Text 12411, 116 rader
Skriven 2005-09-21 09:35:00 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
  Kommentar till text 12344 av Raymond Yates (1:3613/48)
Ärende: looting in NO.
======================
Hello Raymond,

 MV>>>> image is burned into my retina: that of soldiers entering houses
 MV>>>> with assault rifles at the ready! It looked more like an
 MV>>>> invasion than a rescue mission....

 >>> When the "rescuees" are shooting, what is one to do?

 MV>> Why were they shooting in the first place? And with what?

 > Who knows the motivations of gangters and thugs, for that's
 > what they seem to be..

You classify them as gangsters and thugs because that is what they seem to be.
And they seem to be that way because they are shooting at people who come to
rescue them. And since they are classified as gangsters and thugs, you do not
need to ask why they are shooting.

Seems like a bit of circular reasoning to me...

 > It's a product of the deification of the gangster culture,
 > that's seems certain.

If there is a gangster culture in New Orleans, why did the rest of the USA
allow it to come to that?

Anyway, whatever the reasons, seeing soldiers forcible entering houses at
gunpoint is what one has become used to see as coming from Iraq, not from a
hurricane disaster area in the USA....

 MV>> One report I heard is that looters lifted all the handguns from
 MV>> Sears.

 > And Wal-Mart, both have sporting goods departments. Probably
 > pawn shops, all the traditional stores where guns are available
 > Not just handguns, but rifles and shotguns as well.

As I said, they could not have been looted if they were not there in the first
place.

 > Mush less reoprted (as it does not suit the national agenda)
 > are the people that protected their homes with guns of their own.

That indeed did not make it into the news that I saw.

But if it would, it would not have made a favorable impression either. What
society is it, where people need to defend themselves against there own instead
of that they work together to deal with a life threatening situation?

 MV>> My first thought was: that could not have happened if those weapons
 MV>> were not there to begin with. Over here you can not buy guns in a
 MV>> supermarket. It is extremely difficult to legally buy a gun anywhere.

 > However, for good or ill, they are here, and in significant numbers.

So maybe this disasters should make you (y'all) rethink the matter.

 > Many of the guns I expect were already in the possession of the
 > criminal element before the flood, and were purchased illegally.

Possibly.

 > There's quite a business in that as it happens. No criminal checks,
 > no waiting period or other government red tape, just hook up
 > with the local gunrunner, and you're all set...

Question is, why does a society allow it to come to that?

 > I would not be surprised that the same system exists in
 > Europe ( I know it does) but it's probably a lot less common.

I don't know. I have never attempted to buy a weapon. Legally or illegally.
TTBOMK it is impossible for me to legally obtain and own a gun. I have no idea
how difficult it would be to get one on the black market. I would not know
where to start, so I put it in the "not so easy" category. But obviously it is
not impossible. We have criminals here too and some of them have weapons, which
they surely did not obtain legally.

 MV>> An armed society is a polite society? Didn't look that way...

 > A true armed society is. I lived for a time in Eastern
 > Kentucky, where everyone had the ability to be legally armed.
 > It had a low crime rate and people were pointedly polite.

Maybe you are making the old mistake of assuming that a correlation implies a
causal relation.

But it need not be so. If there is a causal effect, the relation may be the
other way around, or it may be that the cause is a common factor. There can be
a dozen explanations of a correlation without there being a cause/effect
relation between A and B.

So the people of Eastern Kentucky are polite and law abiding you say. Well, so
are the people of The Netherlands and here - with a very few exceptions -
private citizens can not legally own fire arms.

 > What differentiates here is that NO was (and is) on the verge
 > of lawlessness in the first place,as it has had the reputation of
 > being one of the most corrupt cities in the nation, even including
 > NYC and Chicago. That rot extends into the Police department
 > (perenially under federal examination for graft and fraud) and
 > into the political system (millions of federal grant dollars
 > that vanished into thin air with no reciepts)

That explains - in part - the images of soldiers entering houses at gunpoint.
It does not explain why y'all let it come to that in the first place.

 > Hope you had a good vacation, and welcome back !

We had a nice holiday, thank you.


Cheers, Michiel

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