Only if your name is Sarah Connor…
Hey Terr, I’d like to know if you’d be saying the same thing if he had a grudge against someone in your family rather than people who are strangers to you.
The real purpose of hollow point bullets is to limit potential collateral damage from over penetrating rounds
If a perp. is shot with a FMJ (full metal jacketed) bullet, the bullet will hold together and create a minimal wound track through the perp, often retaining enough energy to exit the perp completely and potentially injure an innocent bystander
A hollow point is designed to expand inside the target, ideally dumping all its energy into the target and not exiting, thereby not injuring any innocent bystanders, it also creates a larger elastic wound channel and permanent wound channel
Let me use my 9mm handgun as an example
I shot into some semi dry pine logs, and got the following results
The 115 grain FMJ bullet traveled 5", retained weight was 115 grains, and the final size was .38 caliber (9mm bullets are .38 in diameter), there was no distortion, no expansion, I could re- seat the entire bullet into a fired case with finger pressure, if the log was 1/2" shorter, the bullet would have exited the log
The 115 grain hollow point (technically a Hornady FTX Flex Tip with a soft polymer plug in the hollow point cavity to prevent the hollow from getting clogged) expanded to .52 and retained 112 grains of weight, and only traveled 2" before stopping
The 135 grain FTX traveled 4", expanded to .51 and retained 133 Gn
The 135 grain bullet was designed for better barrier penetration for law enforcement use
In both cases, the hollow point rounds traveled shorter distances and ended up wider than the FMJ
if you had to shoot in self defense, wouldn’t you want a bullet designed to minimize overpenetration risks and dump all its energy into the intended target?
If someone has a grudge against someone in my family and is in any way threatening, I’d want them in the ground. Is that how we’re supposed to decide the criminal prosecution issues today - by reflecting on it personally?
If so, I’d want every drunk driver shot. After all, they could have killed someone in my family, right? And don’t start me on jaywalkers - after all they could pop up in front of my wife with kid on board driving, cause her to swerve and have a fatal accident.
For reasons beyond my understanding, some people have more empathy for the guilty than the innocent. I’m trying to get you to realize that the people this guy poses a threat to are real individuals with families. You’re saying “go easy on this psychopath, but only as long as he poses no threat to my life”. Don’t you agree that’s selfish and hypocritical?
He doesn’t need to be put in the ground. But I’m sure you can agree he’s proven himself to be a real threat to innocent people. Why should he be put back into society?
Of course he does. So does every criminal out there. Every burglary may turn fatal. Every drunk driver can kill someone. Every jaywalker may cause a fatal accident. Would you imprison them all for life?
Burglary, drunk driving, and jaywalking are all a bit behind amassing weapons at your home for no discernible reason other than to go kill a bunch of people at a school, an act you’ve explicitly stated you’re preparing to go do.
I call intellectually dishonest here.
You know as well as I do that a person who’s been Facebooking photos of himself with a Glock full of hollow-points, rants and threats to those involved that expelled him (directly and indirectly), a bag full of pipe bombs riddled with nails, IEDs, tear gas, and other terrorist gear, who also seems to be pretty mentally unstable is pretty bent on pulling the trigger imminently.
That’s a far cry from jaywalking. So I call “bullshit” on your argument and premise.
And yet, with the guy’s phobias about getting out of his apartment, as proven by his being a shut-in for months, I’d bet the chances of his actually following through on any of his threats are less than a drunk driver killing someone. After all, to hurt someone he had to first step out of his door. There isn’t even any indication in any article I read that he test-fired the gun or test-exploded any pipe bomb[let - really, it’s 4" long].
The guy deserves to be taken in, psych-tested and prescribed some forced psychiatric therapy in some correctional institution for a while. The life sentence, though, for having a bizarre fantasy life and hoarding some weapons, without ever harming anyone, is a wild overreaction.
Where are you reading that this guy was incapable of leaving his apartment for months?
Also, this isn’t a real life sentence, though it should be. It’s eight to life.
When his house was raided he had not been outside for months, but lived off takeaways which he paid for with other people’s Paypal accounts.
Yeh. That’s not unusual for psychopaths. :rolleyes:
He won’t just be locked up with the key thrown away. After his minimum term, he will be reviewed (I believe fairly regularly) with a view to the possibility of release under licence, and there will be psychiatric evaluation and treatment as necessary. He might end up in a high-security mental institution or something less, or he might be thought to be no longer a danger to the public, but even in the latter case, a life sentence means he stays under some sort of supervision by the probation service. This might become more or less onerous, , always with the possibility of a return to prison or mental treatment, depending on how he behaves.
As to whether the evidence amounted to a serious intention to commit the crime, well, that’s what juries are for, and since none of us was in the court and heard all the evidence, we’re not in a position to second-guess the jury, are we?
Gun laws in the UK are not exactly a secret, so he did know he was committing a crime just by assembling his arsenal. A crime, which, btw, he would have had to leave the house to commit; he wouldn’t have been able to order the guns online even with other people’s Paypal accounts.
BTW, I remember the other story about the old man with the ancient gun and, while I don’t think he should have got a sentence at all, it’s worth noting that it was a suspended sentence, meaning he didn’t actually go to prison for a single day. If he had committed another crime in that time or breached the conditions of his suspension, whatever they were, then he might have been sent to prison.
It’s a bigger difference than that. Most of the students there would have been 16-19 years old and studying for qualifications around the high school diploma level. Not that it makes any difference to the offence, but still, we do like be accurate here.
Some folks are mass murderers. Some folks are jay walkers. Some folks can’t tell the difference.
Well** Terr**, We certainly have very strong restrictions on owning firearms and handguns in particular.
If you have one you’ll be jailed. If you make a credible threat with one it’ll be even more harsh, if you go on to make explosives and pose a credible threat with those then the prison sentence is just going up and up.
This may be one reason why the number of guns in the UK is very small and the death rate from them is around thirty time less than in the USA.
I’d save your poorly thought-through outrage regarding “thought crime” for a handily-placed sub-tropical detention centre and proto-minilove rather closer to your own shores.
Hey, guns have rights too, ya know!
[QUOTE=Terr]
[QUOTE=Lyburd]
I was lonely. I just wanted people to talk to me."
[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
We can all empathise. I sit in my house all day making bombs to blow people up; the only human contact is when I chat up shop-girls talking about coffins and the heat-death of the universe; and I’m on Facebook all the time.
Why doesn’t anyone liike me ?
In the U.S., we would be comfortable using the word “college” for either an Ivy League university or a community college. They both award academic degrees and require a high school diploma or equivalent for admission. The real issue seems to be that this particular “college” is more like a high school.