Doubting Thomas Blog

Archive for the ‘gun control’ Category

I have a 2.5-year-old notebook computer, and the cord on the power supply recently went from what looked like perfectly good to frayed and short-circuited in about a second flat. Bzzzt! and a little puff of smoke, and the next thing I know, I’ve got not only a fire hazard, but a notebook computer that wants some power and can’t get any.

A replacement power supply from the manufacturer of my notebook computer was going to cost me $80 plus tax and shipping, so I started Googling for a better price. I found one on some weird web site that was used and refurbished for about half that price, but I had no idea how good the quality would be (although it said it had a 90-day warranty). I kept searching and searching, and eventually I found a blog entry that referred to a FREE replacement program from the manufacturer, because apparently they were quietly acknowleging that there was a design flaw.

I made a request through the manufacturer’s web site, but they don’t ship them out, their customers have to go to a retail store to pick one up. I went in yesterday after work, and the store employee told me that the replacement program was not automatically FREE, that the store employees were making case-by-case judgments to determine which power supplies were damaged due to customer misuse, and which seemed to be broken due to manufacturing defects.

When I took my damaged power supply out of my backpack and handed it to the store employee, he noted right away that the way I had correctly wrapped the cord around the cordwrap built in to the power brick. I am always careful not to put too much strain on the ends of any kind of wire, because when a wire is bent tightly like that, it can wear out the insulation, crack the conductors inside, or both. And then it’s not a good wire anymore.

Because he could tell I was taking proper care of my power supply wire, he determined that I was eligible for the free replacement power supply. So, my advice to you, if you have the same problem with your wire, is to make sure you wrap it properly before you present it to the store employee. If I had had to buy the part in the store last night, it would have cost me $61 (still a bargain compared to the $80+ online, but who wants to pay $61 when free is a possibility?).

Is it just me, or did anyone else find the fact that the megachurch has armed security guards disturbing?

From cnn.com:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (CNN) — “It seemed like it was me, the gunman, and God,” said Jeanne Assam, describing her feelings as she confronted a man who charged into her Colorado Springs church Sunday firing a weapon.

Assam, a church security guard with law enforcement experience, fired her own weapon at the invader and stopped his attack, police say.

Also, when did “megachurch” sneak into the national vocabulary?

There was a stabbing at a local college this week, and it’s got me thinking: Where should students go if they find out there’s a mass-murderer loose on campus?

Buffalo State defends notice to students about stabbing
Says attack was ‘no imminent threat’

Buffalo State College administrators say they are satisfied with their decision to wait 11 hours to notify students by e-mail about an on-campus stabbing Monday night because there was “no imminent threat” to the campus community.

(Click here to read the full story at BuffaloNews.com.)

Let’s say they had LED billboards that they could update instantly, all over campus, and something bad happened like at Virginia Tech. What does the billboard tell people to do? Do buildings have bomb shelters students could use?

I don’t want to take the guns away from law-abiding, sane people who hunt for food, but I’m pro-gun-control. I think a lot of the gun lobby members confuse “anti gun” with “gun control” and refuse to budge when it comes to this sensible level of control.

Under federal law, the Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from buying a gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment, a state official and several legal experts said Friday.

Read the rest of the article from which the above quote is taken online at New York Times.

He was a nut, he should not have had a gun. And there was a law in place to prevent him from buying a gun.

I don’t think I have anything cogent to say about yesterday’s shootings at Virginia Tech yet.

But something about the reporting of the massacre was bothering me, so I started browsing the innerweb to see whether my suspicisions were correct. And the way the innerwebs work, I bumped into some other ideas along the way.

A. Most massacres are named after the place where they occured.

B. If a mass murderer’s ethnicity is white, the press doesn’t mention ethnicity. But if the mass murderer is non-white, his ethnicty, and the ethnicity of his non-white victims, are included in the media report.

C. Mass murderers are almost never female.

D. Every massacre is rated as the “worst since…” or is ranked as the “second worst” and so on.

E. Both sides of the gun-control argument use gun-based massacres to try to make their points.

B. Of course the ethnicity of the September 11 murderers was a major part of the news story, so I am not saying that our news media are somehow racist by including that as part of the story. And I’m not implying that there’s something wrong with a news report that read “Dylan Kliebold, a white student from Columbine High School…”. But you may have noticed a white bias in our culture. The way we talk about criminals just shows the way we think. We tend to notice when someone doesn’t look like us. If I get in a hit by a car as I bike home tonight, you won’t ask me the driver’s ethnicity. But, if I get run down and seriously injured by someone who doesn’t have the same skin color as me, the report in the news (I’m so vain to think my injury is newsworthy, aren’t I? ha ha) will most likely mention the driver’s ethnicity.

C. I can’t think of a single mass murderer who was female. I know there were women serial killers, but I think they did all their killings one-at-a-time.

D. Perhaps it is something they teach in journalism, you know, being thorough about your reporting and all, but sometimes I find it annoying to have these kinds of news events rated against each other.

E. Lastly, you may already know where I stand on gun control, but I won’t bring it up now; the timing’s wrong, if you ask me.