Summations Only

The police so often burst into the wrong home--and shoot people, terrorize naked or nightgowned women (apparently a fetish of SWAT cops), shatter your children's peace of mind and destroy property--that it's practically a news subgenre.These home invasions are based on tips from drug addict snitches, so I guess it's not surprising. Sometimes they make up the snitches, something that comes out more often when they shoot the wrong citizen.Imagine: It only takes one addict's word to send the SWAT team shooting and screaming into your house. And the police sometimes lie about even that.Steel doors won't help. They'll come in with an armored tactical vehicle and charge you with criminal fortification.I have a 1st Gulf War vet friend who built a solid oak beam door. He has many guns. He says, they break in here, they'll regret it. I used to laugh.

In basic training, we learned not to call our M16s guns. They are rifles.If you made that mistake, you might be required to clutch your M16 over your head with one hand, your genitals with the other, shaking each on cue while declaiming 50 times or more:

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(shake) This is my rifle,
(shake) This is my gun.
(shake) This is for killing,
(shake) This is for fun.

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It was only half bad-- --too many shakes of one, too few of the other. That young man just needed better training and a better notion of fun.

Because he fancies himself an enforcer.Petrophysics' claims, and that specific language, started appearing on rightwing sites and e-mail chains a day or two ago.I believed that's what he googled. It's a sort of meta-irony, his claim to have spotted a lie through original resarch...Sarah Palin's reaction was similar: "Right. That's a clock, and I'm the Queen of England."She compared reactions critical of the arrest to another case:

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Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school's lot later that day.

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She introduced a fictional father/son context. Family values!And turned the car into a truck. Country values!And turned six students into one. Lone Patriot values!As Sam Levine noted:

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In 2010, six students at a Michigan high school were suspended after school officials found firearms in their car that they had used on a deer hunt earlier that morning. School policy and signs clearly forbade the students from bringing the firearms onto school property.

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Bringing a clock to school warrants an arrest; bringing an arsenal to school is nothing to get excited about, even if you have to lie about it, because white guns.If Ahmed exaggerated his accomplishment, the only possible explanation is that he's an incipient terrorist, not an early teen looking to impress. If a bunch of white students bring an arsenal to school, it's obviously innocent. It's fascinating to read back over the comment sections following the original news stories, where self-proclaimed conservatives call the students' suspension an overreaction (they weren't arrested), and speculate that school "libtards" specifically targeted the kids with guns.Personally, I find both cases likely to be examples of innocently foolish teenagers looking to impress, but they've both inspired little white lies in the service of larger white truths.Edited by Omnivorous, : exagerrated spelling

And a lit 100mm cigarette inserted into a matchbook gives you a ten minute fuse. I learned that in the Army.Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, but don't get arrested.

I've been successfully spotting bullshit for 60+ years.What do your electronics qualifications have to do with anything I discussed?As I said, the plethora of similar claims made in similar language on sites that share your political bent, all of which predate your post, make your claims of independent discovery doubtful at best--not because you don't know enough about electronics, but because a dozen other people claim, in similar language, to have made the identical discovery.I guess at least one of them must be telling the truth. Are you the One?If we're going down this particular irrelevant road, shouldn't we just measure dicks?

Petrophysics, maybe it's as you say, and many folks independently looked at the clock's components, recognized their origin, and concluded it was thus somehow a fraud.But that meme has been surging through the cyberverse now for a couple of days; even Richard Dawkins--who is a magnet for rightwng e-mail--turned to twitter to first defend the boy, then to denounce the 'hoax' with the indignation of the duped, and then finally to admit that, yes, perhaps he was making an ass out of himself by denouncing a 14-year-old boy's pencil case clock as a hoax.It is rampant on Facebook. Type ahmeds clock into Google, and ahmeds clock hoax is the first auto-completion, with 2,830,000 hits.So, if you've been oblivious to all that, and genuinely drew your own conclusions, I apologize. I know conditional apologies are like kissing your sister, but it's the best I can do.And I'm not sure getting there on your own is better than being led there, when there is that mean and bigoted.

Like these?Which one looks the most like it?

Couldn't find one, right?Thousands of images of bombs...a long page of time bombs, most of them photographs, and tabs to look at several different pages of bombs. And the whole web to find something that looks like that boy's clock. And you didn't.Hint on those images: They include explosives.

I wasn't going to reply, but lest anyone believe I linked to a google search for "cartoon dynamite", I will.As you know, the link took you to a google bomb page that prominently featured time bombs; across the top, a sliding panel provided access to half a dozen other categories of bomb.Briefcase bombs indistinguishable from Ahmed's pencil case? Really? Which picture would that be? Because people like you staff the school administration.

Then I'll be ridiculously content for folks to check out whether the time bombs I linked to resemble Looney Tunes, and whether his pencil case resembles a briefcase. Won't you?And for you to ponder what an over-reactive administration might have to do with a teacher's advice.

Then booze must top your list.In the meantime, you'd need to persuade the GOP that background checks are a good thing at gun sales.

If we are to predict who will kill and keep guns out of their hands, there are far better predictors than psychiatric meds. Those include male gender, poverty, alcohol abuse, past violent victimization of the shooter, a history of misdemeanor assaults, domestic abuse, etc.The shooter was also apparently a white supremacist. I'd imagine that is a pretty fair predictor of violent loner rage.As to picking out Christian victims for special treatment, that much seems clear, though not the precise reason. He was solitary and angry; perhaps he felt Christians had failed him somehow.Start the kind of database you describe, and folks will stop seeking care. The result would be more violence, not less.

At present, not even felony background checks at all gun sales can be accomplished due to political opposition.I don't think Americans of either political camp will accept a database of folks seeking mental health care in anyone's hands, and if one existed, fewer people will seek care--not so much for the guns as for the stigma and fear. The government can't keep its own secrets; what government database has never been abused?So we can't summon the political will to screen for known violent felons at all gun sales, in part due to distrust of the government, and tracking the mentally ill will remain unacceptable to most, and wouldn't help much anyway. Even the seriously mentally ill as a group are only very slightly more prone to violence than the general population, a difference not predictive at the individual level.The will of the pro-gun camp is for zero government regulation: unregistered sales and universal open carry. The ineffective background checks we have now were hard won, and it's difficult to see any way through the current impasse.Eventually the tide of blood may wash that paralysis away. Ironically, I can envision the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms being lost not to liberal machinations but to a near-universal disgust at its abuse.

Don't underestimate our crazy.From a WHO report in 2011, cited in The Atlantic:

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Over a 12-month period, 27 percent of adults in the U.S. will experience some sort of mental health disorder, making the U.S. the country with the highest prevalence. Mental health disorders include mood disorders, anxiety disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and substance abuse. Over one’s entire lifetime, the average American has a 47.4 percent chance of having any kind of mental health disorder. Yes, that’s almost one in two. The projected lifetime prevalence is even higher: for people who reach age 75 it is 55 percent. The WHO data does not take into account eating disorders, personality disorders, and schizophrenia; the incidence of these disorders together is about 15 percent in the U.S., according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

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It would be more practical to register the Normals.

You mean it is imperative that we counter the Hollywood myth that many gun owners are self-righteous narcissists who won't help solve the problem of mass-murdered elementary school kids as long as their "intelligent responsible" feelings are hurt?It hurt my feelings that women on campus saw every man as a potential threat during a particularly bad season of sexual assaults in the 80s, but I still agreed to help as a library-to-dorm escort when asked.I guess I could have refused, telling them that men don't rape women, penises rape women, but I couldn't achieve that level of responsible intelligence.