$3 Million Fortnite Winner Becomes Latest Swatting Target (arstechnica.com) 154
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Kotaku reports that Kyle "Bugha" Giersdorf was streaming a Fortnite game late Sunday when he abruptly left his desk and abandoned the game with the livestream still running. The cause? His father coming to tell him that armed police were at the front door. Fortunately, Bugha returned unharmed to the stream several minutes later. "That was definitely a new one," he can be heard saying on a recording of the stream. "I got swatted." The comparatively quick and peaceful resolution of the issue was in part due to sheer good luck. "I was lucky because the one officer, yeah, he lives in our neighborhood," Bugha explained on the stream.
Bugha won $3 million for his first-place finish in the first-ever Fortnite World Cup in July and even appeared on The Tonight Show to talk about his win with host Jimmy Fallon. He is also all of 16 years old, and so a threat against him also involved his parents, whose personal information may have been easy to find. "Swatting" occurs when someone places a hoax emergency call to a police department, hoping to mobilize an emergency response (i.e., a SWAT team) to the victim's home. Bugha was lucky in that the officers who responded to his address were of a mood to ask questions first. Not all swatting victims are so lucky. In 2017, a Kansas man named Andrew Finch was killed during a swatting event even though he was not the intended target. The man behind the hoax call was sentenced to 20 years in prison earlier this year for his role in Finch's death.
Bugha won $3 million for his first-place finish in the first-ever Fortnite World Cup in July and even appeared on The Tonight Show to talk about his win with host Jimmy Fallon. He is also all of 16 years old, and so a threat against him also involved his parents, whose personal information may have been easy to find. "Swatting" occurs when someone places a hoax emergency call to a police department, hoping to mobilize an emergency response (i.e., a SWAT team) to the victim's home. Bugha was lucky in that the officers who responded to his address were of a mood to ask questions first. Not all swatting victims are so lucky. In 2017, a Kansas man named Andrew Finch was killed during a swatting event even though he was not the intended target. The man behind the hoax call was sentenced to 20 years in prison earlier this year for his role in Finch's death.
Is it hard to catch swatters? (Score:5, Interesting)
If a swatter calls 911 aren't all calls recorded? How hard is it to catch the caller? There aren't really many pay phones around anymore so couldn't they track the call (unless the caller is using a burner, I guess).
This is gross misuse of public resources and well as the height of recklessness. This kind of behavior should seriously be clamped down on.
Re:Is it hard to catch swatters? (Score:4, Interesting)
supposedly you can use some shady VOIP service which makes it hard to track down
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Hard? Ok. People are getting killed and officers allocated to situations they aren't needed in.
We should avoid prosecution because it might be hard to track them down? If this means imposing sanctions on the countries where these services exist, so be it.
This is a very serious problem that I don't think most people really grasp. This is isn't "petty gamer kids playing pranks on eachother".
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If a swatter calls 911 aren't all calls recorded? How hard is it to catch the caller? There aren't really many pay phones around anymore so couldn't they track the call (unless the caller is using a burner, I guess).
This is gross misuse of public resources and well as the height of recklessness. This kind of behavior should seriously be clamped down on.
The guy that did this in Wichita is cooling his heels in jail for 20 years. It seems like they are pretty serious about clamping down on this behavior already.
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That's clearly not how human psyche works.... After all the death sentence hasn't brought murder to an end either.
The punishment, unless it is negligible, does not deter criminals. Only the odds of getting caught does. Or better said what the perp thinks the odds to be.
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That's not the purpose of the death penalty. I am against the death penalty, but the purpose of it has always been revenge, pure and simple. It's to satisfy the blood lust of the non-criminals, not to provide a disincentive to the criminals.
Don't let any supporter of the death penalty tell you different.
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It also helps to remove a known danger from the public, and would be far cheaper than incarceration if there wasn't so much bureaucracy attached.
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Since the vast majority of people who murder only do it once, I'm not sure how true that is.
Re: Is it hard to catch swatters? (Score:2)
Are you talking about systems with no incarceration/death penalty for murderers ? Because otherwise, it is very likely that murderers would commit multiple murders if they were not jailed/executed.
