photo credit: Ultor83
In 2008 the Supreme Court struck down Washington D.C.’s gun ban. Liberals would have you believe D.C. was going to become the wild west. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty said that more guns would cause more violent crime. Apparently they haven’t studied much history. Guns don’t cause crime, criminals do.

Between 2008 and 2009 the FBI says that murders fell by 8-10 percent. In D.C. they fell 25%. Coincidence? Maybe, but it certainly shows that violent crime didn’t soar and the city didn’t become the wild west.

As I’ve written before, guns aren’t the problem. Criminals are the problem. I’m not sure why this is a hard thing for politicians to understand, but the guy who is ok with shooting someone, doesn’t care about your gun law. It seems obvious to me, but lots of people just don’t get it. Allowing law abiding citizens their constitutional right to bear arms does not increase violence or crime. It does however allow them to protect themselves. It also scares criminals.

Criminals are just like you and I. They are interested in self preservation. A gun ban is perfect for them. It assures them that they will be better armed than any victim they find. If all of the “vicitms” are armed, things won’t go nearly as well for the criminals. This is why gun crime generally drops when gun bans are taken away.

Let me if you think the drop in murders is just a coincidence or if it has to do with the ban being lifted.

I was reading some great stuff from Duane at All American Blogger the other day and I came across his goals for 2010. I have my own goals, but I hadn’t thought of sharing them here until I read his article. It led me realize that I can’t really accomplish many of my goals without help from you, and maybe you’d prefer I didn’t do some of them.

This blog is a conversation, at least that is what I want it to be. That is going to be the driving force behind most of the goals for this year.

Goal 1: Create Quality Content

Duh. Actually what I really mean by this is spend more time creating longer(sometimes) posts with in depth analysis and also engaging posts. Posts that ask a question and elicit a response. Not just the type of post that is a link to somebody else’s work with a paragraph including my opinion. Some blogs have 10 of these posts a day and cover everything that is going on. I have a full time job and can’t do 10 posts a day. It isn’t going to happen. So instead of doing 1 a day, I want to focus on creating better content even if that means there is slightly less of it.

Goal 2: 500 RSS Subscribers

I want to get to at least 500 subscribers by the end of the year. I think switching to more of the quality original content will help get there, but I need your help too. If you enjoy reading this blog and haven’t subscribed yet I would encourage you to do so. If you are already subscribed I’d encourage you to share us with any friends that you think may enjoy our writing. If you prefer email to RSS that is available as well, just put your email in the form in the right sidebar.

Goal 3: 750 Visitors a day

Right now we get around 400 or so a day. It’s not bad but it could be much better. Again I think the original content will help a lot with this. Those are the posts that do well in search engines and they are also the one that do well on stumbleupon and twitter. You can always help by sharing our posts on these services.

Goal 4: More Comments

Right now we are averaging between 4-5 comments per post. That’s not too bad, but the majority of them are centered around a handful of posts. I’ll do my part by creating more engaging content, you can do your part by joining in on the debate and discussion.

Hopefully this will be a change for the better, as well as taking some pressure off of me feeling like I have to post every day. Sometimes I’m just too busy and it can’t be done. Let me know how you feel about this new direction for the blog, and if you haven’t yet, sign up for the RSS feed!

We recently passed the milestone of 200 posts here at Geek Politics so I thought I’d take a quick look back at some of our most popular posts and share them with anyone who may have missed them along the way. Here are just a few of the things we’ve covered:

Fair Tax Pros and Cons

Overall I think the pros significantly outweigh the cons for the fair tax. I think the idea of taxing consumption instead of production makes a lot of sense, and taxing illegal activities and illegal immigrants sounds great to me. However, nothing here can solve the real problem that we have. The thing that needs changed is the out of control spending habits of our government. Until that is curbed, how we pay taxes isn’t the big issue.

Government Stimulus Package

This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

Reasons to Legalize Marijuana

A study by Jeffery Miron, a professor at Harvard, said that legalizing marijuana would save the government $7.7 billion a year. Second, legalized marijuana would bring in a large amount of tax revenue. Miron estimated that it would bring in $6.2 billion if it were taxed at the rates of alcohol and tobacco.

