The WaPo Maps Mass Shootings & Police Killings in the US

Last line of the article in the Washington Post:

What's missing from this series, of course, is a map of all of the shooting incidents that don't involve police and affected one to three people. That map, we suspect, would show an indistinguishable red blot on the United States.

Speaking of which, that last image does remind me of something...

Population-Density of the United States

Oh yeah.  Where there are people in the United States, cops are bound to be there killing them.

Bonus link for the 'guns make me safe' crowd: Gunfight or Flee: New Study Finds No Advantages to Using a Firearm in Self-Defense Situations

See America Has to be Exceptional No Matter What, Whether That is in a Good Way or a Bad

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions.

Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. — particularly as a non-white foreigner — while others said they'd still feel safe if they were to visit.

Especially in Australia and northeast Asia, where firearms are strictly controlled and gun violence almost unheard of, many were baffled by the determination among many Americans to own guns despite repeated mass shootings, such as the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

"We don't understand America's need for guns," said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney's GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. "It is very puzzling for non-Americans."

A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.

A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.

"The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We've tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction," said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.

Ahmad Syafi'i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country's largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.

"People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice," he said. "But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual."

A 21-year-old white man, Dylann Storm Roof, now faces nine counts of murder for the South Carolina shooting. An acquaintance said Roof had complained that "blacks were taking over the world."

Many places around the world struggle with racism and prejudice against outsiders, but mass shootings in the U.S., where the Constitution's second amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, often receive widespread global attention.

Probably, no-one's more disturbed by or frustrated by the American obsession with guns and flat-out denial of continuing racism (shout-out for Chief Justice John Roberts ! *) than...the slight minority sane population of Americans.  Unfortunately, the history & the culture of said nation seems to have encouraged or attracted the development of an above-normal percentage of out-and-out lunatics in the population.

And as for the thing about the US being out of step with the rest of the world, the thing you have to understand, is that this is a point of pride in the US, where obsession with national greatness and inherent national superiority has turned the international and indeed consensus generally into something inherently suspicious.

One case in point being, the US' pride in being just one of three nations still refusing adoption of the metric system.  The US had pledged to do so, and presumably originally intended in fact to someday so do, but at some point, as it dragged its feet on and on, rather than let itself feel any guilt or sense of failure over the continuing delays over adopting Metric, politicians instead seized on the outlier status of the US as a point of pride, and started to turn what was once accepted consensus over international standards into an absurd bogeyman-style conspiracy.

Hence, here we are in the year 2015, such that when a Democratic candidate for the presidency says this:

Let's be bold -- let's join the rest of the world and go metric," he said during his launch. He clarified during a question-and-answer session after that it would be a "symbolic integration" meant to show goodwill to the world.

He acknowledged that shifting to the metric system could cost the U.S., but that "the economic benefits that would come in would surpass those costs of putting up new signs and the like."

The response of one of his Republican candidates for the same office is inevitably this:

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has already incorporated it into an attack. In an email to POLITICO, his spokesman Michael Reed said Chafee is a “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European. Governor Jindal would rather make the world more American.”

Because the entire rest-of-the-world would benefit so much from replacing something as easily understandable and easily calculated as a base-ten system of measurement with something from the Middle Ages based around such things at the size of a particular monarch's foot or hand !

The country is run, to the shame of its sane residents, by a bunch of childish extremists.  The sort of people who, in the wake of a historically black church being shot up by an evident white-supremacist extremist racist (the event itself in the wake of so many other acts of mass-shootings and so many other demonstrations of racial violence), argue that we must not make the event 'about race', and that those who want to bring discussions of gun-control into the debate are radical demagogues, and who insist that, really, the asshole was targeting Christians, not blacks.

Who did so, despite his own words to a survivor of the attack, explicitly outlining his motivations, and his desire to start a race-war.  Some of whom, will no doubt continue to do so, even given the recent discovery of an online manifesto making his violent racist aims and motivations even more explicit.

The United States' problem is perhaps its own success.  A nation rich and powerful for much of its short history, and so rich and powerful since the end of the Second World War that it has come to see itself as beyond criticism, as beyond the purview of mere mortals.  The US is/has long been suffering from a sort of God-complex.  Rather than embracing criticism, and learning from its mistakes, the tendency is to demonise the critics, and to celebrate even its own failings (such as say the dismal state of healthcare in America) as successes (it's a sign of how free we how we compared to you Euro-commies !).  Live free, die young and poor; But opportunity abounds; You could have been rich and successful...theoretically...