Where do you get the data for the revenge-less societies ?
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> better said what the perp thinks the odds to be.
And there's the problem. I recall a study done on prisoners regarding their ability to assess odds. They were (as a group) substantially worse at it than the general public. Which shouldn't be a surprise. Those who end up in prison tend to have a poor ability to assess risk/reward in a given scenario.
Re:Is it hard to catch swatters? (Score:4, Insightful)
How hard is it to catch the caller?
The NSA did not just flash a quick grin; that was only your imagination.
Re:Is it hard to catch swatters? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also a major problem that "swatting" the wrong house leads to major injury and death. Police should always assume there could be innocent people in a location or that they are in fact, at the wrong location.
Way to much military tactics being used. Flash-bang's in cribs?
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They use various tricks to disguise the originating phone number. Once everyone figures out it was a hoax, it can be difficult to trace due to jurisdictional issues - the caller is usually not located in the same state as the target. So you have to convince another police force to investigate on your behalf, and there can be complexities around the interaction of the laws between states.
Also, it's not a felony in many states. Even in the states where it is, it's not a big, flashy crime. So it's not high
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How does this not qualify as wire fraud, allowing the FBI to appropriately address this?
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It might be possible to classify it as such, but so far no one is interested in trying it.
Again, as long as no one gets hurt, it's a low priority. If someone gets hurt, then the laws surrounding that injury come into play and you don't need to stretch existing statutes.
Re:Is it hard to catch swatters? (Score:4, Informative)
How hard is it to catch the caller?
Pre-paid burner phone.
How hard is it to catch them with money... (Score:2)
Seems like $3 million would go a long way to hiring some investigators to track down the swatter and some bitcoin to use as payment to care of the problem.
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Swatters can be caught, but that takes some time and law enforcement has to respond to the potential threat immediately. They need to follow-up with tracing and the punishments need to be harsh enough to deter it from happening in the first place.
See also: fake bomb threats on schools
Abuse of anonymity again (Score:2)
Anonymity must be limited. Let's see the outrage of the AC trolls, eh?
There are times when anonymity is justified. Calling in fake SWAT reports is NOT one of them.
There is a kind of paradox here. Secrecy can be justified by prior secrecy. Ditto anonymity. Swatting is based on this kind of jujitsu.
Paraphrasing is awkward, but: "There is a secret crisis that requires a SWAT team response, but whoever I am who is reporting the crisis, I am claiming that I am in some way part of the secret. Therefore you have t
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Re:Abuse of anonymity again (Score:5, Interesting)
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What surprised me was how much the total number of posts for each article dropped. I never really gave much thought to how many posts were made by ACs, but now it's pretty obvious.
On top of that, it is now pretty clear that Slashdot really has relatively few active posters left anymore. I would assume that a small handful of pe
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Re: Abuse of anonymity again (Score:5, Insightful)
AC posts have been truly shit lately. At the same time, AC is so fundamental to /. that I'm seriously considering posting nothing but frosty piss, GNAA trolls, and Jon Katz fanfic until they cancel my account.
PS check my eserid
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I can live with frosty piss and GNAA, but come on.... Jon Katz fanfic? That's beyond the pale!!!
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I'd give you the funny mod if I ever got a mod point to give. So I have to beg "Mod parent up."
Re: Abuse of anonymity again (Score:2)
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Seriously, though. It's not like you use a credit card to sign up for Slashdot, just make burner accounts if you have something important to say you don't want attached to your main account. Whether logged in or not the site's internal logs save the same info about IP, time etc.
What if they already had a camera there? (Score:2)
In case you haven't noticed.. Slashdot did away with AC posting for some reason. I wonder why?
Wow! No, I was already filtering against AC to the maximum degree possible, but now you made me look and I don't see them. When did this happen? It can't have been too long ago. (Also, this is a conditional response. I can't find any fresh AC comments just now, but lack of evidence is not a proof of nonexistence.)
My first reaction is "Given all the shite flowing from the ACs, what did an AC write to finally persuade the powers of Slashdot to kill the option?" It must have been pretty amazing. It's almost e
Re: What if they already had a camera there? (Score:2)
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I don't know of any way that the police can somehow determine that there's some specific streamer at a given location in order to do said verification.
