61-Year-Old Shot, Killed After Tracking Stolen Vehicle With Apple AirTag (bakersfield.com) 236
An anonymous reader shares news from Bakersfield, California:
Four men were arrested in the shooting death of a 61-year-old Bakersfield woman who died after police said she confronted suspects who reportedly stole her car, according to a news release issued Wednesday. Victoria Anne Marie Hampton tracked her reportedly stolen car with an Apple air tag on March 19 without telling law enforcement, according to the Bakersfield Police Department.
The coroner reported she was shot at 6:32 p.m.
Two of the four suspects were 19 years old, one was 18, and one was 23.
The coroner reported she was shot at 6:32 p.m.
Two of the four suspects were 19 years old, one was 18, and one was 23.
Bad judgement and no value for life (Score:2)
Imagine going to jail for likely the rest of your life because you figured keeping a stolen car was more important than someone's life.
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Indeed, crime really does not pay if you sit down and do the long term financial analysis. It restricts your life once you can no longer pass a background check, and you spend a lot of time stressing over getting caught.
Even a 'successful' mob boss can look forward to living their lives avoiding police investigations and assassination by rivals or even subordinates. There also has to be a happiness price caused by suppressing natural empathy.
But for the short-term thinker... why not?
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You’re not committing big enough crimes. The Wolf of Wall Street guy committed financial fraud in the tens or possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. He got 23 months in white collar jail. His cell mate was Tommy Chong who was jailed for selling rolling papers.
You hold up a bank for $3k and you’ll do more than two years in a real federal jail. Not a Martha Stewart jail.
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Indeed, crime really does not pay
The Shadow Knows!
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You should call some random thing you dont like "woke" and really complete the whole right wing ignorance theme you've got going on here. No use half-assing it after all.
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"Figured"? Where did you get the idea that criminals do a cost/benefit analysis before acting? Most are driven by base instincts and their actions make little sense in retrospect.
Professional organized gangs such as this one most certainly do make calculated decisions.
A common rationale is: I see no job opportunities, and being a criminal pays extremely well. (You can debate why they have that perception, and you can suggest that their 13-23 year old brains are not firing on all cylinders in that department.) But they most certainly have thought about and made a deliberate decision.
Suggesting that criminals are just crazed monsters wandering around and suddenly acting without though
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You think freedom does not matter? Spend a few years behind bars and then come again.
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Re:Bad judgement and no value for life (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that the Second Amendment has much to do with this. I do think the fact that so much of America is designed so it is impossible for people to live without a car and an indifferent attitude of police when it comes to property crimes against poor people, could make someone desperate enough to track down a stolen car and try to retrieve it themselves.
Some time if you're staying in a hotel on one of those eight lane suburban roads with no sidewalk walk out to the grass by the side of the road. There will always be a path beaten in it. Those are the people cleaning the rooms in your hotel and washing the dishes at the restaurant who don't have cars. Now imagine how far they had to walk.
You don't know? (Score:4)
C'mon, man.
Re: You don't know? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: You don't know? (Score:2)
The same remedy advanced countries use, not the nonsense less developed nations like the US and Somalia use.
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Re: You don't know? (Score:2)
Re: You don't know? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. While technically 650,000 can be expressed as a fraction of 300,000,000, I think you miss the point. Australia confiscated 36 guns per 1000 people. If we just look at guns in civilian hands in the USA (up to 390M these days), and if you managed to confiscate 36 guns per 1000 US civilians, you would still have more guns in circulation than people. By itself, the state of New York has both more people and more guns than Australia had in 1997.
2. Australia does not have the same cultural ties into firearms ownership. Perhaps this is at least in part due to the fact that they never fought to separate themselves from the UK. They didn't gain true independence until the middle of the last century, and even today they view the King of England as their head of state, even if that is ceremonial at this point. In the USA there is still the idea that many hold on to (doesn't matter if we agree with them, but there is ample evidence for this point of view), that to disarm the populace is to turn them from citizen into subject.
3. At that time in Australia, most of the guns in the country were registered. In the USA that is not even close to true. In addition to private transfers in the USA, and poor record keeping of dealer sales, we now have 3D printing of frames and receivers. And virtually no official records of sales of the other parts needed to turn a frame into a working firearm. In 1997 3D printing of the receivers and frames was not a practical option. While there have always been people with the ability to cast and machine these parts, there was a pretty high barrier in terms of equipment and skills. Today that barrier is much lower.
