Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Yahoo! News - Teen Girl Shot At Playground
Yahoo! News - Teen Girl Shot At Playground:
"A teenage girl was shot in the neck in a Dorchester park overnight and was hospitalized at Boston Medical Center. "
In case the last one wasn't enough.
There are so many issues that go into this kind of violence on the streets. And I will grant that guns aren't the reason these kids are going out and killing each other. But they are making it easier and they are increasing the body count at an alarming rate. Unless you are really well trained you can't pull up to a park open the door of a van and knife someone in a park from the street. It takes a whole lot of planning and skill to perform a driveby clubbing with a blackjack. You can't strafe a crowd of kids on the corner in hopes you will get the one you meant to get among all the collateral damage with your fists.
A lot of kids these days don't value life, that's true. And there are many societal reasons for that. But by manufacturing and selling so MANY guns, the gun makers are enabling this devestating symptom of the problem to escalate and effect a much larger segment of the population. There are an average of 4-6 MILLION guns sold in America every YEAR! Think about that. That means that in my lifetime, based on the low number, 144 MILLION guns have entered circulation in the United States. And those are just the legal guns. That doesn't count any that have been brought into the country illegally. There are approximately 300 million people in this country. So that is one legal gun for every 2.08 people in the country just since I was born.
Why? For what useful purpose?
Self Defense? Nah. Look at
A Deadly Myth: Women, Handguns, and Self-Defense.
"The 1996 study
Guns in America found that only 6.6 percent of adult American women owned a handgun—less than one out of every 10 women. But of these women, nearly 85 percent owned their handguns for self-defense—a figure that offers gunmakers continual hope in their marketing endeavors. Yet how often are handguns actually used by women to kill in self-defense? The answer, as revealed by unpublished Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data, is hardly ever. Women were murdered with handguns more than 1,200 times in 1998 alone. As these numbers reveal, handguns don't offer protection for women, but instead guarantee peril.
For all of the promises made on behalf of the self-defense handgun, using a handgun to kill in self-defense is a rare event. Looking at both men and women, over the past 20 years, on average only two percent of the homicides committed with handguns in the United States were deemed justifiable or self-defense homicides by civilians. To put it in perspective, more people are struck by lightning each year than use handguns to kill in self-defense."
Or
A Gun May Not Make Home Safer for Children""A home without a gun is safer for children than a home with a gun," declares panelist Bill Vogler, expressing the panel's consensus and the conclusion of several studies.
"It's adding a level of lethality, a lethal weapon, into a situation where there currently isn't one." Indeed, having a gun at home has some specific risks you might not have considered, panelists say. One is that a gun is less likely to be used successfully against an intruder than turned on someone else, including you, one or more of your children, another adult or even another child.
The risk, panelists say, isn't just theoretical. Statistics show the majority of gun-related injuries and deaths to children -- and there were 5,285 kids killed with guns in the United States in 1997 alone -- are the result of accidents or impulsive actions."
It's time to admit that gun manufacturers want to make money and they are willing to sacrifice our children to get it. And the same goes for gun dealers. I will never understand the motivation of gun owners.
So just think about it for a while.
posted by Kimber
at 10:57 AM ::
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Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Really cool article...
Sales Clerk, Ph.D
By Jim Hightower, AlterNet. Posted July 22, 2004.
This passage is an excerpt from Jim Hightower's new book, "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush."
In his January state-of-the-union peroration, George "Pinocchio" Bush's biggest lie was not about weapons of mass destruction.
Attempting to diffuse the growing anxiety and anger about the loss of middle class jobs, he made the bald-faced assertion that the solution is simple: More job training. Millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans must have stared in
slack-jawed disbelief as this son of privilege mouthed the corporate line that everything is OK with our economy, if only America's worthless workers would get more training and improve their skills.
Training for what? Here came George's whopper: "Much of our job growth will be found in high-skilled fields." That's a lie and Bush knows it. Well, OK, he's clueless about real life, so he probably doesn't know it, but his speech writers do.
Bush's own labor department reports that of the 30 occupations that will account for the highest job growth between now
and 2010, two-thirds require minimal skills. High-tech companies will create only 284,000 more jobs for computer software engineers in that period - while 10 times more jobs than that will be created in just these seven very low-tech fields: Freight movers, home health aides, janitors, waitresses, security guards, office clerks, and cashiers.
The number one job-creator for America's future? Restaurant workers, including fast food. This category alone will create
10 times more jobs than will software engineering. You don't need a high-tech degree, you need a hair net! And all of these jobs pay pitiful wages - of the top 30 "growth jobs," nearly half pay only $14,000 - $20,000 a year.
By the way, despite his call for more training in each of his four years, Bush has cut the budgets of our federal job-training programs. And forget about getting one of those 284,000 software engineering jobs - companies are now shipping them off to India, Russia, and other low-wage countries.
