Gun Crime, Facts vs Opinions

Gun control advocates, the press and many politicians would have you believe that we in the USA are the leaders in violence and murder. They tell us again and again that as a nation we do not compare to our peaceful neighbors. 

However a U.N. report produced in 2011 tells a completely different story.

The report contends that the US crime rate in general has been declining since the mid 1990s, resulting in the steady downward trend of the Northern American
homicide rate.

The report goes on to break down the numbers on homicides and group them into geographic regions. 

The USA is in the Americas region. There are 45 other countries listed in the Americas region.  

Given the press about our love of guns and murder you would think we would be on the top of the homicide list. But the U.N's facts tell a different story. 

Here is a shortened list of the winners and losers. Homicide rates are listed after the country's name.

The winners:

Canada: 1.8 

Martinique 4.2

Cuba 4.6

United States of America 5.0

38 other countries fall in the middle.

 

The losers:

Venezuela  49.0

Jamaica  52.1

El Salvador  66.0

Honduras  82.1

So out of 46 countries we rank 43rd in murder rates. Some might say that that we still are the murder capital because those are statistics that do not reflect the total number of people killed, and we gun crazy Americans kill far more people than anyone else. Well that too would be wrong. 

Remember with 330 million people our population is so large that many of country's in the list would not even make a large city here. 

Total number or homicide victims:

Brazil 43,909

Mexico 20,585

Colombia 15,459

United States of America 15,241

Venezuela 13,985

All of these countries have far more restrictive guns laws than we do. Mexico has one, yes one gun store. It resides on a military installation and the process to purchase a gun is so complex only a retinal scan is missing. Brazil allows gun ownership with a license from the government and there are restrictions on caliber, style, even accessories. No one under the age of 25 may own a gun. Venezuela and Colombia are similar in their gun laws to Brazil.

Based on all this information many would point out that Canada is still the best/safest place to live. But again that would be wrong. With the exception of homicide almost all other violent crime rates in Canada are higher than ours.

As a percentage of population:

Assault   Canada 2.3 - USA 1.2

Rape       Canada 0.8 - USA 0.4

Total Crime Victims Canada 23.8 - USA 21.1

When it comes to crimes that may be prevented by gun ownership, assault and rape Canada beats us by a 2 to 1 margin. The Total Crime figures might be skewed as well since one of the big crimes in the USA that Canada does not have is car theft. The US had ten times more car thefts than Canada. But this may have been balanced out by the more  restrictive drug laws in CANADA, which resulted in 164 times more drug arrests in Canada than the USA. 

But wait everyone says Canada is much better than the USA. Nope, not even the Canadians are happy there. Their suicide rate is higher than ours, 9% higher in the 15 to 24 year group and 18% higher in the 25 to 34 year group.

Well, Europe then is much better, right?

Maybe, maybe not. They do have a lower homicide rate in most places, but Russia beat us out with 15,954 homicides or over twice our murder rate.

In the USA one in ten murder victims is female, in Europe four out of ten murder victims are women. 

All in all, when you get the real numbers and not the opinions we are not doing too bad compared to our neighbors.

The Radarman

Statistical Information:

UN 2011 Global Study on Homicide

Canada vs USA Crime Rates

Mexico's one Gun Store 

 

 

  

Mitt and the Olympiads

On July 25th, Brian Williams of ABC asked Mitt Romney what he thought about the Olympics. Mitt's reply has become a huge scandal. All the news commentators, are calling it a great misstep in his campaign. How oh how can Mitt win now that he has said such terrible things about England and the Olympics? Wow! Well just what did Mitt say that was so bad. It took a little digging to find a transcript of the terrible things Mitt said but here it is in all its horror. 

EMBARGOED: NBC/ROMNEY EXTENDED TRANSCRIPT 

MITT ROMNEY:
You know, it's hard to know just how well it were turn out-- will turn out. There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the-- private security firm not having enough people-- the sup-- supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging. Because in the games, there-- there are three parts that makes games successful.

Number one, of course, are the athletes. That's what overwhelmingly the games are about. Number two are the volunteers. And they'll have great volunteers here. But number three are the people of the-- of the country. Do they come together and celebrate the Olympic moment? And that's something which we only find out once the games actually begin.

 Yep, read'em and weep folks. That is all he said. It is horrible isn't it? 

He said that it is difficult to tell how successful a huge project that took of billions of dollars, years of planning and execution, thousands of man hours and most importantly, that had not happened yet would turn out. The nerve of him to not declare a complete and utter success for an event that had not yet occurred.

He had the gall to identify that there were things that were disconcerting. He did not say problems he just said disconcerting. He went on to identify two things both of which had been identified by the press both in and out of Briton as PROBLEMS, not just disconcerting.

Mitt identified three things he thought were necessary for a "good" Olympics.

"Number one, of course, are the athletes. That's what overwhelmingly the games are about." Well there is his first mistake. He assumed the Olympics was about the athletes when everyone running the show know it is about the logos, the sponsorships, the TV time, the brands, the MONEY. Foolish man doesn't he know better.

