newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Terrorists take advantage of weak gun laws in U.S.
It was only a matter of time before terrorists figured out how to use the gaping hole in U.S. security. The pair of Islamic State supporters who killed 14 and wounded 21 in San Bernardino took advantage of lax gun control laws to amass thousands of rounds of high-powered ammo and bomb-making equipment in their home.
In the midst of its latest tragedy, America appears to be searching for answers. Data from Google shows that normally searches for “gun shop” easily outpace those for “gun control” in most states. But after a mass shooting, there is a spike for searches on “gun control” in almost every state.
My hunch is that most Americans would be in favour of at least some kind of better regulation of gun sales, but they’re up against powerful forces.
For example, a day after the massacre, the U.S. Senate voted down broader background checks for people buying guns despite widespread support for the measure. It might have something to do with the fact that there’s a lot of money in gun sales, with the industry privately crowing about how mass shootings are good for business.
Here’s how it works. Following a mass shooting, there is talk of gun control, which the National Rifle Association and other gun advocates attack as an assault on the Second Amendment. Notably, gun and ammunition manufacturers often donate, either directly or as a portion of each sale, to the NRA. The fear of losing gun rights leads to panic buying, which brings greater profits to gun retailers, gun companies and their investors.
The enemies of America see this as an opening. If you want ammunition to attack the United States, why not get it from one of the most wide-open markets in the world — the U.S. itself.
In case you were wondering, yes there is an app for that. Terrorists are using the encrypted messaging app Telegram for crowdfunding guns. The owners of the app have cracked down, but one campaign apparently remains active.
And just to rub it in, one of the San Bernardino terrorists pledged allegiance to Islamic State on one of the most American of modern institutions, Facebook.
The post has been removed, of course. But I’m wondering if we’re reaching a point where mass shootings have become as American as apple pie.
More posts in the Crime category
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Paris
I was going to write about pet finders on Facebook. They work great. If ever you lose your dog or cat, go to Facebook and search “missing pets.” You can also add the name of your city.
You’ll discover that there are hundreds of caring people in your home town who will go out of their way to help reunite you with Fido or Fluffy. Two success stories have come to my attention recently.
I was going to write about that, but it somehow seems trivial when over a hundred people were massacred Friday in Paris. When an atrocity like this occurs, I search for meaning but increasingly I find it unfathomable.
Revenge? Cycles of violence? Ideology? Those things kind of make sense but always to seem to fall apart. Surely there are limits to the evil people are capable of.
If there is any comfort to be found, it is with the knowledge that in the midst of horrific events, there are always good people trying to do whatever they can to make things better. I read, for example, about a man finding an injured teenage girl among the dead, scooping her up, and running 200 metres to get her to a cab that could take her to a hospital.
I was impressed to see the Twitter hashtag #porteouverte (French for “open door”) along with people’s home addresses. They were offering shelter to strangers who, for whatever reason, had no way of getting to safety after the attacks. It takes guts to publish personal information at any time, but especially at a time of crisis when you can’t be sure what to expect.
I was also impressed that Facebook activated a check-in feature that I hadn’t heard of before. If you’re in a danger zone, you can check in and let your friends and relatives know you’re OK. This no doubt saved a lot of people a lot of grief.
Unfortunately, there were also some disappointments. You have to wonder what goes through someone’s mind when they see a tragedy and think about how they can use it to promote a personal agenda.
Such was the case when U.S. politician Newt Gingrich tweeted about how much safer the victims would have been if they were allowed to carry concealed weapons. Former New York Times writer Judith Miller responded with a snarky, almost incomprehensible, tweet about whiney college students.
Even here in Kamloops, I saw journalists goading each other about finding a local angle. I’ve been there, so I can understand being caught up in the moment, but it certainly wasn’t their finest hour.
As always, social media is a reflection of humanity — the good and the bad. It’s no wonder so many people prefer to concentrate their efforts on missing pets — less complex and always appreciative.
More posts in the Crime category
Saturday, December 15, 2012
U.S. schools may be safer, but they're not safe enough
Al Tompkins has done journalists a service by attempting to place school shootings in the U.S. into perspective. I once attended a class led by Tompkins at the Poynter Institute and would describe him as a no-bullshit kind of guy — an advocate of clear thinking.
