Posts by Shay Lambert
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"best minds, knowledge and technology" have contributed significantly to the destruction of the planet over the last 150 years or so.
Surely they've also contributed one or two useful ideas as well. Penicillin is generally regarded as being quite useful, for example. And still don't know how those reflective cats eyes at the Royal Oak roundabout know to flash when someone's about to use the pedestrian crossing. That's just freakin' amazing.
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I'm not disagreeing with you Matthew. Yes, handguns are recovered regularly, but the fact that so few people get shot suggests that crims are reluctant to use them - perhaps because they are so hard to come by. And semi-autos may well be readily available, but they don't get used often either.
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Hand guns are the big killers in the UK and the US, not much of a problem here. Our isolation no doubt helps - I'm sure a black market Glock, if there is even such a thing here, would be cripplingly expensive. Perhaps that's why, apart from gun fetishists like Molenaar, we don't have the gun crime culture to the same extent as in the northern hemisphere. But the attitude to guns in this country helps - they are for shooting ducks and deer.
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we have no real problem with firearms
I think that's the point. For a country that is armed to the teeth, we still prefer to bludgeon, beat or stab our fellow citizens to death. We have a lot of guns, but we don't have a gun culture.
Sadly, boneheads like this Molenaar are going to crop up from time to time and cause havoc, but for the most part gun owners in this country are responsible and law abiding. I don't have any philosophical problems with requiring gun registration as well as owner licensing, but taking resources from other aspects of policing to police that would be counterproductive. -
Is National's judgment really this bad? Given the Commission is their coalition partner's hobby horse - and its existence seems to contradict their aim of reducing the number of public bodies - perhaps they're using the appointment of Rankin, who is so spectacularly unsuitable, to undermine it. Or is that giving Paula Bennett too much credit?
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Prohibition distorted and shaped his sickness into a fortified stronghold.
Molenaar had an arsenal, macho delusions of grandeur - as evidenced by said arsenal - and a short temper.
The cannabis search warrant was just the trigger. If it hadn't been that, it might have been getting pulled over with an expired WOF, or getting his phone disconnected. Or maybe he would have gone troppo because his neighbour's tree was dropping feijoas on his lawn.
Who knows, but even if cannabis was legal, something would have set him off eventually. You don't own that many guns of that nature unless you're hoping to use them one day. You can argue against cannabis prohibition on many different grounds. This ain't one of them.most people would register their guns. Particularly if you faced a five year sentence, as in the UK.
And yet even in the UK, criminals don't.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/aug/12/youthjustice.gunviolence -
The Aussie ban, has by many estimates driven between 400,000 and 600,000 semi-auto rifles underground, and not into the crusher as the aussies had intended.
And Australia is hardly a gun-violence-free utopia as a result. http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,,25336693-2862,00.htm
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The police tend to self-isolate from communities. How many of you have a cop in your circle of friends, or expect to meet one at a party?
Members of both my family and my wife's extended family are current or former police. One of the former said something interesting to me once. He said it wore him down, going to work and dealing with people every day who hated him.
Incidentally, he maintained a wide and varied circle of friends - some of who were recreational users. His only request was that they didn't smoke when he was in the room.
I dare say it's just a fact of policing, that you spend most of your day dealing with drunk, drugged, anti-social and sometimes downright dangerous people who aren't happy with anyone telling them what they can and can't do. And that, I imagine, would change your opinion of people in general, making you less inclined to venture outside the comfort of your own peer group.
A lot of this is (like I said before) down to laws like drug prohibition not being accepted by large numbers of people.
It would be a gross oversimplification of broad social and cultural changes over the past few decades to say that drug prohibition was the reason police are becoming more isolated from the community.
Police are a reflection of the community as much as anything else, and like any other group, some a good, some are bad and most are somewhere in between. The only difference being most people who are bad at their jobs don't get to break out the pepper spray and long baton.