I am really having trouble seeing the problem with the outcome of “nobody else got hurt and the bad guys got caught.”
And if they’d decided to kill the women, what would they have done about that? They didn’t kill more people because they were stopped, but because they didn’t feel like it.
And you think that adding more guns, or tasers, or pepper spray, into this situation would have helped somehow?
Guns no, but personal self defense devices are very helpful against attackers who don’t have guns. Since Britain has eliminated guns from the streets, allowing women to carry nonlethal self-defense devices to protect against physical attacks should be common sense.
And yes, if knife wielding maniacs attacked a woman with pepper spray and she even sprayed it in their general direction, they’d want to be just about anywhere but where they were.
I’m fairly comfortable in stating, as a personal matter of opinion, that on the whole, the population of the UK are quite happy with the current situation re. personal weaponry.
I would also like to add to Baron Greenback in thanking you for your concern.
And if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bump its ass a-hoppin’.
In theory…
While in fact, they did not attack anybody else. The women they did speak with had the wherewithall to calmly interact with them and not try to confront them or make them feel threatened in any way. So when the police did arrive, they did not need to lock down the area for 20 square blocks and do a house to house search with the potential of hostages because the two attackers were feeling like they needed to defend themselves and potentially hurt others in the process.
Why? What’s the rationale behind leaving people defenseless?
You act as if murderers killing more than one person is an unlikely event.
Why try to induce a gun debate into an already tragic event? One which would arguably would have been made worse with the presence of more guns.
Well, that’s one difference here, since that’s the subject of this thread. We don’t exactly consider making criminals feel unthreatened to be a particularly high priority. As a matter of fact, our goal is to make criminals feel as threatened as possible.
Must be proud to have a situation where there are a lot more crime victims than the supposedly ultraviolent US.
Hmmm, if only there were some way people could protect themselves from crime…
Which did not happen in this situation therefore immaterial in this context.
again, not talking about guns. I understand the urge to control guns. What I don’t understand is why there should be a slippery slope afterwards that leads to banning nonlethal personal self-defense tools.
On the other hand, we have far fewer school shootings, which seem to go right ahead Stateside despite the legality of tasers, pepper spray or guns.
If you really can’t see the plus points of making a violent criminal feel unthreatened - as you might want to make a mad dog feel unthreatened so that it would not bite anyone until someone arrived to take it away - then perhaps you should go away and think about it.
I can see the wisdom if you have no means of self-defense and the criminal is unlikely to attack you otherwise.
Of course, that does you no good in 95% of real life situations. you are the prey, and you most definitely don’t want to seem nonthreatening to a predator.
I would be interested if anyone had any actual stats on this - maybe the Home Office produces something? Because my impression is that the majority of violent crime [ETA: in the UK] occurs as a result of inner-city gang activity (where both “sides” are much more likely to be armed than the general population). So being unarmed doesn’t make you more likely to be the victim of violent crime.
If that’s right, I’m not convinced at all that introducing more weapons (lethal or less-lethal) on to the streets of Britain would make anything better.
Because you see the results precisely in this situation: because the attackers knew the women were harmless they didn’t need to attack. They talked instead.
Sure they could’ve killed many more people because they were unarmed. And had they been armed a total of even more people could’ve been killed. But as it turns out, the situation as it is works pretty well to keep violence from escalating further.
What would happen in the Netherlands is probably pretty much the same, except for the people comforting the man and the brave woman who spoke to the attackers. I have no faith that would happen here.
I once came upon a man who had been shot. He was bleeding to death in the street. Other people were gathering and they did nothing. I had to tell them to call an ambulance, I tied off his leg with my belt and then held his hand and told him he would be ok. Eventually there was quite a crowd of worthless wastes of space, all doing fuck all. I know, I know: they were scared, they didn’t know what to do etc. Well if stuff like that scares you into not knowing what to do you’re a crap person and should start knowing what to do when in scary situations. [Yeah, it still pisses me off, why, can you tell?]
What would have been the reaction around here… First of all it would likely have been a shooting. We have as large proportion of population armed, legally and illegally, lethal and nonlethal, as an average US Eastern state.
But IMO the vast majority of our armed citizens would NOT have tried to intervene of their own initiative to neutralize or disable the assailants unless it were evident they were on a continuing rampage. They would seek to take cover and prepare to respond if the threat came at them.
I believe a majority of the public would RUN!! and put as much distance between the incident and themselves as humanly possible. Most of the rest would just stand around uselessly what they considered a prudent distance away with their cell phone cams out.
Maybe or maybe not two or three brave women would seek to comfort the dying or talk the assailants down to calm (and yes it would be women).
You are confused about the definition of “hero.”
And many, many other things.
Why? Plenty of men have been in the position where they’ve had to comfort the dying or ‘talk someone down’, just because a person is male doesn’t mean they think of a physical confrontation first or as the best means to resolve a situation.