None of this is to say it can't be done, but to say that there is any significant similarity to the situation in Australia is just ignorant.
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>"Perhaps you missed the part about the fact that she was shot to death. Of course the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment plays a role"
Sorry, but it does NOT. The 2nd Amendment does not grant the right to murder someone, nor grant manslaughter, nor or any other criminal act. And it is HIGHLY LIKELY that those individuals were in illegal possession of the firearms in the first place.
Oh, and the current "interpretation" is the original intent and interpretation, which was corrupted now restore
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NYT has a good article on who is buying guns, it used to be just the conservatives scared of their own shadow. Now it is branching out to other groups. They point out just to have a gun in the house increases your chances of going tits-up.
We have hit the Kessler Syndrome with respect to guns. Even the nutcases whining about the Chief Whiner, the former alleged president, were threatening to bring out their guns.
Suppose a shooting is in progress, and Joe He-Boy (you) decides to pull out his firearm and "fix"
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>"They point out just to have a gun in the house increases your chances of going tits-up."
Correlation is not causation.
>"Suppose a shooting is in progress, and Joe He-Boy (you) decides to pull out his firearm and "fix" the situation. The cops pull up, having been notified of war in progress, hop out of their squad car, find you shooting, and blow your head off."
You could make all kinds of assumptions and hypotheticals. Including that (I) am not well trained and would not have such situational awarene
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You"re correct that the second amendment doesn't give the right to murder people. What it does do however is make guns so absurdly plentiful that criminals have no problem getting a hold of one. There's a very obvious reason why first world countries with strict fire arm laws (most of them) have homicide rates 1/5 the size of our own.
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>"You're correct that the second amendment doesn't give the right to murder people. What it does do however is make guns so absurdly plentiful that criminals have no problem getting a hold of one."
I will agree with you that the freedom that the 2A provides *does* create a larger distribution of guns that can end up in the wrong hands through theft/etc. There is a certain amount of baggage that comes with the freedom, no doubt. Same thing with freedom of speech. With that freedom, it means we are going
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Not really. Gun violence was a problem in the "old west" because of all those Civil War vets with guns, it was a problem during Prohibition because again, wartime production of weapons-- the Tommy gun in particular was designed for the trenches of WWI, but the manufacturer needed the money, and there wasn't much regulation-- so organized crime bought them by the truck load, and the FBI bought them in self defense.
The 2nd amendment and it's "modern" interpretation have never been the problem-- the gun manuf
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Perhaps you missed the part about the fact that she was shot to death. Of course the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment plays a role in the massive number of guns in America and, by extension, the ease with which people obtain them.
Would it be different if she were stabbed to death?
Re:Bad judgement and no value for life (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Imagine if the police cared and were funded enough that she didn't need to go at it alone, the cops could handle the matter of getting her car back before it went to a chop shop, Mexico, or whatever.
It being a poor woman's car just makes it less likely she could replace it.
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There's a reason I said "cared" first. They do have a funding problem - they don't have enough people to address all the cases that they're called to address, they aren't paying enough for quality employees, they aren't funded well enough to get them the training they darn well should have, etc...
Now yes, removing the war on drugs would help substantially.
Re:Bad judgement and no value for life (Score:4, Informative)
Well there are a couple of problems with the rather simplistic narrative you present.
The first is that, politically speaking, people aren't consistent with their support of US constitutional amendments. People who support a broad interpretation of the first amendment tend to want to clamp down on the second amendment, and vice-versa. But if one amendment is going to be interpreted broadly, all the others likely need to be as well - and vice-versa. And the courts have been pretty consistent in supporting broad interpretations of constitutional guarantees. So meaningful gun restrictions probably need to involve constitutional amendment - which ties in to point #2:
Secondly, the majority of people in the US actually aren't supportive of loose gun laws [pbs.org]. But the GOP has consistently fought tighter restrictions on guns, and has even tried to remove existing restrictions as much as possible... and they control enough states [atr.org] to make meaningful gun legislation pretty much impossible since, again, we're dealing with the Constitution.
Re:Bad judgement and no value for life (Score:5, Insightful)
"But if one amendment is going to be interpreted broadly, all the others likely need to be as well"
Not really. Why would you equate the amendments like that? The country changes, and the second amendment is well past its shelf life. There are plenty of ancient laws that make no sense these days, why should elements of the Constitution also not be held to scrutiny?
