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France hostage crisis: 'Two dead' in Trèbes supermarket

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Blue_State

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Not good. Ongoing and developing. Deep South France.

Reports say the gunman, who remains in the supermarket, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

Earlier, a policeman was shot and wounded while jogging with colleagues in Carcassonne, a 15-minute drive away.

He was shot in the shoulder by the same suspect involved in the supermarket hostage-taking but is not critically injured, Yves Lefebvre, secretary-general of the SGP Police-FO union told the Associated Press.
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France hostage crisis: 'Two dead' in Trèbes supermarket - BBC News
 
Blue_State said:
Not good. Ongoing and developing. Deep South France.



France hostage crisis: 'Two dead' in Trèbes supermarket - BBC News
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Yet France is still much safer to live in than almost anywhere in America. France has a bit over 66M inhabitants - that's about 2.3 times the size of Texas, or a bit under twice the size of California. On any given day, how many people are shot dead in either of those two states? The numbers clearly show that a lot more are killed in any of our more populous states on any given day than in France.

The point is, whether one is murdered by a religious extremist or a gangster or a guy who can't handle being divorced, dead is still just as dead...and a LOT more die here in America, mostly thanks to the Right's national gun fetish.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
Yet France is still much safer to live in than almost anywhere in America. France has a bit over 66M inhabitants - that's about 2.3 times the size of Texas, or a bit under twice the size of California. On any given day, how many people are shot dead in either of those two states? The numbers clearly show that a lot more are killed in any of our more populous states on any given day than in France.

The point is, whether one is murdered by a religious extremist or a gangster or a guy who can't handle being divorced, dead is still just as dead...and a LOT more die here in America, mostly thanks to the Right's national gun fetish.
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So go live there. Nothing in the OP compares which place is safest to live yet you feel the need to derail the topic.

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Glen Contrarian said:
Yet France is still much safer to live in than almost anywhere in America. France has a bit over 66M inhabitants - that's about 2.3 times the size of Texas, or a bit under twice the size of California. On any given day, how many people are shot dead in either of those two states? The numbers clearly show that a lot more are killed in any of our more populous states on any given day than in France.

The point is, whether one is murdered by a religious extremist or a gangster or a guy who can't handle being divorced, dead is still just as dead...and a LOT more die here in America, mostly thanks to the Right's national gun fetish.
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I think you have a fetish with using every tragedy to talk about the "Right's national gun fetish".
 
trouble13 said:
So go live there. Nothing in the OP compares which place is safest to live yet you feel the need to derail the topic.

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My comment didn't "derail" the topic one whit - instead, I put the topic into perspective. But I forget - there's millions in America who focus on the relative handful of those killed by religious extremists and somehow think that's a bigger danger than the ten-thousand-plus murders every year that have nothing whatsoever to do with religion.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
My comment didn't "derail" the topic one whit - instead, I put the topic into perspective. But I forget - there's millions in America who focus on the relative handful of those killed by religious extremists and somehow think that's a bigger danger than the ten-thousand-plus murders every year that have nothing whatsoever to do with religion.
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For people who love to complain about what about isms you sure do evoke it often enough

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French antiterrorism force take at least one terrorist in shooting drama!
 
Spartacus FPV said:
Not true at all, https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-01/51-murders-us-come-just-2-counties

Violent crime in America is not a nationwide problem. The fact is if you're not suicidal, involved in the drug trade or living in one of those specific 2% of the counties then you are significantly safer in America than any place else.
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FYI, you really drank deeply of the Kool-Aid in your post. Why? Because you forgot to bear in mind Mark Twain's maxim, "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics". First off, you're looking at counties...and that in and of itself is misleading. For example, Mississippi has 82 counties, while California - with thirteen times as many residents - has only 58 counties...and the majority of the 39M residents of California is jammed into maybe five counties. That, sir, is why you get a statistic claiming only 2% of counties have over half the homicides - that statistic may be accurate, but when it comes to the likelihood of being killed, that statistic is wildly misleading.

The more accurate statistic is the homicide RATE, which shows the likelihood that one is to be murdered in a particular location. Were there more murders in California than Mississippi? Absolutely. BUT when one compares the number of murders to the overall population, one finds that Mississippi has a homicide rate of 8.0 per 100,000 residents, whereas California's homicide rate is 4.9 per 100,000. An even better example is New York City, which has almost twice as many residents as the entire state of Louisiana, but has a homicide rate of slightly over HALF that of Louisiana...meaning, of course, that you're nearly twice as likely to be murdered in Louisiana than you are in NYC. YES, there are cities that are more dangerous than the Deep South e.g. Chicago and Baltimore, but generally speaking, you allowed yourself to be mislead into thinking that all but 2% of America is safer than France...when that's 180-out from reality. (references available upon request)

It's difficult to find a map of homicide rates by county, but below is the crime rate by county for 2014 - and the crime rate will of course be closely tracked by the homicide rate:

crimerates-promo.jpg

And France's homicide RATE (like that of nearly all of Europe's) is significantly lower than America's.

glgu1m0a1fc01.jpg
 
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trouble13 said:
So go live there. Nothing in the OP compares which place is safest to live yet you feel the need to derail the topic.

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One day my youngest son came home from high school and told me that he knew a couple other kids who were bringing guns to school...and he said it as if it were no big deal. About a month later he was attending high school in the Philippines...and he's since told me that that was the best thing we ever did for him.

Why?

