Jason Kottke

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If anyone is looking for articles to read after the Newtown shootings, Jason Kottke has been posting non-stop.



  • JDSoCal

    Uh, actually, no, if someone is looking for anti-liberty, anti-constitutional, liberal clap-trap articles, that is the place.

    Nice fair-and-balanced link on the issue Jim, Jesus.

    • LTMP

      Anti-liberty? Really? I would prefer to have the liberty to send my kids to school without a flack jackets.

      Fair and balanced doesn’t mean you have to include spin and lies from the NRA.

      • Chaz

        It also doesn’t mean you have to introduce hyperbole and FUD into the equation. The problem with these links is that they offer no opportunity for a response and do not encourage debate. Instead they serve only to reinforce existing views or anger the other side.

        • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

          Because there is a “side” to aiding and abetting wanton murder in the name of worldview predicated a “Red Dawn” fantasy where “patriots” get to shoot US authorities with impunity? Guess what? The debate has been controlled by the gun fetishists for decades, especially those fond of perpetually putting off the discussion until some imaginary point where such a discussion might be appropriate; a point that conveniently never arrives. The gun nuts got their wish: gun laws are all but nonexistent or emasculated, and assault weapons are somehow considered a rational response to a burglary.

          Now it’s time to swing the discussion back to reality.

          • Chaz

            The Reality is that despite such “nonexistent” gun laws, crime in the united states is in a 15-year decline.

          • LTMP

            And assaults in the US are in decline as well. Right now, they are only about 6 times the average in the northern hemisphere.

    • jen729w

      For your point to be relevant you have to provide a single example where carrying a firearm, as per your libertarian, constitutional views, has prevented or even reduced in severity a mass shooting.

      Back to you, then.

      Still waiting.

      No? Ah. Well, that’s a problem.

      • Chaz

        “Jowyk began researching his law school’s gun policy following the January incident in which a disgruntled student at Appalachian Law School, Peter Odighizuwa, allegedly shot and killed the school’s dean, a professor and a student on campus before being subdued by two armed students, Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges.”

        “Student Group Wants Campus Gun Ban Lifted”

        Christine Hall September 17, 2002

        • jen729w

          That case hardly demonstrates the point, does it? Odighizuwa shot a couple of people then calmly walked outside, not shooting, and was subdued.

          Imagine the teachers at Newtown carrying guns, as has been suggested. What are they going to do? Walk out in to a hallway full of kids and take a shot at the shooter? This presumes either a) the teachers are extremely proficient shots, or b) they don’t mind firing a gun in to a hallway full of kids on the hope that they’ll hit the bad guy and miss all the kids.

          I don’t really see that being a realistic scenario. Do you?

          • Chaz

            I don’t think a teacher who is trained and lisenced poses any more of a threat than the police who qualify once a year with their firearms. But in this case, would another gun really have made the situation worse? It already turned out as basically the worst case scenario.

          • jen729w

            Exactly my point.

            The teacher having a gun might not have made it better; it was already “the worst case scenario”.

            The solution to this worst case scenario seems, therefore, not to be to give all teachers – and everyone else – a gun. It seems to be to remove guns from your society so that a kid can’t just get one from his parents’ cupboard and go on a shooting rampage.

            It’s this seemingly-obvious-to-the-rest-of-the-world logic that, when you Americans “don’t get it”, astounds the rest of us so much. We think you’re absurd. Sorry. We do.

            You want everyone to have a gun so that they can gun down a madman with an assault rifle. We think you shouldn’t let madmen get their hands on assault rifles in the first place. If that means some of you are denied the right to shoot a gun, well, yeah. You are. That’s right. You can’t own a gun.

            You can’t own a gun because everyone owning guns means madmen shoot kids with assault rifles. Again and again. Over and over.

            Isn’t that clear?

          • Chaz

            It would be awesome if guns could be removed from our society (police included, ie England).

            I don’t think they can. 300 Million Firearms are in circulation, a tiny fraction of which are registered. A buyback or confiscation would be so far from comprehensive that existing stock would certainly supply criminals for decades.

            I don’t want everyone to have a gun. No one wants madmen to get their hands on “assault rifles”.

            Why can’t I own a gun? Plenty of Germans, New Zealanders and Italians own firearms since they have proven themselves competent.

            Why should I be allowed to drink when 10,000 people die each year in drunk driving accidents? Why should a substance ingested to purposely impair judgement be legal when there is blood in the streets over and over again?

        • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

          Well by all means lets applaud a system that justifies itself thru the argument that not quite as many school kids are dead.

    • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

      Give it a rest, Francis. Or was King George III going to make a play to tax your iTunes music without representation?

      The obscenely narcissistic view that the US is somehow the world’s only true democracy of free people because paranoid housewives can stockpile enough weapons and ammunition to make an infantry squad seem outgunned is as insane as it is comical.

      Unless “freedom” is measured by the amount of blood being scrubbed off the walls of US classrooms, it’s probably time to reassess the need to base your concept of “liberty” on violent anti-government paranoia.

      • Chaz

        “Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.”