"Number two are the volunteers. And they'll have great volunteers here." No matter how you try to turn it around that sounds pretty positive about the people. But I'm sure someone in the press found a pretzel twist that would make it sound bad.

"But number three are the people of the-- of the country. Do they come together and celebrate the Olympic moment? And that's something which we only find out once the games actually begin." There it is again he did not make a glowing prediction about the success of something that has not yet occurred. 

One of the things most everyone desires in their politicians is that they tell us what they are really thinking and tell us the truth. It is something we rarely get. 

Well Mitt Romney just told us what he was really thinking, he gave us a truthful opinion. For that everyone is now saying he cannot be President. You know what they may just be right.

 

3D Printer makes guns too.

3d Printed Firearm

Looks like 3d printers can do more than just print little bits for toys. I wonder how long before Lucky Lucy Napolitano tries to ban printers?

Things that haven't made it into our news.

Have you heard about the largest industrial port in the Caribbean? Somehow, I don't think our embargo of Cuba is working anymore.

Havana Cuba Business Travel Culture and Politics

According to Oregon water laws, all water is publicly owned?!?!

Adam called it again. He who controls the water, controls everything.
Oregon Man Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail

Black Hatter's, Mad Hatter's and the FAA

This article tells the story of a hacker at the Black Hat convention demonstrating the ability to spoof the FAA's Air Traffic Control System into believing a phantom aircraft was inbound to touch down on the runway. Hacker Shows Air Traffic Control Danger With 'Ghost Planes' 

For background, I spent over 20 years in the USAF, working on Air Traffic Control radar systems. I watched the progression from electron tube radars to state of the art computer based systems. In truth I retired almost 20 years ago, so things have changed, but slowly and much if what I worked on is still in service. 

In the simplest of terms, the radar of the past used by the controller to guide airplanes around sent out a big radio pulse, it bounced off the metal of the aircraft, came back in the antenna and was displayed to the controller as a target. As the systems advanced a device called a transponder was installed on aircraft. This responded to signals from the ground and "Replied" in the form of codes which relayed a whole new set of information about the aircraft, most importantly the altitude of the plane and its ident code, the "squawk". This became the little numbers seen on radar scope as 0380 or 5689. But all of this information was processed at the ATC radar's location and displayed along with the old radar paint. So the controller saw both the live target and the digital data that went with it. In today's ATC further advances can and do fill books about how the live and squawk data is now sent out for processing in huge data centers and linked to things like crew lists and flight plan info. But at its core a radar painted the airplane and a real target had to be generated.

ADS-B is part of the NEXTGEN and removes the radar from the picture. The only information seen by a controller is the data transmitted from the airplane. As a result the ATC system must assume if it is getting data it must be valid. If as stated, a hacker can spoof the data and make planes appear at will FAA has a problem and a big one. 


However, the entire NEXTGEN project is costing a huge pile of money as well as suffering from completion date issues, and it will require even more time and money before it is done. 

Here is an interesting quote “The bad news is that out of the $11 billion designated for modernization of the ATC system in February, only about one-third, or $4 billion, will likely be dedicated to NextGen programs and will require four years of annual congressional appropriations. Who in this room has any reasonable degree of confidence that we’re going to actually get the funds necessary to implement NextGen by 2020? . ."
Air Traffic Control Newsletter #94 June 2012

Lots and lots more money. To equip a general aviation aircraft, like Adam's old plane can cost almost $30,000. To do the same for a commercial aircraft, about a quarter million.
 ADS-B: Frequently Asked Questions

It also appears the FAA wants to equip all ground vehicles on the tarmac to also have ADS-B. So count every fuel truck, fire truck, luggage truck, tug, maintenance vehicle, car, pick-up, what have you, at every airport and multiply times some unknown figure between $0 and $30,000 and you get a lot more money. "ASD-B is a nifty solution where
every vehicle has a transmitter so
they can see and talk to each other..."
Centerline the Voice of Airports
 
I find it amusing under the heading of Trains good, Planes Bad the writer attempts to frighten the reader with quotes like "Costin showed he could use just $2,000 worth of store-bought electronics to convince an ADS-B, the FAA's preferred air traffic control system...". It is not the preferred system, it isn't even installed yet. I can say that my preferred mode of transportation is a $200K BMW 750i, but last I looked there isn't one in my driveway so any problems with that make of automobile are not something I worry about.

Costin then of course goes on to tell us the worst case that could happen, "Costin invited his audience to imagine a worst-case scenario, saying, "Imagine you inject a million planes; you don't have that many people to cross-check. You can do a human resource version of a denial of service attack on an airport."


The original post which is at the Huffington Post is run with no attribution and no by-line which I thought odd. But CNN, Information Week and Agence France Press are all sited in the article as sources. Given their history of accuracy and the time lag on implementation plus cost over runs, the best I can say is Happy Flying Citizen! We still have some time left.
The Radarman

Honesty about guns and Freedom

Link to original post. Now includes reference links and documentation.

http://dougsdiggings.blogspot.com/2012/07/aurora-colorado-and-honesty-about-guns.html