Re:Bad judgement and no value for life (Score:4, Insightful)
There are people for whom it's the third testament of the Bible. Not only can the text not be altered, but their interpretation of it can't be questioned. It need not make any sense vis-a-vis external reality - it's immutable truth simply because it's there. The scriptures were ordained at the Holy Council of 1776. (Yes, I know that's not the year - They don't.)
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"But if one amendment is going to be interpreted broadly, all the others likely need to be as well"
Not really. Why would you equate the amendments like that? The country changes, and the second amendment is well past its shelf life. There are plenty of ancient laws that make no sense these days, why should elements of the Constitution also not be held to scrutiny?
Constitutions can be changed, and there is indeed a process for doing that. It is difficult, and rightly so - constitutions should not be trivial to change or they would not be of any more import than the local littering ordinances.
When enough people think it should be changed, by all means have at it. Until then your opinion matters exactly as much as everyone elses. As it should be.
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The first is that, politically speaking, people aren't consistent with their support of US constitutional amendments. People who support a broad interpretation of the first amendment tend to want to clamp down on the second amendment, and vice-versa. But if one amendment is going to be interpreted broadly, all the others likely need to be as well - and vice-versa.
If the Amendments weren't all written differently, at different times, by different people, about different things, that might make a little sense. But ...
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If the Amendments weren't all written differently, at different times, by different people, about different things, that might make a little sense. But ...
We're talking about amendment #1 and amendment #2. They're all part of the original package.
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If the Amendments weren't all written differently, at different times, by different people, about different things, that might make a little sense. But ...
We're talking about amendment #1 and amendment #2. They're all part of the original package.
Your first sentence (which I didn't originally quote) was, "The first is that, politically speaking, people aren't consistent with their support of US constitutional amendments." which implies all the amendments.
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If the Amendments weren't all written differently, at different times, by different people, about different things, that might make a little sense. But ...
We're talking about amendment #1 and amendment #2. They're all part of the original package.
Your first sentence (which I didn't originally quote) was, "The first is that, politically speaking, people aren't consistent with their support of US constitutional amendments." which implies all the amendments.
I assumed he was mainly talking about the Bill Of Rights.
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Re: Bad judgement and no value for life (Score:2)
I'm willing to bet his schools dont need active shooter drills.
The barbaric underculture (Score:2)
I am sure that every generation decries the moral degeneracy of "today's youth." Yet we end up with stories like this more frequently and you can't blame it on the Internet or video games or immigrants or even the 2A fetishists.
A couple of years a go my wife's son was with us and got a call from a neighbor from their quiet suburb. It turned out another neighbor was just shot and killed by a group of three teenagers. They had stolen a car and were joyriding around, and ended up doing donuts in that nei
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Stealing cars is illegal, murder is illegal. Even discharging a firearm where they did is probably illegal. Why do you imagine that these criminals are willing to break all of these laws, but would be willing to obey your "behavioral requirements"?
You dickless hoplophobes need to get out and connect with reality now and then, lest you start believing stupid things like violent crime only happening in America.
Re:The barbaric underculture (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you imagine that these criminals are willing to break all of these laws, but would be willing to obey your "behavioral requirements"?
Yes of course of course of course. The old "when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns" thing.
Astute readers will have noted that my "common sense" respondent here failed to address the question of why it is such an issue in the USA and nowhere else in the world? You can get a gun legally and illegally in Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Canada. Any other developed country really.
But this "common sense" applies only here and nowhere else. Why? I never get a rational answer. Just more NRA bumper sticker crap.
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A well regulated militia, in other words.
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you can get a gun legally and illegally in Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Canada. Any other developed country really.
Technically true, but practically, the legal requirements for legal gun ownership aren't really comparable. At least in Germany, scenarios in which an arbitrary private citizen can legally own say a semi-automatic hand gun are so few and far between as to make it de facto impossible. Switzerland is a bit of an outlier here because of the milita system. But it's a small, wealthy and culturally homogenous place. A direct comparision between Switzerland and the US makes very little sense.
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Right. The process of obtaining firearms most developed places is arduous. Maybe too much so.
But you can still obtain arms Illegally in each of those places. And it doesn't result in the insane levels of gun violence we see in the U.S. The argument we get constantly is that since it is "so easy" for criminals to get guns illegally, there might as well be no laws at all. They "do nothing but burden law abiding citizens," and "do nothing to solve the problem."