And of course, the problem with creating such a database is that, even if you trusted law enforcement with this information, it would eventually be accidentally leaked and then you've just doxxed every streamer in the country.
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Hmm... Good point. But maybe it could be part of a celebrity-protection thing? They don't need to cover everyone, mostly just people who want such protection, with perhaps some outreach for likely targets.
It raises an interesting question in this specific case. Was he attacked because he was famous, or was it personal? One of the losers in the Fortnite game?
Have they caught the perp yet? And what sort of logs does the game create? If they can match the suspect against the logs, then it might be a paper case
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Some of the best posts I've read on Slashdot have been anonymous. Providing that option allows
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Suppose you tell the cops you're John Doe, a pizza guy who was driving by. Are they going to have to track you down and interview before sending the team to a potentially time-sensitive situation?
Even if you say you're Mickey Mouse, they have to take your call seriously because if they don't, people could die if it's a Of course we know the cops don't really have to do anything, and sometimes when they do respond, more people die than if they didn't, but that's beside the point.
There's never going to be a
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Not clear what your focus is, but on your numbered list the first one is already true and the second one is essentially the situation the fake SWAT caller is trying to create, deliberately, with malice, and possibly with practice if he hasn't been nailed and jailed on his first attempt. Maybe you could clarify?
However my point is that this crime is increasing the pressure for more surveillance. If the cops can instantly find the cameras that are looking at the 911 caller, then they have him in the bag. If t
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I think we are agreeing but sideways. I think I can clarify from your example: If the identities of the members of the terror cell were not secret, then there would be no need for the secrecy in reporting who they are. I previously worded it as justifying secrecy (including anonymity) in terms of prior secrecy.
There are various abuses of anonymity, but the one that seems to have been the biggest problem on Slashdot was acting like a dick simply because there was no accountability. The total ban on AC postin
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Explain or I'm calling BS. How do you equate calling in a fake emergency with being a fascist? However the confusion you are apparently creating could certainly be exploited by fascists to justify more fascism.
Right now I think you're just some kind of naive ideologue (in the PI camp). You are probably confused about what freedom is (but see my sig, especially the penultimate term). However in the general case (which applies to most ACs), I divide them into proudly ignorant, sincerely stupid, or paid to pla
USA USA USA (Score:4, Interesting)
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Swatting, school shootings, mass shootings, parents buying bullet proof backpacks for their kids ,high crime rate, worlds largest prison population....what the hell has gone so wrong in the USA ???
Seriously? It's not just the USA you know. It seems to be a fact of the human condition that some of us do shockingly evil things and it doesn't matter where on the face of the earth people are.
And you need to take a look at the number of events to the number of people. I think if you make a fair comparison of violent crime deaths per 100K of population and compared it to some other countries, the USA isn't likely at the top of the list for nearly any specific crime you can name. We have a LOT of peopl
Re:USA USA USA (Score:5, Informative)
Yup (Score:2)
...and one of the reasons that the SWAT team didn't go in all trigger happy is that one of the cops knew him.
No need to hire a hit for big $$ anymore, just pay some kid to disguise a 911 call.
Re:USA USA USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Per 100,000 the USA is the 143rd safest country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] There are MORE countries better than the USA than are worse. And by country, you are 7th for the most murders Yes, some countries are much worse, but some countries are also a hell of a lot better.
Unfortunately, this is a matter of how statistics are collected and reported. For instance, in the USA "Gun Deaths" includes intentional suicides and accounts for a full 2/3rds of the reported number in the USA, where we count them as homicides. Other countries do NOT count suicides in their numbers. Also, reporting criteria and accuracy varies from country to country. We really don't have good numbers in many of the third world countries that don't have functional governments which keep accurate records. So I question the numbers overall for some of those.
