Ive had it with yobs!

haha...


But seriously, I'd rather be stabbed than shot if anything.

 

I'd quite like to be prodded with watermelon

 

Crucifixion! That's the way to go.

On the subject of pacifism and retaliation, I would speak from experience and say a middle road approach is best.

Example. I've taken karate lessons, kung-fu and judo. I wouldn't say it's made me invincible, but I could now actually put up a fight, if need be.

But that's the point, "If need be!"

I don't look for trouble, because I'll find it. I used to get picked on A LOT. So I went to kung-fu classes to learn how to fight back. As soon as you tell someone your training, they get cocky and want to push you. So don't brag. The best way is not to train for strength, big muscles cause a male dominance thing. All my "strong" mates are always getting into fights. The best way is to train for speed and precision. My friend is an 18 stone, 5 and a half foot diabetic, and he can punch through bricks. But he's completely passive. Muscle just attracts unwanted attention.

Long and short of it. Knowing you can defend yourself builds your confidence to help you cope with yobs. If they start, walk away. If they hassle you, call the police. ONLY if they corner you should you fight back. And if you must, take down whichever one is leading them. I can't tell you how little I've had to do this, but if your passive and then suddenly react and take down the leader the others will think twice.

Of course, that doesn't happen to me anymore. I managed to convince most of the town that I'm a psychotic fruitcake without violence. They leave me alone these days.

It's funny what flashing around a few commitence papers I made on photo shop can do

 

Ummmm....whats a "yobs"?

 

we live in a country where the media give you the idea that the less weapons a country has the safer it is , but if you look at the uk in the past we had far more weapons in the society and yet we had a lower crime rate .
when handguns were banned in the uk it didnt stop gun crime, burglary didn't drop no crime rates increased , when you look at america the better armed parts in many cases are the areas with less crime.

also there is a element of personal freedom in the uk even if you know someone is trying to kill you your not allowed to be armed , a person in the uk, had death threats went to the police and they said we cant do anything unless your killed then we will investigate , the only evidence this person had was a threat in person and that wasnt enough for the police to do anything about it .

what this person ended up doing is getting asylum from america he actually had to leave this country for good , because he couldnt defend himself here he now lives in one of the more gun friendly american states, the person making the threat was later convicted of terrorism charges in a unrelated incident and the threat was very real .

the right to bear arms Id say has a lot to do with natural freedom in that the first right a person has is to be able to live and you cant depend on the police to defend that right

thats why I think the usa at least comes nearer to being a free country .

 

but that might hurt.

I'm thinking to take by Odons example and overdose on banana skin fumes.

 

There are two things wrong with this argument. Firstly, we also used to wear a lot of top hats in this country, and top hat wearing has decreased. Is this a factor in crime rate? No, because correlation does not equal causation.

Second, you need to demonstrate there is such a correlation in the first place. Figures on violent crime going back more than a few decades are hard to come by, but we do have a record of the murder rate over the past century at least (link). In 1900 we were at 9 per million, there was a roughly continual drop until the 1960s to 6 per million, the 1900 rate was reached again in the 1970s, and we're currently at about 14 per million. In other words it has fluctuated a few fractions of a percentage point both up and down over the past more than a hundred years.

These figures show that weapon ownership has no direct correlation to murder rate, since guns had largely been restricted and licensed in this country by about 1920, and there's no reason to think the availability of other weapons has changed very much, I think the knife laws are quite recent, maybe 20 years, during which time violent crime has both risen and fallen.

It is trivially absurd to suggest that crime rates are linked simply to the availability of weaponry. Fluctuations may be linked to a variety of a socioeconomic factors, population pressures, wealth, housing, jobs, gangs, religions, ethnic or cultural differences, social disaffection, plus an underlying level of violent crime which is innate to humans and which will never go away. Ensuring those who commit and will always commit violent crimes don't have access to the most effective way of injuring or killing people is actually rather a good idea.

Rates of violent crime have undoubtedly been much higher than they are today, we have peaks and troughs but generally we are exceptionally safe, certainly when compared to centuries past, times when there was no police force at all and when the country, particularly urban areas, were often lawless. You were far more likely to be a victim of violence, robbery, rape or other criminal activities at almost any other point in history than in the UK today. Yobbery of today is incredibly unlikely to result in you getting injured, in general I'd guess that the incidence of violent crime is on a more or less continual downward trend on a century or more-than-century scale.

As for personal freedom, yes the restriction of weapon ownership is a restriction of your personal freedom, in much the same way the ban on bludgeoning someone to death with a stick is a restriction of your personal freedom. We trade in certain freedoms for the good of wider society, and we hand over authority for the use of violence to accountable bodies like the police. Making offensive weapons less widely available will have an impact of the kinds of violent crimes committed, the loss of the freedom to walk around in a very safe country armed with automatic weapons is a trivial one compared to the benefit in safety we all receive as a result.

Weapon ownership probably has very little to do with the incidence of violent crime, but it does have an impact on the severity of that crime when it happens, it has been shown that gun-related crimes have a far higher mortality and serious injury rate than knife-related crime or crime involving any other weapon. This is how restricting gun ownership particularly impacts on your personal safety, we can be fairly sure in this country that when you're confronted by a criminal he probably won't have a gun and you're therefore quite a lot less likely to die or be seriously injured.

Few weapons are actually "banned" anyway, they are restricted and licensed so that those who need to use them (farmers, sportsmen, hunters etc) can own them if they demonstrate a need and demonstrate that they will be kept securely.

 

accountable groups like the police please tell this to the disarmed German or Chinese or Russians etc etc who ended up being rounded up and sent to their death by the police .
one of the biggest causes of death in the 20th century was state sponsored murder of unarmed citizens .

and as far as I know you cant have self protection as a reason for having a gun

 

We're talking about the UK today, which is a democracy, where the police are accountable, and where self protection is not a valid reason for having a gun, yes...

Interestingly, gun ownership was largely deregulated by the Nazis before WWII.

 

Update on this...it's been used so often, and is now such a tired worn out comment, mods will ban anyone who uses the phrase "it would be different if your country had guns" in a UK-related thread. Yanks take note.

 

Theres this gang of yobs in Chelt that are always hanging around in Waitrose car park and trying to look mean and frighten the old ladies hobbling out with their shopping bags...
I wonder if they realise what an uncool place it is to be yobbish...
Waitrose crew 4 lyf!

 

Heh, yep when you see gaggles of chavs hanging around outside Tesco Express I just think how tragic it is that they have such a limited imagination, it's like saying that this place is the centre of their tiny lives...

 

Waitrose car park although a relative ghetto to these poor lads, doesn't quite beat the group of them I encountered, minus shirts, shouting and lookin hard .... on a boating lake in rural Suffolk bless 'em!