UCSD Lecturer Releases Geotagging Application For "Dangerous Guns and Owners" 976
NF6X writes "UCSD Lecturer Brett Stallbaum has released an Android app called Gun Geo Marker to allow people to 'Geolocate Dangerous Guns and Owners.' The app description states:
'The Gun Geo Marker operates very simply, letting parents and community members mark, or geolocate, sites associated with potentially unsafe guns and gun owners. These locations are typically the homes or businesses of suspected unsafe gun owners, but might also be public lands or other locations where guns are not handled safely, or situations where proper rights to own or use any particular type of firearm may not exist.' I question how the motivation behind developing this app differs from, say, developing an app to allow others to publicly geotag homes of people believed to belong to a particular religion or political party."
Kind of Lawsuits a Lawyer will love (Score:2, Informative)
This has litigation written all over it, lible, invasion of privacy, etc. He won't begin to be able to afford the swarm of lawsuits if people start actually using the app.
Geotagging non-gun owners (Score:3, Informative)
OK, Slashdotters, who wants to help me make a geotagging app that crowdsources locations of people and businesses who are NOT gun owners so that legitimate users can use this as positive reinforcement of the anti-gun ideal?
It will allow users to personally thank those non-gun owners (and businesses) for their thoughtfulness toward others and their pacifist approach toward dealing with an increasingly dangerous and violent world.
I think Brett Stallbaum should be the first address in the database.
Re:All guns are dangerous... (Score:4, Informative)
Posted as a joke. Don't get your panties in a wad.
Re:Geotag those military bases! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All guns are dangerous... (Score:5, Informative)
Records show that Loughner was registered as an Independent and voted in 2006 and 2008, but not in 2010.[39][40] A YouTube channel under an account called "Classitup10" was linked to Loughner. (There have been numerous copies of 'impostor accounts' such as 'JaredLoughner' and 'Classitup1O'.)[41][42]
Loughner's high school friend Zach Osler said, "He did not watch TV; he disliked the news; he didn't listen to political radio; he didn't take sides; he wasn't on the Left; he wasn't on the Right."[17] But a former classmate, Caitie Parker, who attended high school and college with Loughner, described his political views prior to 2007 as "left wing, quite liberal,"[43] "radical."[44]
Re:All guns are dangerous... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Guns are just as dangerous as matches, driving a car, running with scissors and swimming in a public pool.
All of these things kill people. In fact, (PDF link) fire, drowning and car accidents [cdc.gov] kill more people per year than anything else. Actually, that's not true. Matches, Cars and Swimming pools kill nobody if they are left just sitting there. It takes human interaction to actually make these objects dangerous.
Re:Move to Europe. (Score:5, Informative)
So - you DO have school shootings. All the propaganda that tells us that Europe is gun-free and safe is bullshit at the end of the day then. Rationalize it how you will, spin like crazy, you do hae school shootings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Europe [wikipedia.org]
I will note that the death tolls are lower than the US - is that due to ineptitude on the part of the shooters, or better police response, or some other element at play?
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Lott-guns-Connecticut-shooting/2012/12/15/id/467903 [newsmax.com]
Newsmax: The media typically spins these mass shootings as an American phenomenon. They suggest we ought to be more like Europe, with strong gun control, because then we would not have these problems. Is that true?
Dr. Lott: No. Europe has a lot of multiple victim shootings. If you look at a per capita rate, the rate of multiple-victim public shootings in Europe and the United States over the last 10 years have been fairly similar to each other. A couple of years ago you had a couple of big shootings in Finland. About two-and-a-half years ago you had a big shooting in the U.K., 12 people were killed.
You had Norway last year [where 77 died]. Two years ago, you had the shooting in Austria at a Sikh Temple. There have been several multiple-victim public shootings in France over the last couple of years. Over the last decade, you’ve had a couple of big school shootings in Germany. Germany in terms of modern incidents has two of the four worst public-school shootings, and they have very strict gun-control laws. The one common feature of all of those shootings in Europe is that they all take place in gun-free zones, in places where guns are supposed to be banned.