If you take the developed countries with similar economies and standards of living, the USA isn't at the top of that list, or at the bottom. This tells me that we are not hugely different than most countries like us in violent death rates. HOWEVER, if you look at the number of weapons we have, the USA wins, hands down as having the most guns. Yet, our violent death rates are not off the charts high. As other posters have pointed out, if you scratch off a few square miles from two cities from our statistics, Chicago and Baltimore we drop nearly to the bottom of the list. Most of the USA is extremely safe, and exceedingly well armed, on average.
So, my original point stands. A percentage of people are bad, no matter where you find them, it's part of the human condition and it's pretty much everywhere. It's been this way since Cain and Abel, and will be this way until the world comes to an end and there is no earthly solution that fixes But I'll ad the following point: it. It DOES seem though that legal gun ownership doesn't change any of the death rates, at least in the USA.
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As noted on Wikipedia, they use the UN definition that does not include suicides for the US statistics.
The real questions are:
1. Would fewer guns lower the murder rate? Seems likely that it would.
2. Is the higher murder rate a price worth paying for high levels of gun ownership?
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Three things for you..
1. The second amendment of our constitution exists, like it or not, and it recognizes the natural right to arms for defense. The courts have held that this right includes owning modern firearms and this must be allowed for law abiding citizens in their right minds. It also means that government MUST show cause to a court to deny you this right. Just like they have to show cause to take your life or liberty, they must show case to abridge the right to arms. This means that law abidin
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1. if it was a natural right it doesn't need to be in the constitution and it certainly wouldn't be an amendment!
2. Look at the gun homicide stats of other countries that allow guns in private hands. Your argument has no merit, it fails.
3. USA has more mass shootings per year than countries in a civil war! Again, your argument has no merit and fails.
Guns make impulsive violence so much more violent than it would likely be without guns.
Re: USA USA USA (Score:3)
1. Violence rates are falling almost everywhere, without a proportionate increase in gun ownership. So your assertion about the inverse relationship needs much more support than you've provided, so is highly suspect in the present.
2. Violence in gun free zones : there is high incidence of violence when the gun potential difference is high, without sufficient insulation. E.g. high gun ownership in surrounding area, but a bar/school/theatre/mall is gun free : such gun free areas are vulnerable. Because the bo
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Look at the graph on the right hand side, deaths by suicide and homicide are separated. Look at the US rate vs other wealthy countries.
Re:USA USA USA (Score:5, Insightful)
For murder rates, among OECD countries USA is second only to Mexico. 5 years ago it was behind Estonia and Turkey as well, but murder rates in those countries have fallen while US has climbed from 3.8/100k to 4.9/100k. All of Europe besides the ex-Soviet countries is below 2.
It is just the USA. Comparing yourselves to war torn African and Middle Eastern countries and drug lord infested Central American countries so you can pretend the US does not have a problem is burying your head in the sand.
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And yet huge non-Chicago and non-Pittsburgh expanses of the USA have a fairly minimal murder rate. I don't feel endangered going outside any time, for instance.
One has to look at who is doing all the killing, and why.
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Why... because its the American way
Only poor Americans Die (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure the statistics for middle class Americans are about the same as elsewhere in the western world.
Re:Only poor Americans Die (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're so damn close to figuring this out... just... think about it one step further. The middle class isn't your problem.... there are poor in other countries too... ergo...??? Come on, you can do it! I believe in you!
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So it's okay if it's just poor people murdering each other?
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"One has to look at who is doing all the killing, and why."
You can't do that, though. The results would be totally non-PC. For example, according to the 2017 FBI stats (the most recent year with definitive data), black males between the ages of 17 and 39 carry out far more murders than any other group [fbi.gov]. Hence, no surprise, murders tend to be concentrated in the black areas of the big cities: St. Louis, Philadelphia, Baltimore, etc..
The problems with black culture in the US are well-known, but no one is willi
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Sadly, I agree with you. Being a middle aged white guy, my opinion doesn't count even though it is informed by having lived and gone to public school in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina because my family was poor when I was in High School. It doesn't matter that I am well acquainted with the social and cultural norms that lead to perpetuating the condition of being poor, regardless of one's skin color. It also doesn't matter, that I was able to rise above this though working hard, going to col
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black males between the ages of 17 and 39 carry out far more murders than any other group
Except that's not what your source actually says. But when people try to tell you that, you accuse them of being PC.
