Crosswalk or not, the way I learned it was that peds ALWAYS had the right of way, and that you were NEVER to drive outside of your ability to stop for whatever may preset in front of you.

That being said, it is clear that for this tech to progress we have to let it learn and evolve (just like human drivers). This was inevitable, and yet necessary.

 

Gotta love statistics, when fully presented they're hard to argue against.

As far as most of us Aussies are concerned, we prefer our gun-related deaths be kept to a minimum.

2015 Fiream deaths:
Australia:6 (from posted stats above)
USA:13,286 (source: Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence - BBC News)
The US has ~13.5x the population of Australia, so scaling accordingly, that would equate to 81 deaths in Australia which is STILL only 0.6% of the US figure.

I'd say gun control works pretty bloody well in Australia and it's hard to argue those statistics.

 

Yeah, I remember when I was attending Ok State that was drilled into us about pedestrians, and the attendees frequently just walked right out in front of traffic.

And while yes, they do have the right of way, that doesn't matter if someone doesn't see you/can't stop/etc. So common sense is needed on both sides.

As to your initial statement, depending on state/local laws, pedestrians do not necessarily have the right of way outside of a crosswalk.

 

Those were stats for mass shootings.
The total number for Australia for 2015 was 211.
Also, you cited the total homicide number in the US. Homicides committed with a gun totaled 9,778. (Note that rifles were used the least; 258 times) https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s...ta-table-4.xls

An interesting thing to note about Australia's population is that it is over 90% white and 90% urban.
I am NOT implying that minorities are bad. It simply means that your country is homogeneous ethnically and culturally, which has a major impact on such things.
You also don't have problems with gangs which plague most of our major cities and account for the vast majority of homicides.

One aspect of your culture that I find interesting is the almost total disregard for due process and probable cause your police seem to have.
In Hobart and Perth consecutively, I spent a few nights on patrol with local police.
In both cases, they had no qualms about getting handsy with people and did things like reach into moving vehicles and jam the gear selector in park to have a look inside.

 

First, You can't compare those stats.

According to this source there was: 211 gun deaths in AUS in 2015 and 36,247 from the same source in the USA.

117 of those 211, from the same source, are from suicide. a rate of 0.55. which is 0.78 per 100,000 people. total suicides are 13.30 per 100,000.
27 of those 211, were from homicides. 0.12 per 100,000.

22,018 of the 36,247, from the same source, are from suicide in the US. a rate of 0.60. which is 6.86 per 100,000 people. total suicides are 13.76 per 100,000.
12,974 of the 36, 247, were from homicides. 4.04 per 100,000.

your homicide rate is 1.1, ours is closer to 6.

so yes, to be clear, Australians are less likely to get murdered with a gun -- or any other method -- but just as likely to kill themselves with a gun.


the point is, people will kill people regardless of any law. it's been proven over and over for thousands of years. Americans have the unalienable right to own guns and protect themselves from those bad people, so we don't give a **** what Australians have to say. We had more gun deaths in Chicago alone than all of Austrailia -- and that state has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.

fun fact: 75.3% of victims and 70.5% of offenders were African American in Chicago.

should we ban blacks? Statistics suggest that would sustainably cut down the numbers, or I guess we could continue to implement silly laws that wont actually solve anything? I'm always shocked when I hear a suggestion that's not: increase funding, or ban it.

 

Serious reply: I've never understood why people often say "you can't compare those two things" about things which are easily compared.

Example:





I assume you mean that 75.3% of victims and 70.5% of offenders in Chicago were African American. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that we'd be literally swimming in blood up here.



I seem to recall this having been tried once or twice before. It didn't end well.

 

0% to 75% gun murder rates -- I dunno...

 

meanwhile:

https://www.themaven.net/bluelivesma...IEWx8FSltmni8g

 

Not sure where you get that 90% figure from.
Walk around any of Australia's 5 major city centres and try and convince anyone that 90% are caucasian.
According to the 2016 consensus, Australia is more like 76% caucasian based on country of birth.
This figure decreases significantly when you take into account anyone born in Australia to non-caucasian parents.

It's been mentioned here already, and I totally agree with it, the problem is NOT minorities, it's more to do with poverty and the breakdown of the traditional family structure (which is where moral values and discipline have traditionally been enforced).

As for the Aussie police:

If you've got nothing to hide, you should have no issues doing what's asked of you otherwise you just give them more reason to suspect something's afoot and it escalates.