Perhaps demographic changes will one day reduce the ageing lunatic fringe to enough of a minority that the non-maniacs can take over the asylum.  The numbers are promising.  Then again, the lunatics may just burn down the asylum before that could/in order that that never be allowed to...happen.

Especially as the tool of choice in burning down this particular asylum would likely be not lighters, but cheap, readily-available, and hugely (especially, thanks to the NRA, since the inauguration of a certain black president) stockpiled bullets.


* As always, Thanks Harriet Miers !

American Exceptionalism...

...in accidentally harming children by giving them the wrong doses of medicine apparently...

Children’s liquid medicines should only be measured in metric units to avoid overdoses common with teaspoons and tablespoons, U.S. pediatricians say.

Tens of thousands of kids wind up in emergency rooms after unintentional medicine overdoses each year, and the cause is often badly labeled containers or unclear directions, said Dr. Ian Paul, a pediatrician at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Children's Hospital and lead author of new metric dosing guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

"Even though we know metric units are safer and more accurate, too many healthcare providers are still writing that prescription using spoon-based dosing," said Paul. "Some parents use household spoons to administer it, which can lead to dangerous mistakes.”

For example, he said, accidentally using a tablespoon instead of a teaspoon would triple the dose.

To avoid errors associated with common kitchen spoons, the guidelines urge that liquid medicines being taken by mouth should be dosed using milliliters (abbreviated as "mL").

Also, prescriptions should include so-called leading zeros, such as 0.5 for a half mL dose, and exclude so-called trailing zeroes, such as 0.50, to reduce the potential for parents to misunderstand the dosing.

While the AAP has been pushing for more accurate dosing of children's medicines since the 1970s, the new guidelines are the most extensive call for metric dosing to date and are intended to reach drug manufacturers, retailers, pharmacists, prescribers and caregivers.

"For this to be effective, we need not just the parents and families to make the switch to metric, we need providers and pharmacists too," said Paul.

The image above is of course a map of countries that have still not adopted the metric system*.  Those other two countries in red are Liberia (yes, that Liberia) and Myanmar/Burma (yes, that one too).  And the latter announced in 2013 its own planned conversion to metric, which will leave just the US of A and Liberia in this particular little club.

And this of a country that adopted decimal currency in 1792.  To much of the rest of the world, the idea of using an Imperial-based system of measurement is as strange as still using the likes of guineas, florins, crowns, and groats.

A smidgen of history on the US' flirtation with metric:

In 1821, after studying the various units of measurement used by the 22 states, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams determined that the U.S. Customary System was sufficiently uniform and required no changes. Most people thought actually that the metric won’t survive Napoleon’s rule. They were wrong however and by the time the American Civil War ended, most of Europe had turned metric, besides the proud British of course.

In 1866, an act of Congress, signed into law by President Andrew Johnson, made it “lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system in all contracts, dealings or court proceedings.” The act however was merely an act of recognition, which didn’t necessarily translate into practical use.

Following the second WWII, the world officially entered a stage still in expansion: globalization. As America was importing and exporting millions of goods, it found itself in a predicament when trading with other countries, most of whom used metric. American companies had to make twin labels, train workers and students with both systems and re-purpose thousands of machines across various industries. The costs were and still are enormous. With this in mind, some Congressmen proposed the US finally switched to metric. In 1971, the U.S. National Bureau of Standards issued a report titled “A Metric America” recommending that the U.S. transition to the metric system over the course of 10 years. In response, Congress enacted the Metric Conversion Act in 1975 to commence the conversion process. However, these good intentions were extremely poorly applied because someone had the bright idea to strip out the 10-year deadline and make the conversion voluntary. Of course no one wanted to willingly change to metric.

Could it be that due to the size of its economy, the US has made a calculation that it would be more expensive for it to convert than not, unlike the conclusion the rest of the planet has come to ?  Perhaps.  More likely, it's just plain...cussedness.  Or, as it's more commonly explained:

Freedom!

* And yes, of course there are variations & exceptions in the degree of adoption, such as items sold in 'Liters' in the US, and the continuing use of MPH in the UK.