Tag Archives: Violence

News

Two Christian preachers brutally beaten at Seattle Gay Pride Festival

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Warning: the video above has extremely coarse language and violence.

Fox News reports.

Excerpt:

Two street preachers were brutally beaten — punched and kicked — by a crowd at a gay pride festival in Seattle and the entire melee was captured on video.

The preachers were holding signs reading “Repent or Else” and “Jesus Saves From Sin.” The video shows a group of people initially screaming and threatening the men during Pridefest at the Seattle Space Needle.

Television station KOMO reported that some of the attackers belonged to a group called NOH8

A group of women tried to steal their signs but were unsuccessful. The video then shows a group of men grabbing onto one of the preacher’s signs and dragging him to the ground. At some point he was punched in the back of the head a number of times while others can be seen kicking the man.

Another preacher was sucker punched in the back of the head.

Police arrested two suspects – one of whom has a long rap sheet.

Now the first thing to say, obviously, is that the two Christians are going about their opposition to homosexuality in a wrong way. I don’t think that it is a Biblical approach to expect non-Christians to accept Christian morality because of what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 5:9-12. If you want to disagree about homosexuality or same-sex marriage with a non-Christian, then you’ll have to go outside the Bible and use evidence that is compelling to a non-Christian. And that’s what I always do in my blog posts because my audience is non-Christians. So that’s the first thing that needs to be said. There is a right way to argue against homosexuality with non-Christians, and these Christians were not doing it. The right way to discuss homosexuality is by using data found in books like “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth” and “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality“. And the right context for presenting this data is probably in written work or in the context of a relationship with the other person. Not holding up signs with flames on it to strangers.

My sexual orientation

Now the point I want to make about this is that I have a sexual orientation, too. My sexual orientation is pre-marital virginity, pre-marital chastity and lifelong faithful married love (if I get married). Now I don’t need to have a parade or get all kinds of government recognition and financial benefits in order to make me feel good about what I’m doing. In fact, even if someone puts down my virginity and chastity, I wouldn’t really care. In fact, the number one place where my sexual orientation is looked down on is in the church. In church, there is a whole group of people who are enamored of compassion and they are opposed to having any boundaries on sex at all, regardless of the harm it causes with things like abortion, divorce, fatherlessness and so on. Their idea is that people should be able to have sex if they are in love, and that they shouldn’t be “shamed” or “judged” for doing so. However, I don’t attack them and violently beat them up just because they disagree with me on my sexual orientation. I just let them say what they are going to say and mind my own business. I don’t need anyone to tell me that what I am doing is right. I have reasons and evidence showing me that my view is right, like the peer-reviewed papers that show that premarital sex causes lower quality and stability in marriage. I know what I’m doing, and disagreement doesn’t bother me.

Anti-chastity people could even hold up signs in front of my house saying “Repent of your chastity, evil virgin, or burn in Hell!” and it still wouldn’t bother me. And that’s because I know that what I believe causes no harm to anyone. It doesn’t impose social costs on others because I need special drugs or health care for my chastity. It doesn’t cause me to make other people sick. It doesn’t break up marriages so I can go off with someone else. It doesn’t leave children fatherless or motherless. It doesn’t expose born or unborn children to harm from strangers. It doesn’t require public schools to teach young people how great my virginity and chastity is. It doesn’t require new school lessons telling everyone the contributions that virgins have made in history. It doesn’t require the Supreme Court to force people to affirm chastity. It doesn’t require anyone to be fired because they disagree with me on premarital sex. It doesn’t require other people to have their freedom of speech or freedom of religion limited so that I can avoid feeling “offended” by what they say and do.

So in conclusion then, I don’t respond with anger, vandalism, coercion or violence when people disagree with me about being a virgin and embracing chastity before marriage.

