Make ‘em mandatory!

There is a town in the states called Kennesaw with what might be called the opposite of gun control laws. Each household is required to own and maintain a gun. Must be a real shoot-em-up town right? People gettin’ popped left and right? Check out the article.

When you think about it, the proposition “If we make guns illegal there will be less gun crime” is pretty nonsensical. I would suggest the simplified relation “Gun crime is proportional to the difference between the number of armed bad guys and the number of armed good guys”. From this it seems likely that decreasing the number of guns the bad guys have would be good, just as increasing the number of guns the good guys have should have a reducing effect on the level of gun crime. This subtraction however is problematic: it is difficult to actively reduce the number of bad guns. Installing gun control laws causes the good guys who have guns to turn them in and the bad guys to snigger. Arming the populace may well put guns in the hands of the bad guys, but I would argue that on balance more good guns are created than bad - criminals don't feel they need gun licences, don't register their guns, don't pay retail, don't install gun safes, don't enrol in official how to shoot safely courses. Gun control laws have the opposite to the intended effect.

If you make gun ownership criminal, only criminals will own guns.

Are you packing?

I would like to live in a world without guns. I would like to live in a world without violence of any sort. If people were never even verbally abusive to one another I would consider that we were on our way to the perfect society. If someone threatens your security with violence, I believe the first response should be to try to defuse the situation, to remove yourself and those dear to you from danger into safety. Only as a last resort would I consider meeting violence with violence. But to not take that last step. To turn the other cheek as it were - well I leave that to other folk. For me, if you threaten me and you leave me no other recourse than to violence, then violence you will get.

I am starting to believe that in some societies this necessarily extends to a willingness to counter gun violence with guns. I have often thought, and heard said by others, that the death toll in shooting rampages would be very much diminished[1] by some of the people involved (witnesses, victims) having guns (heroes). I think that is a very difficult argument to dismiss outright.

I recently watched a video by Penn & Teller on the bullshit that is gun control. Their argument is very America centric (citing constitutional amendments), but I think the arguments within translate nonetheless. Then yesterday there was the shooting at Virginia Tech. I wonder how far a lone gunman would progress into his spree if some significant portion of the populace were armed. I wonder how many criminals, who now find themselves in the wonderful position of being likely the only person with guns in a couple of minute radius, would reconsider all manner of crimes. Overnight there was also a shooting by a security guard of a man in Sydney. Two men approached him with a drawn gun, likely not expecting any resistance. He shot them and they fled. Criminals use guns to have a power advantage. By reducing the power of the populace (removing their guns) you let criminals easily tip the balance in their favour - carry a handgun. An armed populace (maybe as few as 2% carrying weapons) could greatly reduce a lone criminal's expectation of being ‘the most powerful’ in a certain situation merely by carrying a gun.

I am not saying that everyone should or needs to have a gun. But those considered stable enough, those who can show they can do so safely, those who wish to take on the responsibility of using a gun if the situation requires, why not?

Gun control folks are always carrying on about needing to ban guns. “If only we could remove all the guns we would be safe”. Well think about this: Virginia Tech was a gun free zone. For the 30 minutes or so between 9am and 9.30am there was only one person in the area who had a gun, and I think we all know now what he decided to do with it. I just wonder what may have happened if some of the teachers, the RA, the seniors, the janitors were armed. I wonder even what would have been different about that morning if the gunman had even the slightest doubts that perhaps he would meet with people in that place that were armed and prepared to defend themselves and others.

I don't think ideas that appear logically sound ought to be dismissed outright by ‘zero tolerance’ style arguments.

[1] There was a shooting at another school in Virginia, not so many years ago. Though there was a different outcome at the Appalachian School of Law. Two students at the scene were armed. They subdued the gunman after he took his first victims.

*Sniff*

You know how when sometimes you are just sitting there and you smell this smell and like, you smell it and you can't work out whether it's toast or dog shit... Yeah, I hate that.

Moo

The communist utopia can be build from a socialist regime by force in much the same way that a glass of milk can be build from a cow by cutting it in half. (Sounded better before I wrote it down...)

Turn up the suck

I need to work out why the company I work for sucks.

We all want to know why our product sucks. I guess I could benefit from knowing why (you think) I suck.

Seth Godin's new book The Dip (under the lens here) seems just the ticket. I have not had much trouble in the past knowing when to quit. My problem has been more quitting when it is time to... (I just want to know how they get the little guy on the cover to walk along like that)

[Edit: I totally read “help you see what's causing your organization (or you) to suck” rather than “to get stuck”. Seth: Please tell us why we suck too! But in the end, one could say that people and companies and enterprises and relationships get stuck precisely because they suck.]

Swap Mouse

So I swap sides with the mouse a lot. I have to say I mostly use my left hand (even though I am a righty), but I swap often enough to have looked for a utility to easily swap the buttons.

I downloaded a couple of them and found them to be horrible. Some had graphical interfaces. One wanted to install and run at startup. One wanted to leave its little icon on the notification area. Geez Louise. All I want is a utility that I can double click that will swap the damn buttons around then go away. Silently if possible. So I made one.

It is all of two or three lines of code. (Well, okay, you know what I mean, three that I had to write myself). It is about 20KB, does not install, does its job quietly, and has a cool looking icon (well maybe not, but I had fun making it).

I used this as an opportunity to check out Google Code at the same time. So I have created a project called swapmouse, the executable is there now, the source will be linked up when I get home. Here is a link to the bare executable for SwapMouse for your convenience. Just put it in a directory under Program Files or somewhere (I usually make a Program Files\Utilities just for storing nice little programs that don't need to be installed) and make a shortcut to it. Enjoy.

404

    Error 4.04 - Date Not Found     Please try again at a later date. Maybe the 5th.

Last.FM gadget

This past weekend I have been working on a windows vista gadget for last.FM

Most of Saturday was spent fooling around with javascript for the first time in a long while. Trying to find syntax errors using notepad. Ugh. I finally relented and downloaded visual web designer. Next time I play with it I will hook up the script debugger. The rest of the time was spent parsing the XML and text responses that the last.fm 'APIs' respond with. It is a shame that the whole thing is not done in XML - the np.php (now playing) for example just responds with name value pairs in text. Not so nice. Plus it seems to me that the whole shebang is a little iffy at times. Just not responding to requests.

I will have a bit more of a look at the last.fm source tomorrow, for now I have only really looked at the myLastFm source code... Perhaps going back to the original source would be better. I want to know for instance whether the 'real' client polls the np.php for track updates (say every 5 seconds) or if it has some other way. I had envisioned getting the remaining track time and then waiting until around about the time the track should finish and then requesting new track info. But time remaining field seems to have been left out of the response (the myLastFm client looks for it too).

So for now I have working:

• Basic gadget functionality (icons, page sizing, basic css and js)
• Username and password configuration.
• Password hashing.
• Recently played tracks fly-out.
• Now playing info (artist, album + cover art, track).

I think actual login (send username and password hash, receive sessionid and stream address) is close to working - just that when I was testing it last night the whole last.fm site stopped working, now np.php was not returning etc. Later it worked again, but I was past the stage of wanting to code - Guild Wars...