Top 40 Reasons to Support Gun Control, NOT!

4. The Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban, both of which went into effect in 1994, are responsible for the decrease in violent crime rates, which have been declining since 1991.

5. We must get rid of guns because a deranged lunatic may go on a shooting spree at any time and anyone who would own a gun out of fear of such a lunatic is paranoid.

6. The more helpless you are the safer you are from criminals.

7. An intruder will be incapacitated by tear gas or oven spray, but if shot with a .357 Magnum will get angry and kill you.

Assault Weapons Ban

I wanted to finish this series with a discussion on the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. The sad truth of this legislation that Obama administration would like to make permanent is that it doesn’t do anything. This legislation does nothing at all, it did nothing the last time it was enacted except serve as a way for politicians to look tough on guns.

Conservative Books, lots of them. Go and read them all, then report back to me.

Illegal Immigrant Problems

The problem is that illegal immigrants are taking from society without giving anything in return. Health care, education, and other areas of public service. Illegals aren’t paying for these things, yet they are receiving them. The thing is, we either have to stop them from coming in the first place, or we have to find a way to have them contribute. Otherwise, our systems are going to go bankrupt due to the people who are taking from it but not contributing to it.

Electoral College Pros and Cons

1. Pro: It allows small states and small town America to have a say in the the election. The candidates go to every corner of the battleground states and many people get the opportunity to meet and question them. I am originally from a small town and I think that this is one of the major benefits of the electoral college.

If you like politics and enjoyed any of these articles you should subscribe to our RSS feed to get free updates.

John Morrison
Age: 62
Gender: Male
Occupation: Teacher

This is from Fox News:

John E. Morrison, a 62-year-old a music teacher at Romeo Elementary School in Florida, is charged with lewd and lascivious molestation and one count of battery for allegedly inappropriately touching two female students, ages 7 and 8, in May.

Police said Morrison admitted to putting his hand in the 7-year-old’s pants to touch her leg and to putting his hand in the 8-year-old’s shirt to touch her chest, according to various media reports. They said he also admitted to touching the 8-year-old’s buttocks.

Morrison continues to get paid as he awaits his trial, which is scheduled to begin next month.

Tammy Clinton
Age: 39
Gender: Female
Occupation: Teacher

Tammy Clinton, a 39-year-old teacher at Farnell Middle School, has been charged with two counts of lewd and lascivious molestation and two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct after allegedly forcing a 14-year-old student to touch her breasts, fondling his buttocks, and enticing him to leave the campus twice so they could commit sexual acts.

Police said Clinton admitted to the accusations after her arrest, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel reported. She is banned from school grounds but will continue to receive her paycheck pending a complete investigation.

The L.A. school system has 160 teachers getting paid to not work

The housed are accused, among other things, of sexual contact with students, harassment, theft or drug possession. Nearly all are being paid. All told, they collect about $10 million in salaries per year — even as the district is contemplating widespread layoffs of teachers because of a financial shortfall.

Most cases take months to adjudicate, but some take years.

The Times says that it is extremely difficult for the district to fire teachers because they are union-protected.

New York City has “Rubber Rooms” that house hundreds of teachers at a cost of $35 million dollars a year. m

Is this a good use of taxpayer money? Paying admitting child molesters to sit and do nothing because the union is too strong. This is pathetic. If I did anything like this I’d be fired yesterday. No questions asked. Teachers unions (and almost all others) need to go away forever. There is no reason for our hard earned money to go to these sex offenders in the form of taxes just because they happen to belong to a union.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about public transportation and its related subsidies. The reality is that I expect a large amount of money from the ensuing Job’s Bill will be gobbled up be local governments to build out public transportation infrastructure. The federal government certainly doesn’t have the money to pay for this program but that’s not really the point of this article. Rather, I’m interested in whether or not tax based subsidies for public transportation are worth it for the average city. Especially when you consider all public transportation systems operate in the red (at a loss).

