Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic 61 years since the worst industrial accident in the U.S.A.

On April 16, 1947, the worst industrial accident ever happened in the United States. This is from today's New York Times:

Can you imagine? A ship carrying fertilizer catching fire and blowing up, and the next day another ship exploding as well. Fires spreading throughout the town, and 500 people were killed and another 200 went missing. It boggles the mind, really. Anyway, that sort of accidents don't happen in the United States or Europe any more. In some ways the world has become better.



Ann

I remember hearing about that on... the History Channel or something a couple months ago. That was a lot of people...

Carol [who is also happy the boards are working again]

I recall it is also the anniversary of the day a delusional "unappreciated artist" went on a shooting spree, who would have been stopped if gun savvy students on the campus had been allowed to carry FIREARMS.


TEEEEEJ

That's very clairvoyant of you, TJ. Since they weren't, it's somewhat impossible for the rest of us to tell what could or would have happened, either way.

Myself, I rather suspect that if they had been, an even larger bloodbath might have ensued. But that's just my opinion. I'm stuck with an opinion because I don't have the facts to make absolute pronouncements. Just an opinion about a speculative future.

LabRat

One of the national news programs did a story about several states introducing legislation to allow concealed carry on college campuses, and I believe they said that Utah already allows it.

I'll always remember the bloodbath at Luby's Diner in Kileen TX, and how the woman chiropractor could have saved her parents' lives and many others if only she'd had her gun with her and not locked out in the car (because at that time concealed carry permits apparently weren't allowed.) I believe she was instrumental in changing the law after that.

Hmmm. I just saw the LnC episode, 'Tempus, Anyone?', for the first time. That is where Lois ends up in Alt-Clark's universe, where Charlton Heston is President and everyone carries around a big gun. I thought it looked extremely scary.

It is none of my business if people in Utah and other American states want to carry a weapon on their persons at all times, and it is none of my business if they tell their political representatives to change the law in their states so that they are allowed to carry their guns around. But personally, I'm just not going to believe that the relationship between weapons carried around and people being killed is such that the more weapons people keep on their persons, the fewer people are killed. Yes, it wouldn't surprise me for a second if there is a greater percentage of people killed in, say, New York City than in Utah even if gun laws are much stricter in NYC than in Utah, but then again crime always gravitates towards the biggest cities. You simply don't have the same kind of demographics in Utah as you have in New York City or L.A.

As for the Virginia Tech massacre, if the gun laws in Virginia hadn't allowed that gun salesman to sell weapons to a mentally unstable person without making any in-depth checks on him at all, then it is at least possible that the Virgina Tech massacre wouldn't have happened at all. Anyway, imagine someone like Seung-Hui Cho walking into a big room crammed full of people and starting shooting, and imagine everyone else drawing their guns and starting shooting back. Maybe no one but Cho would have been killed. Then again, maybe lots of other people in there might have been killed by 'friendly fire'. Maybe the number of people killed would have been thirty-two after all.

Like I said, it's none of my business what kind of laws people in the United States want to have for themselves. But I'm sure glad that it's against the law to carry a weapon, concealed or otherwise, on college campuses and other public places in Sweden.

Ann

I find the statistics interesting that more children die each year from drowning in swimming pools than from guns. Maybe we need to ban swimming pools

I just googled "Woman shot 2008" and got 1,450,000 hits. The first ten hits described actual shootings of women in America in 2008. Two of the women were pregnant and the babies they were carrying also died.

When I googled "Child drowned in swimming pool 2008" I got 92,000 hits. However, apparently one one of the first ten hits described a case where a child actually drowned in a swimming pool in America in 2008.

So, with the babies who died in 2008 because their mothers were shot, it appears that shootings are more dangerous for American children than swimming pools after all.

Ann

Those are google hits, not statistics.

Try googling "swimming pools more dangerous than guns" and you'll get that swimming pools are 100 times more dangerous for children than guns are.

As one of the hits (for the book Freakonomics) says, Or this link, which apparently appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times ... the author is not promoting guns, but rather warning of the dangers of swimming pools. But the statistics given show that more children drowned than were shot by guns.
http://timlambert.org/2001/07/levittpoolsvsguns/

How reliable are your statistics?

This is what I found when I googled "Children shot in America" and "Children drowned in swimming pools in America":

The figures are from http://www.usa.safekids.org/NSKW.cfm.

I also found this:

The figures are from http://www.neahin.org/programs/schoolsafety/gunsafety/statistics.htm. Yes, I realize that this site talks about children and teens, and many of the dead youngsters are going to be teens, 18 or 19 years old.

However, this site also makes these claims:

And it said this:

And it said this:

It's up to you Americans to decide if you think that all these firearm deaths among youngsters are worth it, or if you think that even more kids would die if guns were harder to come by in your country.

But I really think you should think twice before you say that not many people are killed by guns in the United States.

Ann

EDIT: Okay, I found the figures you referred to. It says that there are six million swimming pools in the United States, but 200 million guns. It also says that in 1997, 550 children under ten drowned in residential swimming pools, whereas, in 1998, 175 children under ten were killed by guns.

That is certainly possible. The younger the child, the more likely it is that the child can't swim and will drown as he or she falls into a swimming pool. Growing older will make the child safer. (Also, pool safety has generally improved: according to the site I found, drowning deaths of children in pools are down by about 40%.)

Well, getting older will certainly not make a child safer from guns. Nevertheless, we should all have our crusades, and if anyone wants to dig up and fill in all residential swimming pools in the United States, by all means take on that noble fight!

Ann

Deprive men of the use of water, for fear of being drowned? Ah, yes, the false idea of utility.

Here’s a quote from Cesare Beccaria's " Of Crimes and Punishment ”, published in 1764. This passage so impressed Thomas Jefferson that he hand-copied it into one of his notebooks. (The influence of Beccaria’s book can be seen in our Bill of Rights, specifically the eighth amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, and the second, which guarantees the right to bear arms.)

A Principal source of errors and injustice, are false ideas of utility. For example, That legislator has false ideas of utility, who considers particular more than general convenience; who had rather command the sentiments of mankind, than excite them, and dares say to reason, "Be thou a slave;" who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages, to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire, for fear of being burnt, and of water, for fear of being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it.

The laws of this nature, are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator; and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.