A somewhat political post

"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
02/22/2019 at 23:50 • Filed to: None

But you know that about me.

A presumed mugger was murdered today a few blocks away from our offices.

Apparently the assailant pulled out a revolver and threatened a motorist arriving to his home when a guard came out of the building and shot three times; Killing the assailant. Now... Is this a case of good guy with a gun?

I don’t think it is. But it’s not his fault. The guard was doing “his job” and as all armed guards in Mexico City belong to the police force’s private police, he is a police officer. Which means a cop killed a would be mugger today: not big news in a city with ninty thousand cops.

But lets imagine for a second what would’ve happened if the guard didn’t have a gun. His boss would’ve been mugged, but everyone would be alive.

Now, lets imagine the assailant didn’t have a gun. If the assailant didn’t have a gun, the guard would’ve drawn his weapon at the assailant, made him surrender, and everyone would be alive.

Now lets imagine the motorist had a gun. How would he protect himself? if you carry a gun in your car, it’s on a secure location, and you can’t draw it quickly enough. Had he tried to do so, the assailant would’ve murdered him.

Now, if no one had a gun, the guard could’ve still “done his job” by apprehending the assailant with a batoon or a taser, and everyone would’ve been alive.

I think the lesson here is that: Guns make everything more dangerous. Today someone died because they wanted to steal 300-400 dollars from someone else, and now, this cop will probably be promoted, and more importantly, he won’t even be trialed for excessive force.

Which again, in a guns out situation, is almost impossible to avoid using force. But that’s kind of the problem with guns. They makes violence almost inevitable.

Clearly the problem isn’t the lack of good guys with guns; Mexico city has twice as many cops as New York City despite having the same population. The problem is that because of the illegal arms trade, and our inability to control the flow of weapons across the American border, we have too many bad guys with guns.

Which means I could go get an illegal 1911 for as little as 1200 dollars in the capital. For that money you might be able to get four 1911 in the US. But in Canada or Germany getting an illegal gun is much harder, and the violent crime rates show it.

Is a life worth the 400 dollars the mugger could’ve gotten out of the businessman?

Is it OK that two out of three guns illegally imported to Mexico, and very probably the one the assailant wielded, come from the US?

DISCUSSION (17)

GLiddy > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 00:12

I’ll give the flippant American answer:

Stop sending us drugs and we’ll stop sending you guns. Done.

The fact is that Americans want drugs from Mexico, and it seems Mexicans want guns from the US. I’m not going to cry about a mugger getting killed. He wanted something that wasn’t rightly his, tried to take it, and got shot. I won’t feel bad for him. There are thousands of people just as poor as the mugger in your story who don’t go rob people using a gun. Feel sorry for their situation, but feel proud that they know right from wrong.

Spanfeller is a twat > GLiddy
02/23/2019 at 00:20

I don’t want to strike the wrong tone here. It is clearly not the responsibility of Americans if their legal, serialized, controled weapons end here.

But I feel that when it comes to safety across the border both sides really need to start working on something that will truly work. On the one side Mexican customs officers could be more thorough with drug inspections, and it could be the same for guns on the American side. I believe that given how busy and large our border is we should really try some sort of internationa policing effort, but again, that’s just a wild guess from someone who isn’t a security expert.

Around 200,000 guns are imported illegally to Mexico every year, compared to the 57,000 guns sold legally annually. It is a massive issue.

On us sending you drugs... well. we can’t help it. We’ve got the fucking military doing raids, we’ve got state and local, and federal police working on it, interpol, the FBI, DEA, it’s crazy... have you seen what ya’ll give us under the Merida plan?

The market is very strong, and the forces behind it lie on American laws and policing. When pot became legal in America we stopped making pot, we started making opiates. I’m not suggesting opiates become legal in America, but I suppose that widespread rehab programs and a re evaluation of how possesion is punished could certainly reduce the consumption . The only places we have drug consumption problems is right againts the border.

As for the criminal. Yes he did something wrong, and a mugger that can afford a 1500-2000 dollar gun to go around waving is certainly richer than a lot of folk down here. I don’t condone what he did, but the violence is what gets me. Why does it have to be so violent?

marshknute > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 00:30

Jesus, dude, i f you’re going to post that intentionally misleading Vox video, the least you could do is include some context:

Honestly, you lost my sympathy pretty much immediately. A mugger was shot dead by an armed guard. Nothing of value was lost that day. He was an asshole who was willing to kill another human over $400. The armed guard did society a favor and deserves his promotion.