Newsmax: So can you give us a correlation between crime rates in jurisdictions that try to ban concealed guns and the crime rate in those that do not?
If you look over past data, before everyone that was adopting [concealed carry laws], you find that for each additional state that adopted a right-to-carry law . . . you’d see about a 1.5 percent drop in murder rates, and about 2 percent drop in rape and robbery . . . Just because states are right-to-carry doesn’t mean they’ve issued the same number of fees. You have big differences in states’ training requirements.
Newsmax: Would it be a good idea to have teachers who have concealed carry permits in the schools, to better protect kids?
I’m all for that. I’ve been a teacher most of my life. I’ve been an academic. I have kids in college still, and kids below that. It’s not something that I take lightly. But it’s hard to see what the argument would be against it.
People may not realize this, but we allowed permit-concealed handguns in schools prior to the ironically named Safe School Zone Act. And no one that I know has been able to point to a single bad thing that occurred, not one.
We changed the law, and we started having these public-school shootings. So I don’t think they got the intended result that they were hoping for with that type of ban. Right now, [some jurisdictions] allow you to carry concealed-permit guns in the schools. There are not a lot of them. But there are no problems that have occurred with any of those states, either.
Re:All guns are dangerous... (Score:5, Informative)
And I'm sure the police and those laws were a great comfort to all of those victims of gun violence and rampage shootings, and 100% effectively prevented any deaths.
Gun laws don't prevent gun violence [nbcchicago.com] as criminals are already breaking the law. [theblacksphere.net] However if one of the victims [news4jax.com] had been allowed to carry [ktvn.com] his weapon legally there might have been far fewer casualties. [citizensvoice.com]
Re:Geotag those military bases! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not suggesting gun control is the cause of that, just pointing out that it's a purely manufactured crisis. Chicago isn't among the top 50 most dangerous cities in the world. [wikipedia.org] New Orleans has four times the murders Chicago does. San Pedro Sula has TEN times as many murders. Chicago isn't as safe as, say, rural Japan, but it's not "dangerous" compared to most other places in the US. More people die of texting while driving than die by guns in Chicago.
Simple things like increasing or decreasing the number of guns isn't going to really affect crime rates unless you go to extremes. Successfully eliminate the vast majority of guns or arm everyone and then you'll see changes in crime, either for the better or worse I don't claim to know. Debating concealed carry laws or waiting periods is a waste of time. As you said, criminals don't follow laws. And both sides of gang wars are armed, yet it's not proving a deterrence to violence. Suggesting that more guns = lower crime assumes that criminals will act rationally. Kids in gangs certainly don't act rationally.
Re:1 2 3 4 I declare flame war (Score:2, Informative)
Re:1 2 3 4 I declare flame war (Score:5, Informative)
Then there are objects built for the purpose to kill, and nothing else.
Don't pontificate from a position of ignorance - you clearly have no experience with firearms and their myriad of uses. I have fired well over 20,000 rounds through various firearms, and NOT ONCE has a single person been injured, much less been killed, from it.
I did have a mighty enjoyable time poking holes in defenseless paper, however.
Re:1 2 3 4 I declare flame war (Score:5, Informative)
And yet, as the number of Concealed Carry license holders increased in recent decades, the murder rate has declined.
Yes, correlation does not equal causation, but it's hard to see how "higher carry rates" + "lower murder rates" matches up with what I quoted above....
Re:1 2 3 4 I declare flame war (Score:2, Informative)
Mod parent as flamebait, or maybe troll. Here's the truth; http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/baseballbats.asp [snopes.com]
For those who won't bother to click, it's Firearms: 67.8%, Blunt Objects: 3.9%. As Snopes says, even if *every* blunt object homicide it by baseball bat, the parent's assertion is not just wrong, it's overwhelmingly wrong.
Re:1 2 3 4 I declare flame war (Score:2, Informative)
Stats show clearly that armed self defence is worse than just running for it. Not manly or macho, but if you want to live then run.
it's funny how stats can clearly show anything when you don't present any evidence or quote any source.
rates of injury by victim's method of protection [rkba.org]