The stats say that more black men between 17 and 39 are *convicted* of murder than any other group. And as we know, black people are convicted at a much higher rate than other groups. The data doesn't adjust for that.
It also doesn't adjust for economic status. It isn't comparing black people of similar economic status to other groups of similar economic status. Again, we know that poverty bree
paging Mr.Clemens (Score:2)
It also doesn't adjust for economic status. It isn't comparing black people of similar economic status to other groups of similar economic status.
Irrelevant. The conviction rates represent actual individuals, and a percentage of the whole. There is no need for 'adjustment'.
black people are convicted at a much higher rate than other groups
You're implying false conviction, but you have no figures to support that assertion.
There is really no evidence that this is anything to do with "black culture", and a mountain of evidence that suggests it is to do with poverty and bias.
If no pertinent observations can be made about "black culture" to imply contributing factors towards incarceration rates, then you may want to consider removing your ideological blinders.
But point that out and someone will brand you an SJW. I get the impression that they mainly do that to avoid anything being done about the problem.
Likewise, certain facts are somehow racist. But at least I can appreciate the subtlety of invoking a victimhood n
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Not necessarily false conviction, although with the epidemic of unfair plea bargaining that's certainly a factor.
Studies have repeatedly shown that the lighter the accused's skin, the less likely they are to even be brought to trial, the less likely they are to be convicted on the same evidence, and the less harsh the punishment. It's not even just a black/white thing, black people with darker skin actually get punished more too.
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Not necessarily false conviction, although with the epidemic of unfair plea bargaining that's certainly a factor.
Studies have repeatedly shown that the lighter the accused's skin, the less likely they are to even be brought to trial, the less likely they are to be convicted on the same evidence, and the less harsh the punishment. It's not even just a black/white thing, black people with darker skin actually get punished more too.
Again, the implication is that the crime statistics are faulty and misleading based on a supposition that all groups commit crime at equal rates. Apparently we're not supposed to look at the demographics for the U.S. cities with the worse gun violence, homicides, and robberies, and use that as the basis for any hypothesis because willful denial is the order of the day.
Also please excuse me for extreme skepticism towards any 'studies' involving social justice. [areomagazine.com] To say that too often the methodology and assump
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Lies, damned lies, and racist AF statistics, as Ami just spelled out.
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Most American's see nothing wrong with chlorine washed chicken. Perhaps if know that the rate of Salmonella in the USA is at least 10 times higher than in the UK you might change your mind. Remember Salmonella is a killer.
Your perception of safety is clouded by what you consider to be normal, that is you don't feel endangered because you are used to that level of danger. Someone used to a much lower level of danger would feel endangered.
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Did a hood get in the way of finishing out that thought process? If it slips I imagine it must make it harder to type accurately.
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.what the hell has gone so wrong in the USA ???
It all started with too many Clint Eastwood movies and it's been a slow slide from there..
Re:USA USA USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Its NOT the media, its NOT the internet, its NOT click bait, its NOT fake news, it is the USA as it actually is.
Re:USA USA USA (Score:4, Informative)
https://rsf.org/en/ranking [rsf.org]
USA 48th
UK 33rd
Canada 18th
The USA talks a big game, but the facts say something very very different.
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I don't think you understand. USA is #1 by definition. So if it doesn't come out in the top spot then clearly the statistics are bogus.
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Facts? What facts? (Score:2)
Facts?
Every one of those studies and rankings is written by somebody with an agenda. You need to get into the details and methodology before you take any one of them seriously.... and then you need to consider how often other countries fudge their statistics or straight up lie (harder to be sure of this latter issue).
I'm rather fond of my corner of the United States, in terms of safety, freedom, education, and so on. I'm not going to give up anything to the sort who believes every nasty thing someone tell
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Anyone who says different is a liar or has an agenda.
As for your comparisons, worthless, you cherry pick the worst. This is what anti-vaxxers do, cherry pick the information they will accept, the rest is just a conspiracy against them.