It is an obvious lie but it drives o
Re: The barbaric underculture (Score:2)
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Please explain how the demographics in the United States differ from Canada. Enquiring minds want to know.
There aren't as many n.. uhhh b... uhh I mean it's different ok
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Wait, I thought we were all just human beings no matter where on the planet we're from?
Re: The barbaric underculture (Score:2)
Re:The barbaric underculture (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not the only country where this regularly happens, here's proof [wikipedia.org]. Why would you even say such a thing? Do you get your facts from The Onion?
In rural areas it is normal and necessary to own guns, because one must sometimes contend with hostile wildlife and/or hostile people where law enforcement is thinly spread. People who live in such areas have a hard time understanding why people are so afraid of civilian gun ownership, since they and basically everyone they know owns guns, and things seem perfectly fine to them.
In crowded cities everyone experience constant "stranger danger," and without some solid emotional hygine that can really get to a person. The last thing someone wants is for scary strangers to be even more scary by owning guns. People with such a mindset have a hard time understanding why any civilized person would support civilian gun ownership.
These two groups do not communicate well on this topic. The matter is made worst by dishonest statistics. Stats report on "gun violence" rather than "total violence" in an effort to spin a narrative that the presence of guns increases violence. But such a lopsided statistic is easily called-out by people on the other side of the conversation, and since a dishonest stat was put forward, the presumption is that the other side is arguing in bad faith and it all goes down from there.
The trade-offs cannot be escaped. Disallowing civilian gun ownership might reduce the number of guns that criminals can get their hands on, but it ALSO makes civilians more vulnerable to crime (not to mention attractive targets). Allowing civilian gun ownership might make civilians safer and make criminals think twice before attacking someone who might have a gun, but it also might cause more accidents or enable more crime. We don't know which is which without solid and honest statistics. Speculation about which is which is entirely biased and motivated reasoning that will never convince the other side no matter how right it sounds to the speaker.
I am personally of the opinion that freedom is a good thing and our default position should be to protect freedom apart from very compelling reasons why it must be sacrificed. Specious reasoning and dishonest statistics have not convinced me that there is "very compelling" reason in this case, so I still support civilian gun ownership. I am willing to listed to counter-arguments, but they must pass the bar of being honest and compelling, otherwise it's just more bias talking.
Re: The barbaric underculture (Score:2)
Don't be a spastic. There's space between "ban all the gerns" and "give them out in cornflakes boxes".
The reason the US is in the shittet is because they lean to the last one. The problem is now so big that it probably can't be fixed and the US is doomed to burying more and more of its children.
Hey, least the gun company execs and their paid for politicians got new yachts, so there is that I suppose.
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Shooters pick places like schools because there are no guns there. Nobody who can shoot back. Parents are sending their children to congregate in places where they are not well-protected. That simply doesn't make sense.
In most instances where police didn't bother doing things like surrounding the building, etc., and just charged right in, the shooters shot themselves the moment they saw the police. They have no interest in being arrested or even surviving, they just want to cause as much harm as they ca
Re: The barbaric underculture (Score:2)
Re: The barbaric underculture (Score:2)
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That does not contradict my point in linking to wikipedia, at all. I demonstrated that violence involving guns happens in many countries other than the USA, in contradiction to the claim that the USA is the only place where this regularly happens.
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In rural areas it is normal and necessary to own guns, because one must sometimes contend with hostile wildlife and/or hostile people where law enforcement is thinly spread. People who live in such areas have a hard time understanding why people are so afraid of civilian gun ownership, since they and basically everyone they know owns guns, and things seem perfectly fine to them.
I have no problem with civilian gun ownership. There are people who just want to ban all guns and while that would work to curb gun violence, I am not one of them. In fact I am in favor of regular gun ownership.
Yet I also find the condition we have as untenable. Perhaps you are happy with unrestrained gun violence. I am not. I don't consider the average (or even most of) gun owners to be any kind of threat and therefore would not consider taking their guns away to be any sort of solution. Instead I
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Yet this is the only country where this regularly happens and they will never answer why that is.
Probably because the reality is a bit harsh, the difference between the USA and other countries with lax firearms laws that have far fewer firearms offences is that of culture and of societal support.
Desperation can lead to all manner of horrible things. Does it surprise me that a country where one medical diagnosis or accident can be the difference between a normal life and indentured servitude has violent crime problems? Not really.
The support systems and culture in the USA can be pretty terrible. Blaming
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Yet this is the only country where this regularly happens and they will never answer why that is.