Spanfeller is a twat > marshknute
02/23/2019 at 00:46

There is a great wealth of literature that proves underregulating guns causes more violent crime. Even in the rebbutal video you can clearly see in the slides he uses to disprove Vox that the US is an outlier compared to other industrialized nations when it comes to homicide.

and I’m not saying the guard doesn’t deserve the promotion. He is doing “his job” what I lament is that this worthless interaction between three men ended up with a death. Had this interaction occured in England or Germany, no one would be dead.

What I’m trying to say is that having so many guns IS a problem here, and it certainly seems to be a problem north of the G rande as well. Having the right regulatory rules and proper enforcement could save hundreds of lives. You might think that nothing of value was lost today, but what if the cop was killed in the line of duty? or if the victim was murdered and their families lost a breadwinner? The victims are more often than not the criminals, but in the end the sheer violence is absolutely unnecesary and widespread.

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 00:54

There’s also no guarantee the assailant with the gun would have shot anyone. It’s one thing to wave a gun around as an intimidation strategy, quite another entirely to shoot your victim.

Spanfeller is a twat > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee
02/23/2019 at 00:59

Fake guns are also becoming an issue here. A mugger that can’t afford a real gun might get a fake one and achieve the same result most of the time.

But most times muggers have a spotter a few meters ahead or on the other side of the road to prevent retaliation from the victim. This was a best case scenario. Had the mugger worked with a spotter we'd probably be looking at a dead cop and a dead victim.

Just Jeepin' > GLiddy
02/23/2019 at 01:08

Deleted because.

MrDakka > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 03:40

You’re looking at it from a demand pe rspective, when you sould be looking at it from the supply side. If every single person on Earth had a gun , a lot of problems would be solved overnight, mostly be cause the parties in conflict will either have wiped each other out or wiped out the opposition.

By na tural selection, most of t he trigger happy population will have wiped each other out and the less impetuous , but dangerously proficient resulting survivors would be much much more polite to each other as no one one would want to initiate another self p urge of humanity at least until the next cycle .

Plus you’d solve global warming, overpopulation, famine, poverty and etc. just by arming every man, woman and child. Democratization of violence would finally bring peace to earth just at the cost of billions of lives.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 04:17

Agreed. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the individual situation, more guns equals more chances of people winding up dead.

In NZ, the cops aren’t routinely armed. And most of them are strongly in favor of that: there’s a strong belief that if the cops gun up, the crims will gun up, and a lot more cops and civilians will get dead. Right now we have very little gun crime because (a) illegal guns are expensive, (b) a knife does as well as a gun for threatening an unarmed victim, and (c) the crims know that if you rob someone at knifepoint you’ll probably get away with it, whereas if you use a gun you WILL be hunted down: an unarmed police force takes gun crime really damn seriously.

Danimalk - Drives a Slow Car Fast > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 07:38

Guns are for the weak.

HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 08:51

If you are going to draw a gun on some one you have to accept that you may end up dead.

I realize some people who commit crimes like this aren’t inherently bad people, but he knew the risk of what he was doing.

I do, however, agree that arming the guard with a taser would have been a better solution. T rying to solve that problem with a baton probably would have ended with the guard losing his life.

In the end yes it would be great to live in a world where fire arms, and their production was outlawed. But that will never ever happen.

HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles > marshknute
02/23/2019 at 09:09

Samsung is South Korean not Japanese

Your boy, BJR > Danimalk - Drives a Slow Car Fast
02/23/2019 at 09:13

DipodomysDeserti > Danimalk - Drives a Slow Car Fast
02/23/2019 at 10:53

I’ll gladly whoop someone’s ass with my hands. However , only a moron would try to fight someone with a gun.

DipodomysDeserti > HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles
02/23/2019 at 10:54

Tasing someone pointing a gun at you would be a really, really bad idea.

Spanfeller is a twat > DipodomysDeserti
02/23/2019 at 11:39

The guard shot him from behind... i dunno if that changes anything in this case

DipodomysDeserti > Spanfeller is a twat
02/23/2019 at 12:25

If he’s holding a gun facing someone else, it really doesn’t. If he was running away it does.