Among other things, one day he took a penknife - a freaking penknife - to school and showed it to the other kids...and suddenly a bunch of the other students clustered around him, castigating him for bringing a weapon to school, asking him (in not-so-very-nice terms) why the heck he would bring a weapon to school. Mind you, it wasn't the teachers but the students who were mad at him for bringing a penknife to school. He didn't make that mistake again.

In other words, unlike most Americans, we did have the wherewithal and opportunity to send our kids to school overseas in order to keep them safe...and we did so. Yes, that safer place was and is a third-world nation, but they were certainly safer there than going to school here...and we don't regret it for a moment. Why? Because the third-greatest cause of death to teenagers in America is homicide.

The only reasons we're staying here right now are because this is where our livelihood and most of our family is. I've told my family several times that if we can afford it, I hope we can all move to Australia where people are a bit more tolerant and sensible than the neo-Confederates that we see infesting much of our political Right. And before you start giving me the pseudo-patriotic "love it or leave it" line, I did my twenty years in the military - I do know a bit about patriotism...and one of the things I've learned about patriotism is that when it comes to those so-called patriots who plaster American flags all over their trucks and think that it's Really Patriotic to have as many firearms as possible, a LOT of them have never served and never learned what real patriotism is. So many of them no longer believe in constitutional rights of freedom of religion or equal protection under the law. Instead, their "patriotism" is all about who they should hate, who they should reject, who they should fear.

A great man once said "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." Y'all have forgotten the deeper meaning of FDR's quote, but instead have embraced an ethos of fearing everyone who doesn't look/think/speak/worship like y'all do. Xenophobic nationalism is NOT patriotic - not in the America I served. Instead, y'all seem to look wistfully back to the days of Jim Crow, as if America was somehow greater then than before Trump took over.
 
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Hmmm... I wonder what drove him to do this attack?

Or am I supposed to just blame the gun???


(checking)
 
Glen Contrarian said:
Among other things, one day he took a penknife - a freaking penknife - to school and showed it to the other kids...and suddenly a bunch of the other students clustered around him, castigating him for bringing a weapon to school, asking him (in not-so-very-nice terms) why the heck he would bring a weapon to school. Mind you, it wasn't the teachers but the students who were mad at him for bringing a penknife to school.
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The term is "socialization" *which has NOTHING to do with "socialism"*.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
One day my youngest son came home from high school and told me that he knew a couple other kids who were bringing guns to school...and he said it as if it were no big deal. About a month later he was attending high school in the Philippines...and he's since told me that that was the best thing we ever did for him.

Why?

Among other things, one day he took a penknife - a freaking penknife - to school and showed it to the other kids...and suddenly a bunch of the other students clustered around him, castigating him for bringing a weapon to school, asking him (in not-so-very-nice terms) why the heck he would bring a weapon to school. Mind you, it wasn't the teachers but the students who were mad at him for bringing a penknife to school. He didn't make that mistake again.

In other words, unlike most Americans, we did have the wherewithal and opportunity to send our kids to school overseas in order to keep them safe...and we did so. Yes, that safer place was and is a third-world nation, but they were certainly safer there than going to school here...and we don't regret it for a moment. Why? Because the third-greatest cause of death to teenagers in America is homicide.

The only reasons we're staying here right now are because this is where our livelihood and most of our family is. I've told my family several times that if we can afford it, I hope we can all move to Australia where people are a bit more tolerant and sensible than the neo-Confederates that we see infesting much of our political Right. And before you start giving me the pseudo-patriotic "love it or leave it" line, I did my twenty years in the military - I do know a bit about patriotism...and one of the things I've learned about patriotism is that when it comes to those so-called patriots who plaster American flags all over their trucks and think that it's Really Patriotic to have as many firearms as possible, a LOT of them have never served and never learned what real patriotism is. So many of them no longer believe in constitutional rights of freedom of religion or equal protection under the law. Instead, their "patriotism" is all about who they should hate, who they should reject, who they should fear.

A great man once said "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." Y'all have forgotten the deeper meaning of FDR's quote, but instead have embraced an ethos of fearing everyone who doesn't look/think/speak/worship like y'all do. Xenophobic nationalism is NOT patriotic - not in the America I served. Instead, y'all seem to look wistfully back to the days of Jim Crow, as if America was somehow greater then than before Trump took over.
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I wasn't giving you the tired old mantra of love it or leave it. I don't agree with that. My point was that the OP made no reference to america. It was talking about an incident that happened in France. You rationalized it by saying the problem is worse here and completely avoided the subject of the OP. What you did was attempt to derail the thread.

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trouble13 said:
I wasn't giving you the tired old mantra of love it or leave it. I don't agree with that. My point was that the OP made no reference to america. It was talking about an incident that happened in France. You rationalized it by saying the problem is worse here and completely avoided the subject of the OP. What you did was attempt to derail the thread.

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That's your excuse. What happened is that I put the three deaths in France in perspective. That not "derailing" - instead, it's pointing out that what happened in France is but a metaphorical molehill compared to the relative mountain we have here in America.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
That's your excuse. What happened is that I put the three deaths in France in perspective. That not "derailing" - instead, it's pointing out that what happened in France is but a metaphorical molehill compared to the relative mountain we have here in America.
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Sounds like whataboutism to me

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It’s sad when this stuff has just become so commonplace it is just expected. Yesterday, an 86 year old Jewish woman was stabbed numerous time by her neighbor...a Muslim man she had often told others that was like a son to her. Today, a Muslim man and woman attempted to run down a platoon of French soldiers. Just another day.


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