whether there was free will or not. I said that a society that rejects it is a weaker society and an individual who rejects it will be less successful than otherwise. And I believe there's plenty of evidence of that.

This is your problem you believe in absolute truths based on your opinion not realising your making gargantuan claims out of opinion alone.

I'm not aware anything I've written uses my opinion as evidence.