the thing about not stopping congressmen was so someone couldent just pay off poliecemen to delay congressmen and make a vote 1 sided
There’s a more practical reason that legislators are excused of their speeding tickets: in a close vote, would you want funding for your state or area dependent on whether your highway patrol pissed off a lawmaker? A few years ago, Austin, Texas stopped the practice of forgiving state legislators’ parking tickets. The city was reminded that it was the target of several bills, and policy was changed.
Let’s face it, we live in a messed up, homicidal country, with a number of nuts just crazy enough to attempt snuffing the President, and the means to do it. If the SS let off, and something DID happen to the President, who do you think we would blame? Those who were supposed to protect him. I see the measures the SS takes as necessary–and a way for them to cover their own hides.
two things:
-Regarding the OP, a big gripe here in DC is when the President or VP makes a surprise visit somewhere. As a safety precaution, they will often tow cars in the area to a different location, often to the DC impound lot. There have been several documented cases of someone parking their car and comin back to find that it’s not where they thought it was. In one case the Secret Service towed it to an illegal spot so the car’s owner amassed several parking tickets.
-Last year, Sen. Robert Byrd rear-ended a driver. The officer on the scene was about to write Sen. Byrd a ticket when:
“Byrd pulled a copy of the U.S. Constitution out of his pocket and pointed to a section that he said the cop prevented the cop for ticketing him for anything because he, as a member of Congress “shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest” both while attending a session and traveling to or from the Capitol.”
I believe a big enough stink was raised that Byrd capitulated and got the ticket. There’s more info on this (and other political-related hijinks) here.
Good list. I see that you later covered the 2 attempts on Ford, and the attempt on Reagan. There was also a man (Sam Byck, I think) who tried to hijack a plane and crash it into the White House.
For some fascinating musical theatre, I recommend Sondheim’s show Assassins. It’s about (almost) all of the men and women who have tried to kill the President.
Four presidents were killed, and two more were exceptionally lucky. Reagan only survived because of modern trauma care, and because he was near GW hospital. Andrew Jackson…was shot at point blank with 2 guns, both of which misfired, and both of which worked perfectly when they were later tested. I’ll take this opportunity to use one of my favorite H:LotS quotes: “All those bullets flying around. And you don’t get hit. You must’ve been born with a horseshoe up your butt.”-(Bolander, End Game.)
You know, it’s 2000. A zero year election. Gore or Bush had better watch out. Look for Cecil’s column on the Tecumseh curse.
I think that the SS should at least look at some more inteligent ways of protecting the President. First of all, I do not see the reason behind the two big modified blue and white 747-200’s that have to take the President everywhere. The planes are expensive and most of the space aboard is dedicated to the press. I think that the President could get around just as well with several unmarked large business jets, and some of the newer aircraft (Bombarder Global Express) can go as far as the 747’s and on things like trans-Pacific segments. I also do not understand why the President always has to do the motorcade through major urban centers through helicopter transport, etc.
I think part of the reason for the 747’s is a national pride thing. “See this plane? Our country built it and it’s the coolest passenger jet out there!” Kind of a “Wow” the locals concept.
Of course, maybe a B-1 bomber would have a better effect along those lines but I doubt other countries would appreciate it.
AmyJohn writes:
Then wouldn’t it be better if we did something about the fact that we’re a “messed up, homicidal country,” rather than just making sure that the President isn’t affected by our messed-up homicidal problems? The problem, incidentally, isn’t that our country is that much more affected by general violent crime than other countries. According to The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators by William J. Bennett (page 210), the rate of violent crime (in 1996) is below that of New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, and England, although it’s higher than that of Italy, France, Denmark, Australia, Ireland, South Korea, and Japan. The New York Times Almanac 2000 (page 323) notes that the rates of assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft are higher in England, while robbery is higher is the U.S. The real big differences are in rape, which is three times as high in the U.S., and murder, which is six times as high in the U.S. Perhaps we should concentrate on the crimes which we are specifically higher in. For murder and robbery (and possibly for rape), wouldn’t the obvious answer be gun control? Better yet, perhaps we should figure out what it is in the cultures of the countries with low violent crime rates that makes them nonviolent and adopt those things into our culture.
I don’t think it would look proper for the president to fly around in a small private jet. It just doesn’t have enough cache for a president.
Presidents do have a lot of work to do and they need to take a lot of staff members with them. I think they deserve to have some room.
Wendell-Uh huh.
Incorporate certain aspects into our culture? Riiiiiight…
I am gonna ignore that remark.
On you push for gun control, maybe we should also consider the relatively low rates of crime for states with more liberal gun laws. Additionally, murder, rape, and robbery does not necessarily have to be committed with a gun.