In his article for Poynter, he asserts that American schools are safe and presents statistics to back this up. They show that school crime has fallen dramatically in recent years, which does indeed help to counter some of the hysteria.
But there was one figure from an NPR report that I can’t get out of my mind: “By 2010, the latest figures available, those numbers had decreased to two homicides and four violent crimes per 1,000 students.”
That means one out of 500 students in the United States was murdered in 2010. It means that in a high school with 500 students, you could expect that one of them would be killed during the school year.
But say you live in a safe neighbourhood, where students are never killed. That means other schools have to pick up the slack, and have two or three students killed in a year. It’s shocking.
I have no idea how many students there are in the U.S., but let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s 50 million — although in a country of 311 million you would expect it to be higher. That would mean 100,000 students were killed in 2010. It’s beyond shocking.
I suppose there is hope in the fact that this number has been decreasing and that we may one day see it drift down to zero, but I don’t see this as a reason for complacency. The no-bullshit solutions are blindingly obvious — restrictions on gun ownership and improved access to health care. Cut the crap and just do it.
More posts in the Crime category
Friday, August 19, 2011
We know who set those fires, and it should be no surprise
So who’s to blame for the recent arsons at Centennial Park? I have it on good authority that police expect park vandalism to take a sharp drop once school is back in. That points to the obvious culprits: drunken teenagers.
I wonder how a small community such as Westsyde can have this kind of problem. Surely, people know each other well enough that there would be social pressure on parents, and even the teens themselves, to take good care of their park.
The Westsyde Community Development Society is a stellar of example of neighbours fundraising and working together. It must be exasperating for them to know that some of their neighbours are deliberately destroying their efforts.
In the case of Centennial Park, someone set a fire at the fieldhouse near the rink. It was a community fundraising that helped build the structure, and it is volunteers who use the equipment there to maintain the rink. They had hoped to expand the building for washrooms to be used with a water park nearby.
With repairs alone estimated in the thousands of dollars, that effort has suffered a serious setback.
So if, as I suspect, drunk teenagers did start the fire, then why haven’t their parents turned them in? From what I hear, the culture among many parents these days is one of accommodation. They have no control over their children so they give in to their wishes to party in the parks. Some actually drive them there, give them a six-pack and pick them up later.
The apparent logic is that at least they know where their kids are.
I hate reading advice to parents from columnists or bloggers. It seems that if we just did this or that simple thing, all would be well. Believe me, if there were some simple magic answer, every parent would be doing it.
In this case, though, where parents may actually be complicit in a crime, I really have to wonder if there is any hope at all.
More posts in the Crime category
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Neighbour Watch might be best way to emulate the Cyrs
As someone who reads press releases from the police several times a week, I can tell you that it’s true — the North Shore really does get more than its fair share of crime. To get an idea of what it looks like, have a look at the crime map. Seeing is believing.
So when I spoke to the Cyr brothers on Monday about their go-round with a thief at their home on Vernon Avenue, I could sense that these guys felt they were doing more than just protecting their property. They were striking a blow for their side of the river.
Not that they have any illusions. Jordan and Cody are plain-spoken men with a view of life that’s hard not to agree with. They worked hard for their stuff and no one is going to take it away from them. They caught a thief taking power saws from their garage in the middle of the night, struggled with him, and held him long enough for police to make an arrest.
The big question is whether their actions will be an inspiration to others. Scrapping with drug addicts is not the safest thing to do, but Neighbour Watch programs can also be empowering. Police in many communities will help you them up, although I’m not aware of any in Kamloops.
The Crime Stoppers website for Kamloops makes mention of Neighbourhood Watch, but details have not been posted. The Kamloops RCMP website offers it as a service, but again there are no details.
If anyone knows of any successful programs of this kind in Kamloops, please let me know.
More posts in the Crime category
Thursday, July 28, 2011
It may be time to combine legalization with education
The Daily News has made a good case for keeping marijuana illegal, but it misses an important point — finding and using marijuana is so easy that it is practically legal already.
Anyone who wants to smoke a joint can easily be accommodated. Just ask around. Someone you know is bound to know someone who can help you. Or if that doesn’t work out, take a stroll downtown or on Tranquille Road some evening.