Training doesn't create jobs, and low-wage jobs don't create a middle class. America needs a living wage, labor law reform,
an end to subsidies for corporations that ship our good jobs out... and a president who has a clue.
Here's America's high-tech future!
Jobs with the largest growth between now and 2010:
Listed by title, annual salary, and necessary eduaction level
1. Food preparer, $16,000 - On-the-job training
2. Customer service rep., $26,000 - On-the-job training
3. Registered nurse, $48,000 - Two-year degree
4. Retail sales clerk, $18.000 - On-the-job training
5. Computer support specialist, $39,000 - Two-year degree
6. Cashier, $15,000 - On-the-job training
7. Office clerk, $22,000 - On-the-job training
8. Security guard, $19,000 - On-the-job training
9. Computer technician, $55,000 - Bachelor's degree
10. Waiter/Waitress, $14,000 - On-the-job training
11. General manager, $68,000 - Bachelor's degree
12. Truck driver, $33,000 - On-the-job training
13. Nursing aide, $19,000 - On-the-job training
14. Janitor, $18,000 - On-the-job training
15. College teachers, $52,000 - Doctoral Degree
16. Teacher assistant, $19,000 - On-the-job training
17. Home health aide, $18,000 - On-the-job training
18. Freight haulers, $19,000 On-the-job training
19. Computer engineer, $70,000 - Bachelor's degree
20. Landscaping worker, $20,000 - On-the-job training
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Remember how we were told that globalization would be such a boon for American workers? Blue-collar was going to become
white-collar, low-wage would move up to high-tech, and everyone would sing Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah all the day long!
They were feeding us globaloney. Dell, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle, Intel, CSC and the other greedheaded giants of
high-tech are swiftly moving these very jobs out of our country to China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and elsewhere, making a killing by paying a fourth as much to a foreign employee as they pay here, then pocketing the difference.
This is leading to a tense workplace. Internal IBM memos show that while U.S. companies are ecstatic about the bucks they
gain by abandoning the homeland, they're very skittish about the anger this engenders. One of the memos tells top managers to be evasive when talking about the company's long-range employment plans, advising them that "Terms 'on-shore' and 'off-shore' should never be used," and that anything written to employees must first be "sanitized" by the corporate communications department.
IBM says it'll "save" $168 million this year by replacing 3000 of its "knowledge workers" with cheaper versions abroad. These are the jobs that were supposed to represent the future of upward mobility in America, but instead, the "global sourcing" of such work (as IBM's fun-loving corporate jargon-meisters call it) is leading to a distressing wave of downward mobility in our country.
IBM now provides a "suggested script" for managers faced with telling employees that their jobs are going bye-bye. For
example, to soften the blow, managers are instructed to say: "This action is a statement about the rate and pace of change in this demanding industry... It is in no way a comment on the excellent work you have done over the years." That's a bit like slathering some Oil of Olay on the stiletto you're thrusting into someone's back.
The official corporate line, repeated religiously by politicians and pundits, is that high-tech is such a zoom-zoom industry that a discarded worker can easily and quickly find another job. They might check with Mary Lowrance about that. She was a
high-tech worker for AMD Corporation, where she'd won awards for setting production records and helping devise ways for the company to save money. AMD repaid her by sending her job offshore. A year and a half later, she's still out of work, even after applying to more than 500 other firms. "My job has gone away," she says... "there are just no jobs to be had."
To add insult to injury, many American high-tech workers are forced to train their foreign replacements! Refuse, and they
lose any severance pay.
Even some Republican leaders, such as Rep. Don Manzullo, are gagging on this globaloney: "The assumption was that while lower-skilled jobs would be done elsewhere, it would allow Americans to focus on higher-skilled, higher-paying opportunities. But what do you tell the PhD, or professional engineer, or architect, or accountant, or computer scientist to do next. Where do you tell them to go?"
If you're a high-tech CEO, you tell 'em to go to hell.
posted by Kimber
at 5:37 PM ::
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Monday, August 02, 2004
Another fine youth sports moment brought to you by the NRA
Yahoo! News - Boy, 11, Shot During Football Tryouts:
"'A kid in the park came up and there was about four gunshots and the kid dropped to the ground,' said Lazar Franklin, the coach of the Titans Pop Warner football team.
Police said they believe the shooting stemmed from an argument that took place on a nearby basketball court.
'We have an 11-year-old boy who was not the intended victim who was shot with a stray bullet,' said Boston Police Lt. Kevin Foley. "
You know, the NRA may be right! If we EDUCATE kids in proper gun safety rules this kid could have ducked quicker, and the other one would have hit who he was aiming at!
And if that kid had had a knife or a baseball bat rather than a gun, the NRA would have lost out on the dues from the fine upstanding gun dealer who sold that gun, and the lobby money from the gun manufacturer. Damnit!
Thank the gods that our second amendment rights to be gunned down in the streets and playgrounds of our neighborhoods are safe. Thank you NRA!
posted by Kimber
at 1:11 PM ::
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