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Re:USA USA USA (Score:5, Insightful)
The "well-regulated militia" line is parenthetical in the text of the Second Amendment. It is there for context. Keep in mind that at the time it was written, every able-bodied man was part of the "militia" by necessity. The founding fathers believed it of utmost importance to have an armed citizenry that could oppose foreign or domestic tyrants at a moment's notice. The problem with this logic is that "tyranny" is rather loosely defined and even shortly after the formation of the United States, you had an armed revolt attempt to march on DC for perceived "tyranny."
You should separate the questions of "is the Second Amendment a good idea" and "what did the Second Amendment actually mean," because it's relatively clear what it meant if you have a clear grasp of English: "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Not the rights of the militia, though at the time there wasn't much difference. If you want to argue that the Second Amendment is a bad idea in a modern context, that's your prerogative; I'll agree to disagree but I think there are valid grounds to argue that on, there's obviously a lot of bad things associated with gun ownership for the good that's there. If you want to say the Second Amendment says something it very clearly does not say, that's very easy to debunk.
Re:USA USA USA (Score:4)
A "people" is made up of a collective of individual persons, though. If you infringe the rights of a person, you are by definition infringing the rights of the collective, you'd just be doing so piecemeal. "People" is also used to refer to the right to assemble; if the government prohibited a key speaker from attending a public assembly, I believe that would (and should) still constitute an infringement of the First Amendment, even if it was only limiting the rights of a single person.
Either way, I acknowledge you have a point that I didn't think about. I haven't heard it framed in those terms and I'll have to think about it some more.
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Freedom of the press? I'd argue we more of that than say, England.
You might, but many people would disagree with you: https://rsf.org/en/detailed-me... [rsf.org]
The UK press has serious problems (like being thoroughly murdoched for one), but the problems with the US press are way, way worse. The first amendment doesn't do all that much if the press are in the iron grip of a very small number of corporations.
Or Russia. Or China.
Why even bother with that comparison? Why not go with "America: less repressive than Nort
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The second amendment is an amendment and you can change an amendment. Like you did with prohibition and slavery.
This is all paraphrasing from Jim Jeffries btw, to be honest you can change the entire constitution if enough people agree about it. That's the whole point of a democracy. Unless America is not a democracy anymore? But considering that you have the most peopl
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Parts that many of us would never visit.
Why even keep those parts? We should have let them go in 1861.
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"Did THAT make the front page? No. "
Umm, yes, yes it did, here in Australia. And likely other nations too.
Perhaps this is another symptom of the USA's lack of care about people dying? If they're not white people, that is? Or it wasn't via guns?
I dunno exactly why, but no other nation has mass shootings like the USA has mass shootings, and that's not arguable.
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The American Dream is exactly that, a dream. Social mobility in the US is worse than many more left leaning countries.
You should travel, I have been to over 30 countries including months in the USA, watch news from outside the USA and actually read about how th
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Criminals have guns in tge rest of the world as well. They also have equivilent things to SWAT teams. How come swatting is not an issue in the rest of the world?
Incredibly bad police training that emphasizes the safety of the officers over that of the public. And then gives them military-style gear and military-style tactical training. The result is a body of men acting like an invading force and not like peace officers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You may not be 100% correct, in that some nations ex-military join the police force as some of their training is well suited to some tasks. Some of their military training, obviously, may not be well suited to law enforcement, certainly.
Most riot or special response teams in Australia have access to armoured vehicles and weapons that can penetrate such vehicles, as well as general crowd clearing weapons, like heavy machine guns.
Hopefully they'll never need to be used!
Treated like calling in fake pizza order. Wrong. (Score:4)
So why is this still possible? (Score:3)
The capability to spoof the Caller-ID to a number you are not verified as owning should be made *GONE*. Immediately. Certainly for calls to 911, but I'd say across the board. There is no legitimate use case for this, at all. It's a legacy gaping security vulnerability that has no business still being left wide open.
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Re: Hoax maybe? (Score:2)
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More attention than being on national television? Okay there
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I do agree about the lotto thing though, if I won the lotto I would tell NO ONE, not even my wife. I am too soft hearted, if people climbed out of the wood work (which they would) with dying babies and dead dog stories I would be broke in no