Despite the best efforts of law enforcement officials and billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, it’s just as easy for a teenager to buy pot as it is to buy alcohol. Of course, they shouldn’t be using it, especially at that age when their brains are still growing. I’m talking about efforts to restrict access. Those have failed.
Money now being wasted on marijuana interdiction would be better spent on education. There is a lot of science to show the harmful effects of marijuana, and people should be made well aware of it so they can make informed choices on whether to try it. In fact, with program such as this in place, marijuana use could conceivably decrease if it were made legal.
More posts in the Crime category
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Theft of Megan's sign must have taken some effort
There are a lot of things that are just plain wrong about the theft of a sign memorializing Megan, a Black Pines girl.
But looking at the picture of the post where the sign used hang, I’m struck by the effort the thieves must have gone through.
The pole looks to be several feet high, so they would have had to climb on the fence next to it. Not only that, but they would have had to go through the effort of ripping it from the chains that held it.
And the sign is heavy, so lifting it down and carrying it away likely means that more than one person was involved.
My first thought was that this was done by someone drunk and stupid. Now I’m wondering if the theft was something more personal. Either way, there’s not excuse for it.
More posts in the Crime category
Friday, May 27, 2011
The shortest 30 seconds ever
After reading the report from the Criminal Justice Branch on its decision not to lay charges in the death of Wilbert Bartley, one thing stands out that in a sense explains everything: the entire incident took 30 seconds.
During those 30 seconds:
» Police pulled up alongside Bartley’s vehicle to talk to him.
» One officer got out of the police vehicle.
» The police driver pulled back behind Bartley’s vehicle.
» Bartley drove in reverse and slammed into the police vehicle so hard that it tipped off two of its wheels.
» Bartley drove forward toward the officer who had originally got out to talk to him.
» The officer shot Bartley.
» Bartley’s vehicle veered off and struck the building.
I’m not sure if things move that fast even in the movies.
If this string of events, as related in the report, is to be believed then the officer was not just contending with a vehicle driving toward him, but a vehicle that had just got finished bashing into another vehicle. It doesn’t take much imagination to believe that the driver did not have the safety of others uppermost in his mind. At the very least, it would be justified for the officer to conclude that the driver was out of control and that lives were at risk. We’ll never know what Bartley’s actual intentions were, but it’s clear that he could not be allowed to continue.
The question that arises is whether shooting him was the best way to stop him. Again, let’s remember that all this happened within a space of 30 seconds.
Police, and the rest of us, are entitled to take action to defend themselves if they feel that they or others around them are at risk of being killed or seriously injured. In this case, the officer’s reaction was to fire his gun at Bartley.
Could he have done something else? With only seconds to make up his mind? When it was a matter of life or death? The fact that he had the presence of mind to do anything at all is amazing. Most of us would likely have been frozen with fear, done nothing — and be dead.
More posts in the Crime category
Friday, April 15, 2011
Putting Kamloops crime on the map
I’ve started a new project called Criminal Kamloops — a map showing crimes or suspected crimes as reported in The Daily News. Different types of icons represent the various types of crimes. Click on the icon for information about the crime. To get all the details, a link is available to take you to the original story at The Daily News website.
One of the things that strikes me after a week of working on the map is that there really isn’t much in the way of reported crime in Kamloops — at least not recently. I may have to resort to the archives to find more. This could be interpreted in one of two ways: our city is blessedly free of crime or police aren’t giving us the full story.
I’m hoping that as more crimes are plotted on the map that trends will emerge. It may also serve to give people a truer picture of how much crime actually exists — our fears often don’t match the reality.
More posts in the Crime category
Monday, January 24, 2011
Arson is often revenge
If the information we have on the fire at a Brocklehurst home on Saturday night is correct, it would appear that revenge was the motive. With a disgruntled former boyfriend facing charges, vengeance seems like a safe bet.
According to interfire.org, revenge is one of the six main motives for arson. In fact, for serial arsonists, revenge is cited as the motive in 41 per cent of cases. The other five main motives are vandalism, crime concealment, extremism, profit and excitement. How do you profit from arson? Mainly insurance through insurance fraud.
When one of your children has a boyfriend or girlfriend, they can become almost like a member of the family. So when there’s a breakup, a lot of ties are involved. Those emotions can be tough to deal with.
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