I'll take shot (pardon the pun).
We are "wealthy" and therefore can afford a plethora of guns during non-wartime. We have probably have more lazy idiots per capita than any other developed country; look at our children's test scores. We have arguably porous borders that let it all kinds of bad stuff: People (some desperate), weapons, drugs and things we might not even know. We subsidize people here who would otherwise be most concerned with earning their next meal. We have weak familial [pewresearch.org] structures--2
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That's a good effort and I appreciate it.
I'm glad your nephew is OK, but I don't think his case supports your argument.
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How do you propose to even find "all the guns"?
Where did I propose "find" all the guns? I did not.
I said register them all. Here is how that works because you are confused. All new guns get registered. All existing guns, and there are more than there are people at this point, would have a time window to be registered before they are illegal. After that time if you are caught with a gun then you are charged under the statute.
Will we "find all the guns?" Doesn't matter. Will there still be illegal guns around? Probably. As per above the w
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How do you propose to even find "all the guns"?
Where did I propose "find" all the guns? I did not.
I said register them all. .
What do you propose to do when it turns out that approximately nobody will register their guns? How will you even know that there are guns to be registered? That was my question.
Here is a partial list of things that you cannot manufacture in your garage today:
No, you are very confused. What you have shown is a list of things that may be illegal to manufacture in your garage. It's not a list of things you cannot manufacture in your garage. It is in fact a partial list of things that you MOST CERTAINLY CAN manufacture in your garage. People do it every day.
How do you propose to go get all
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The rest of the world doesn't have a gigantic problem with mass shootings. No where else in the world had a mass shooting epidemic and solved
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Will people do all the above illegally? I would say probably yes. Does that make the laws against doing so useless? No. Are guns and firearms somehow more unenforceable than the others? If you think so then tell us how.
Governance is bankrolled by legitimacy. Laws against things a significant portion of the population are willing to do anyway regardless of legality have a tendency of eroding legitimacy which have a tendency of imposing worse costs on society.
You can get away with more of this shit in countries where the states legitimacy is derived by fear rather than consent. You can get away with it in a society in which only outliers are willing to do the thing you want to ban.
In present day US I think there is a fair
OK (Score:2)
That sucks. I guess.
Police do not care about stolen cars. (Score:5, Informative)
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In California, maybe. In more conservative places like Texas, police still go after car thieves.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/lo... [nbcdfw.com]
https://www.kxan.com/news/loca... [kxan.com]
https://abc13.com/houston-crim... [abc13.com]
Re: Police do not care about stolen cars. (Score:2)
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That doesn't make it any less stupid. If the police didn't care you know what I would have done? Nothing. Cut my losses, save my life. We get robbed, shit happens. If something is valuable it is insured for that reason. Life isn't all rainbows and roses. Confronting criminals unprepared is mindbogglingly stupid irrespective of what the police do or don't do where you live.
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From the article - "Victoria Anne Marie Hampton tracked her reportedly stolen car with an Apple air tag on March 19 without telling law enforcement, according to the Bakersfield Police Department."
Maybe the police wouldn't have gone. Or maybe they would have. But in this case, they never had the chance because she didn't tell them. So you can't put the blame for this one on the police.
This is a small but important inflection point (Score:2)
...in our culture.
Thieves steal things.
As witnessed here, the Mark Rober porch pirate glitter bomb video, and ceaseless other examples, it is not hard to identify them nor even to track them down.
The police do not care. Or, to be more accurate, they care as much as anyone but are well aware that the vast amount of paperwork, time, and labor to arrest that unquestionable criminal will be mooted the moment they are almost-instantly released uncharged, unpunished, unrepentant.
In the hierarchy of human needs,
Moral (Score:2)
Moral of the story: don't bring a moron to a gunfight.
Re:Why does this require an AirTag (Score:5, Informative)
Last I checked, most new cars come with an app that lets you track them without third party tools.
Most? [*citation needed*]
So, it must've been an old car not worth that much money.
(a) Old cars can be worth more than you think, (b) that's irrelevant, especially if you need your car.
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91% of new car sales in the U.S. are connected The United States had the largest percentage of connected vehicles sold in 2020. Of all passenger cars sold, around 91% were connected. That’s over 13 million connected vehicles sold in the U.S. alone.
And that was three years ago...
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My car is "connected." I have no access to that system. In addition, if I don't pay for it, it will not send gps coordinates anywhere.
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if I don't pay for it, it will not send gps coordinates anywhere.
