Quote: sootyj @ January 28 2009, 2:06 PM GMTN.B. this'll piss some off, but I feel way safer going club in Jerusalem where all the off duty soldiers have assault rifles with ammo(albeit unloaded),
Providing you don't wear a tea towel on your head, or are a kid, you're perfectly safe in Jerusalem.
Quote: Nigel Kelly @ January 28 2009, 2:01 PM GMTWhat about the right to arm bears?
Robin Williams wants his joke back.
Quote: David Bussell @ January 28 2009, 2:08 PM GMTRobin Williams wants his joke back.
Rumbled!
Quote: chipolata @ January 28 2009, 2:07 PM GMTProviding you don't wear a tea towel on your head, or are a kid, you're perfectly safe in Jerusalem.
That's Gaza city you're thinking of, Israel has a very low murder rate.
Quote: David Bussell @ January 28 2009, 2:08 PM GMTRobin Williams wants his joke back.
I want the time I spent watching Robin Williams films back. One Hour Photo was pretty good though; there is absolutley no excuse, however for Flubber. Which I was forced to take my sister to see once.
Quote: Nigel Kelly @ January 28 2009, 2:08 PM GMTRumbled!
I must have watched Live at the Met a hundred times when I was a kid.
America's disenchantment with "gun control" is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that "firearms-related crime has plummeted".
In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.
We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.
If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.
As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.
Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2409817.ece
Quote: Matthew Stott @ January 28 2009, 2:10 PM GMTI want the time I spent watching Robin Williams films back. One Hour Photo was pretty good though; there is absolutley no excuse, however for Flubber. Which I was forced to take my sister to see once.
I liked him in Insomnia too. And Patch Adams of course. What a wheeze!
I liked him in that mad film with Kenneth Brannagh and Emma Thompson, where he swore a lot.
Quote: David Bussell @ January 28 2009, 2:13 PM GMTI liked him in Insomnia too.
Thats the other one, I kept thinking 'The Prestige', but he wasn't in that. He basically does good creepy.
DaButt really ain't gonna quit with all the 'I love guns' gumpf, is he?
Robin Williams wasn't bad in Death to Smoochy either, a sadly overlooked film by Danny Devito.
Quote: chipolata @ January 28 2009, 2:17 PM GMTRobin Williams wasn't bad in Death to Smoochy either, a sadly overlooked film by Danny Devito.
I'd forgotten all about that. He was good in it.
Quote: chipolata @ January 28 2009, 2:17 PM GMTRobin Williams wasn't bad in Death to Smoochy either, a sadly overlooked film by Danny Devito.
I like his stand up too. His films are a real hit and miss. I admire him for obviously taking risks in his choices.
Quote: Matthew Stott @ January 28 2009, 2:15 PM GMTDaButt really ain't gonna quit with all the 'I love guns' gumpf, is he?
I like him. He's like a big right-wing bear we all prod and throw stones at, and out he comes, paws swinging.
Quote: chipolata @ January 28 2009, 2:18 PM GMTI like him. He's like a big right-wing bear we all prod and throw stones at, and out he comes, paws swinging.
I'm not at all right-wing or conservative. More of a centrist, if anything, but mostly I'm realistic.
Most of my friends are uber-liberal and the majority of them own guns.