I'm "old school" when it comes to cops, they're there to enforce the law and should be respected - most cops don't want to cause trouble, they see more than enough of it every day (those that do seek trouble don't last long, nobody likes working with someone like that and it's bad for their image).

In my youth, when you got out of hand, the cops would belt you over the head with a truncheon, throw you in the back of the paddywagon and lock you up in a cell overnight to sleep it off or charge you for something serious.
We respected the police because we knew the consequences of our actions and, if you spent a night in jail because you were drunk and disorderly, you accepted it and the bump on your noggin as being deserved.

These days kids have NO respect for the law and when someone attacks them and gets injured from it, the media is all over it as police brutality.
If someone spits on a police officer, they deserve retaliation - I'd have no qualms about punching anyone in the head if they did it to me.

As for "No problem with Gangs":

So far Australia has been fairly lucky regarding this but Melbourne is now suffering a lot of Sudanese-youth street gang violence, mostly home invasions, muggings and stolen cars. Thankfully they don't have easy access to guns otherwise the murder rate would skyrocket.

 

It's difficult to pin down an official government source for Australia's whiteness due to an effort to create distance from the "white Australia" policy.
The Google machine turns up several articles referencing a 92% white population, and adding up the available census data by nationality collaborates that figure.
My observations of the police were mentioned because it clearly has an effect on how people behave on the street.
In an almost entirely urban country whose citizens are very tolerant of being babysat, it seems to work.
I liked Australia, and I've visited it from one end to the other.
It's not America.
It's more like a country with 4 copies of San Diego.
Gang bangers here don't have easy access to guns. They obtain them illegally, and statistics bare this out.
By the way, they can do obtain them illegally in the blessed Utopia of Australia too. Do you remember the Sydney hostage situation in 2014?
You have to go back to the 80s to find any instance of an automatic weapon being used in a crime in the US, and it was perpetrated by a policeman.
There are roughly 6,000 Sudanese living in all of Victoria.
Even if 100% of them were gangbangers, it would hardly be an epidemic.
We have an epidemic here.
We've discussed harsher punishment as potentially the most effective means of lowering homicide rates in this thread and others.
It is clearly the biggest problem (related to this issue) we have, and it needs to be addressed.

 

North Hollywood shootout?

 

I'm fairly certain that we could generally lower violent crime rates if we brought back public hangings.

US Citizens residents are far too disconnected with the concept of punitive measures. If someone gets executed, we maybe hear about it on the radio, but don't actually have the opportunity to see or understand what is happening in the moment. If, however, we got to watch the executioner lead a man up the gallows, fasten a noose around his neck, hear a reading of the crimes he is convicted of committing, watch the terror, anger, or regret on his face as the trap is prepared, witness the peaceful violence of his death, and then see him hang in the square for a day... suddenly, I think people would start to reconsider their crimes.

As it is today, someone who is put to death simply "disappears" and we go on about our daily life. Maybe we hear a name before we soon forget it, but the valuable socially corrective experience is forfeited by a society that thinks punishment is beneath them.

 

I agree.

Maybe we could cut off the hands of the thieves. Maybe we should stone the adulterers.

 

Nah. There are already too many stoned people around.

 

Right. I had forgotten about that, although they were technically modified semi-auto weapons.
Police actually bought AR15s from a nearby gun dealer to engage the douchebags.

 

I just like all the fully semi guns I can own right now. I can pull the trigger a fully shoot one shot. Some people should learn about guns before they start pushing their agendas.

 

btw:

he didn't even need a gun to kill himself...

 

We need to move quickly to ban assault packages before this kind of thing happens again.

 

It works well. There are absolutely no thieves in the Middle East where this type of punishment is enforced.

Liveleak, b e s t g o r e.com and many other sites will let watch particularly brutal examples of such.

I remember one in particular of a man having a gun held to his head as it took 3-4 whacks to cut off all his fingers.

 

To be fair, the barrier for entry to bombs is actually much higher. Large studies of serial killers and criminals in general have shown that bomb makers have the highest average IQ. In fact, guns replaced the bow primarily because it was so much easier to throw a peasant a gun a tell them to point at their target and fire than spend many years and a lot of resources training a competent archer. Pretty much any idiot can use a gun to be an effective killer. Most people cannot assemble and properly place an effective explosive device.