Well, not to you anyway
Re:Why does this require an AirTag (Score:5, Insightful)
It is sad. And if police would actually get involved when you can tell them EXACTLY where your stolen car is, it wouldn't have happened.
Re:Why does this require an AirTag (Score:5, Funny)
"Fuck no, that sounds like a good way to get shot." -- The police
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As we've already seen time and time again. The police are not there to protect you.
The SCOTUS has ruled this way at least twice, DeShaney v Winnebago, 1989 & Gonzales vs Castle Rock 2005.
Whatever variant of "to protect & serve" you see written on the side of any squad car in America is purely marketing or public relations, not something you can bet your life on.
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Lol yes I'm sure being "armed" would've saved her. Maybe she'd quick-draw and shoot them down before they pulled their guns out, like it's the Wild West. *facepalm*
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Classic slashdot comment. First the false fact, then the follow up based on it.
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Shootout at the OK corral.
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These day the shootout is at the Golden Corral.
Re:Why does this require an AirTag (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why does this require an AirTag (Score:4, Insightful)
Those weren't good guys. Those were assholes with badges and titles, not good guys.
Re: Why does this require an AirTag (Score:3)
They also didn't enter right away because they were afraid of the shooter's choice of weapon.
I don't blame you for wishing they didn't count.
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If she had a gun and confronted them with it she would have simply been shot sooner.
And the guys who stole her car would claim self defense if not Stand Your Ground.
That isn't a liberal thing. That is simply anyone capable of logical thought thing.
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That is simply anyone capable of logical thought thing.
Remember, this is /. :-)
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I know right? Who are these utterly retarded morons who think a 61 year old woman carrying a gun around like some cowboy from the 1800s would've saved her from these kids with zero respect for human life? These neocon troglodytes think this is GTA, like she'd get into a drawn out gun battle.
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Re: Why does this require an AirTag (Score:5, Informative)
More choices than suicide or homicide (Score:5)
I fail to see why the cases that result in a homicide somehow validates the "having a gun is the solution to my problems" mindset. Apparently you think it does.
Nor does it make the case that the 61-year-old woman would have been more likely to survive in the story's scenario. Even if she was a veteran retired Marine or law enforcement officer, in which case she would have had more sense than to try.
Getting robbed sucks. I know. But there are more choices than getting yourself killed or killing someone or both.
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The car wasn't worth dying for. This is the police's business and/or possibly her insurance company's business.
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Bakersfield is NOT a haven for liberals. It's quite redneck. Also the home town of Kevin McCarthy.
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They're called liberals and they don't believe in guns because they're not safe.
Heh, you should tell this to my US liberal friends who have carry permits, regularly go to the range, and love discussing guns, rifles, and the like in our group chat, including homemade ones.
As far as I understood from their many, many, many gun discussions (to which I pay little attention myself), what they do dislike are military-grade weapons in civilian hands, and more particularly allowing any person with 10 different mental issues to buy said military-grade weapons at will.
My guess then is you don't
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Well, it's interesting because it's the only bit of corporate surveillance technology that the big tech collective lets their targets use for themselves.
And sadly, someone is bound to use this incident to argue that corporate surveillance should say in the hands of secretive corporations, when the true argument should be that corporate surveillance shouldn't exist at all.
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Why is this on slashdot, because it has an airtag?? Slashdot has gotten pathetic
It is here because the editors know that within a few comments, it will turn into a gun-control "debate" and vastly increase the web traffic for the site. Oh, and also: the foibles of modern tracking technology i the hands of a naive society.
In 60 years, all children will know about tracking and how it can be used and misused and abused. They will know that just because you CAN track a criminal does not mean that it's a good idea to do so. Right now, a lot of adults don't think that sort of thing through, a
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If you tell police your car was stolen AND tell them where it's at right now, rarely will they do anything about it. American police are generally lazy and useless and will do anything they can to avoid their duties.
In America, the Police are locally operated and they mostly protect property. Stolen cars are one of the things they take more seriously, unless you're in an overworked city during the Kia Challenge.
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...yo Pops put an AirTag on her pussy so he could find it again later.
I hear that does not work very well. Very weak RF reception down there.
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Even for an American, this is unbelievably dumb. Do you really believe in stupid stereotypes like this? What about the criminals who pulled off the Lufthansa heist [wikipedia.org] in New York City starting at 3AM? Are you going to try and explain that away as just staying up very late or something?