Schadenfreude

One of the things I’m always hearing is how if you are allowed to have a gun in your car, road rage will involve a lot more shootings. I’ve never really believed it, and I decided to see how much the Google News Archives show for this type of story. There are around 40,000 stories that contain “road rage gun,” some of which can be seen here. I saw some interesting trends:

• There are three incidents on the linked page in Australia, surprisingly, even though they have very strict handgun control. Even fake guns were involved…
• There was one in Toronto, also strict on handgun ownership
• Many states in the US are represented, including Maryland, Georgia, and Florida
• Quite a few are road rage incidents involving off-duty or retired police officers or Federal marshalls!!

There was a study that showed that “people who carry guns in their car are more likely to have road rage.” It’s a pretty far stretch since the percentages are 23% of people with guns vs. 16% of people without them. I don’t think this is a good conclusion. Until someone can show me that road rage deaths in Texas or Alaska or Florida increased when carry laws were loosened, I won’t believe these urban legends I keep hearing. And, if they’re not urban legends, please please cite your source – at least the publication.

I find the last one really shocking. Many of these people are trained very well in firearm use and safety. I would really like to be able to break it down by state using the Google archive search, but I can’t find that. If anyone knows where I can find statistics on police reports per state for road rage incidents involving handguns, especially time series data, let me know.

Uncategorized crime, guns, law, politics, road rage

I find these figures interesting. It seems that many of the happiest countries in the first world are near the top (US, UK, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany), which means they have more crime than many more disadvantaged countries. It also seems that many of the countries with the least crime have very strong religious influences in their government, while the top is mostly “free and prosperous”. But what is extremely interesting is how I’ve been hearing that England has less crime than we do. It plainly doesn’t when taken per capita. They have about 6% more crime currently. It’s amazing to me since they have all these measures to curb it such as spy cameras on every corner of London.

Hopefully, no politicians will elect to start this invasive Orwellian crap here. It obviously doesn’t work.

Uncategorized crime, england, politics

Code

Here’s a quick one-liner using some UNIX utilities and Perl to construct some nice averages from CSV data:

for i in `seq 2 20`; do cat crim_rate_2005_by_state.csv | cut -d , -f $i | perl -e '$c=$d=0;$e;while(<>){if(/^\d/){$c+=$_;$d+=1}else{s/\s{2,}/ /g;s/"//g;chomp($e=$_);}} print $e, ": ", $c/$d, "\n"'; done

And now, the spaced out version:

#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 2 20`; do
  cat crim_rate_2005_by_state.csv | \
  cut -d , -f $i | \
  perl -e '$c=$d=0;
    $e;
    while(<>){
      if(/^\d/){
        $c+=$_;
        $d+=1
      } else {
        s/\s{2,}/ /g;
        s/"//g;
        chomp($e=$_);
      }
    }
    print $e, ": ", $c/$d, "\n"';
done

Output

• Population: 5775431.88461538
• Violent crime rate: 418.930769230769
• Murder/manslaughter rate: 5.59038461538462
• Forcible rape rate: 33.1634615384615
• Robbery rate: 114.455769230769
• Assault rate: 265.728846153846
• Property crime rate: 3339.50961538462
• Burglary rate: 685.671153846154
• Larceny/theft rate: 2273.43269230769
• Motor vehicle theft rate: 380.417307692308
• Violent crime: 26928.3461538462
• Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter: 335.730769230769
• Forcible rape: 1809.67307692308
• Robbery: 8128.30769230769
• Aggravated assault: 16654.6346153846
• Property crime: 196569.711538462
• Burglary: 41756.0961538462
• Larceny-theft: 130880.442307692
• Motor vehicle theft: 23933.1730769231

So, now we have our averages. More work to be done. The data file used is available here:

crim_rate_2005_by_state.csv

Uncategorized bash, crime, data, perl, statistics

I got this in the old inbox today:

Hello
I wish to let you know that i have been paid by a client to assasinate you
at convinience,i have signed a contract of $250,000 yesterday for this,i
have never met you before,but they gave me the full description of your identity and contact,together with your photograph which my boys have used to trace you.

The reason why they want you Dead is not disclised to me as i was not allowed to know,but you are now not better that the dead ok.

My BOYS are now contantly watching you,they are following you anywhere you go and they are waiting for the instruction to terminate you.

I used the contact the client gave me to source for your email from the public email directory so that i can get you informed that you will be killed

This is my message to you.

LISTEN VERY WELL !!!!,the Police cannot do much to help you out in this right now because you are beign watched,any such attempt is very risky cause you will push us to terminate your life without option

your calls are not safe also.In fact you are traced.

I have no business with you but at least i have cleared the way as a pro-,

HAVE A NICE DAY TODAY!!!!! GOOD MAN.

Thank you
loverboy.

What a disturbing email! I notified the FBI.

Uncategorized crime, email, life, scary