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News

New CDC study on gun violence that Obama requested undermines gun control

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Here’s an article about the CDC study from the leftist Slate magazine. (H/T ECM)

First – Obama ordered this study, and it was performed by an agency under his control – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The article says:

Earlier this year, President Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the existing research on gun violence and recommend future studies. That report, prepared by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, is now complete. Its findings won’t entirely please the Obama administration or the NRA, but all of us should consider them.

The article explains 10 findings of the report.

Here are a few of them:

2. Most indices of crime and gun violence are getting better, not worse. “Overall crime rates have declined in the past decade, and violent crimes, including homicides specifically, have declined in the past 5 years,” the report notes. “Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of firearm-related violent victimizations remained generally stable.” Meanwhile, “firearm-related death rates for youth ages 15 to 19 declined from 1994 to 2009.” Accidents are down, too: “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”

5. Mass shootings aren’t the problem. “The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths,” says the report. “Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” Compare that with the 335,000 gun deaths between 2000 and 2010 alone.

7. Guns are used for self-defense often and effectively. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year … in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008,” says the report. The three million figure is probably high, “based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys.” But a much lower estimate of 108,000 also seems fishy, “because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” Furthermore, “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

10. It isn’t true that most gun acquisitions by criminals can be blamed on a few bad dealers. The report concedes that in 1998, “1,020 of 83,272 federally licensed retailers (1.2 percent) accounted for 57.4 percent of all guns traced by the ATF.” However, “Gun sales are also relatively concentrated; approximately 15 percent of retailers request 80 percent of background checks on gun buyers conducted by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.” Researchers have found that “the share of crime gun traces attributed to these few dealers only slightly exceeded their share of handgun sales, which are almost equally concentrated among a few dealers.” Volume, not laxity, drives the number of ill-fated sales.

The findings of the CDC study are not aligned with either side of the gun control debate, but considering the source (an agency of the Obama administration), I expect them to be even more liberal than the real state of affairs.

A better place to look for the truth about guns is in the academic literature. Here are two books I really like for that.

Both of those books make the case that permitting law-abiding citizens to own firearms for self-defense reduces rates of gun violence.

News

Swedish riots continue as police disperse vigilantes and ignore rioters

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Stuart Schneiderman wrote the best article I saw about the London terrorist attack and the Swedish riots.

Excerpt:

In another post Hinderaker described the scene in Stockholm. There the police have taken a laissez-faire attitude toward Muslim rioters. They are too afraid to do anything, so they stand by and let it happen.

One wonders whether Swedes are quite as tolerant of laissez-faire capitalism.

Be that as it may, Hinderaker quotes the account offered by the Swedish publication, Fria Tider:

Since last Sunday, May 19, rioters have taken to the streets of Stockholm’s suburbs every night, torching cars, schools, stores, office buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday, a police station in Rågsved, a suburb four kilometers south of Stockholm, was attacked and set on fire.

But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

Why would they not riot? If no one has the courage to stop them, then their actions must be righteous.

But, don’t think that the Swedish police are not doing anything. When a meter maid comes across an illegally parked incinerated vehicle, she gives it a parking ticket.

Fria Tider described the scene:

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford.

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken. Her employer, the parking company P-service, refused to comment when Fria Tider contacted them on Wednesday afternoon.

At least the meter maids are doing their jobs.

[…]Seeing the threat posed by vigilantes the Swedish police are springing into action. Fria Tider has the story:

In the Stockholm suburb of Tumba the police decided to abandon their earlier non-intervention policy as a large group of police officers rounded up and dispersed a group of vigilantes trying to fend off rioters.

The decision to round up vigilantes while, according to Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving, ”doing as little as possible” to stop rioters, met with a wave of protests in various social media and on the Internet. 

Swedish police fighting Swedish citizens for doing what the police refuse to do. Surely, the Muslim population is watching and laughing.

Secularism and leftism is not strength, it’s weakness. It’s postmodernism, moral relativism and dependency. It’s subsidizing your own executioners because you have lost the will to live. I would argue that Sweden is even more advanced in cultural decline than the UK. But we are rapidly catching them up.