But not to hijack a thread (no pun intended), I do not get why the President really needs that much room, that he does all of that much with the room he has right now, or why the 747 is particularly well suited to allow the President work and rest in an uninterupted manner. From a security standpoint, the 747s we currently use are bigger, more obvious targets than an average business jet, and using smaller planes means that the planes can be replaced more rapidly than 747s to incorporate newer technology that just did not exist ten years ago when the two 747’s that we now use for the majority of the President’s flights were delivered.
Does anyone know if the president has a single workstation that he tends to favor or something that goes everywhere with him like a laptop or briefcase?
There is the guy who carries around “the football” which has all the codes for the nukes.
Can you quote me statistics that say that the rates of violent crime have any relation to the the gun control laws in each of the states?
Why not change our culture? Are you saying that we Americans have nothing to learn from other countries?
The “football?”
Can you elaborate.
Or would you have to kill me.
Ha ha get it?
You are not laughing.
Damn, I knew I should have watched my mouth
Washington, D.C.'s ban on handgun sales took effect in 1977 and by the 1990s the city’s homicide rate had tripled. During the years following the ban, most murders, and all firearm murders, in the city were committed with handguns.1
Chicago imposed handgun registration in 1968, and homicides with handguns continued to rise. Chicago imposed a D.C.-style handgun ban in 1982 and over the next decade the annual number of handgun-related homicides doubled.2
California increased its waiting period on retail and private sales of handguns from five to 15 days in 1975 (reduced to 10 days in 1996), outlawed “assault weapons” in 1989, and subjected rifles and shotguns to the waiting period in 1990. Yet since 1975, the state’s annual homicide rate has averaged 34% higher than the rate for the rest of the country.
Maryland has imposed a waiting period and a gun purchase limit, banned several small handguns, restricted “assault weapons,” and regulated private transfers of firearms even between family members and friends, yet its homicide rate is 46% higher than the rate for the rest of the country.
The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 imposed unprecedented restrictions relating to firearms, nationwide. Yet, compared to the five years before the law, the national homicide rate averaged 50% higher during the five years after the law, 75% higher during the next five years, and 81% higher during the five years after that.
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Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.
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Chicago Homicide Dataset.
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Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Historical Statistics on Prisoners in State and Federal Institutions, Year end 1925-1986” and “Correctional Populations in the United States, 1987-1994.”
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Department of Justice, “Probationer and Parole Violators in State Prison, 1991.”
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FBI, “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 1995,” p. 36.
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U.S. Attorney’s Office, Richmond, Va.
These are anecdotes. A statistical proof of your assertion would be a correlation between all of the gun control laws of all of the states and all of the gun crime statistics of all the states.
Furthermore, some of the examples that you give are poor correlations. For instance, let me take the one I’m most familiar with. Washington, D.C. passed its gun control law in 1977. It hasn’t changed since then. The murder rate didn’t start to rise until 1986. It was at its peak in 1990 through 1993 and has been going down since then. There’s a much simpler explanation of the high murder rate in D.C. during the late '80’s and the early '90’s: the crack epidemic of the late '80’s and the early '90’s. The violence it caused hit D.C. harder than most American cities. It’s not clear why, but it might be because there weren’t very well-defined boundaries for the gangs in the city, unlike the situation in many big cities, so there was more fighting between the gangs for territory.
The murder rate in the U.S. has been going down since 1993 (and since 1991 in some places) and there’s no tendency for the places where there has been consistently gun control laws since then to have rates going down any slower. There’s a simple explanation of why the murder rate has gone down overall in the '90’s: the improved economy. Give me some statistics showing any clear correlation between the murder rate and anything else except the economy. Statistics, not anecdotes.
But let me congratulate you on your ability to quote word-for-word from the NRA website.
I’ll concede that these statistics are pretty sketchy, but what can you provide?
As far as I have been able to find, there are no good statistics showing any correlation between the level of gun control and the murder rate in different states. (It is interesting though, though not really convincing, if you look at the U.S.'s murder rate compared with other industrialized countries and compare the gun control laws.) If anyone has such statistics, I’d like to see them. This isn’t too surprising. It’s hard to see how a state by itself could cut off the flow of guns. There are no boundaries to naturally limit the flow. This would have to be done on at least a national and more likely on a continental level.
But you haven’t answered my earlier question. Why not change the culture of the U.S.?
Let us go ahead and make the entire human race quintessentially good and nice?
Change the culture? Great, but how?
[Moderator Hat: ON]
Ok, normally we don’t step in and worry too much about thread drift, but this is a bit ridiculous. If you guys want to discuss gun control, please start a new thread for it rather than completely hijacking this one.
Thanks.
David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator
[Moderator Hat: OFF]