Measuring the wrong things

While researching for this article I ran into this site explaining the cost reductions we’d all get by providing a much more comprehensive public transportation service. Unfortunately, I found the research to be mostly useless. The author’s talk about the annual subsidies necessary to run the high quality public transportation service and explains that their research shows people in places with high quality public transportation will drive quite a bit, 30%, less resulting in a substantially lower annual subsidy costs for roads, parking, etc. He shows a savings of about $1000 per capita. Now that’s nothing to thumb your nose at but I just don’t buy it.

While it didn’t appear the author, Todd Litman, included initial costs of providing the public transportation to his report its clear he is one smart cookie. Mr. Litman runs a research group focusing on public transportation policy and he is also on the editorial board for at least one professional research journal. Unfortunately, people from outside the U.S. tend to not appreciate the American obsession with cars, something that is deeply psychological - and not something likely to go away.

Mr. Litman’s proposed cost savings are based on the assumption that cities suddenly endowed with this new, fancy, public transportation will abandon their cars at the same rate as people in cities that already have really nice public transportation. I don’t buy it. Perhaps someday public transportation would reach the same level of adoption in these new cities but not in the near future, perhaps a decade, and in the mean time we’d be subsidizing both the public transportation costs, because we have to always have the nice public transportation to get people to eventually adopt, and the road and car costs because people will still be driving.

At the end of the day, Mr. Litman has to realize that, at least in the U.S., cities with high quality public transportation have a culture embedded in the fabric of the city relating to the use of public transportation; a culture entirely absent from the rest of America.

Are there good reasons to keep paying for public transportation?

I live in Nashville, TN and 1.8% of our commuters use public transportation. Nationwide 5% of workers use public transportation, a measurement that is heavily skewed by the top performers. In my city we have recently been subsidizing the public transportation service at about $20 million a year. What does that 20 million get us? Assuming there is about 250,000 people working in Nashville - 4500 of them commute using Nashville’s public transportation system. With the median household income being $39,000 in Nashville we are generating about $175.5 million in salaries for commuters annually. Is that worth $20 million? I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell if those are people that can’t afford a car and therefore wouldn’t have a job without public transportation. There is no income tax in Nashville, or Tennessee, so the only funds returned to the city come in the form of a heightened sales tax which I seriously doubt returns the entire cost of the subsidy back to the government.

Personally, I lean towards thinking this is a worth while expenditure, even while operating in the red, as long as the subsidies provided by the government to cover this aren’t massive amounts of deficit sending.

Thoughts?

I recently ran across an article that will be especially interesting to the geekiest among us. It seems a group of security experts, the SANS Institute, believe that the only way we can ensure that buggy and dangerous software is not released by developers is to hold them all legally liable.

Nearly every attack is enabled by mistakes programmers make that provide a handhold for attackers,” said Alan Paller, Director of Research, SANS Institute. “The only way programming errors can be eradicated is by making software development organizations legally liable for the errors…

Paller is almost certainly correct in this assessment but he is talking as a security professional and not as a consumer, businessman, politician, programmer, etc. A law like this would have a number of very real impacts on you, your neighbor, your brother, your cousin the programmer, and your grandma’s small business.

1) High Cost Software

Why are doctor’s prices so high? One reason has to do with their malpractice insurance. A doctor, or the hospital he works for, is considered to be legally, and financially, responsible for any error they make. If this were applied to software a programmer might be sued because they weren’t very good at their job and wrote buggy software that produced the wrong shipping labels for grandma’s business and now she has to ship duplicate items. Right now she’d probably ask for a refund but with this kind of legislation she might sue for some damages - hopefully a reasonable amount - and win. This means we have to charge more for the software ahead of time, not just to cover the lawsuit cost but also because of the increased cost of development. I’d need to hire more programmers, more testers, and spend more time in development. And, lest you forget this applies to every electronic gadget you own: Microwave, TV, cable box, video game, car, laptop, mp3 player, refrigerator, stove, phone, etc - all more expensive.

2) Longer Product Cycles

You won’t be getting that new iPod every year anymore and Ford won’t be releasing a new truck this year. Now that these companies have to ensure an especially high product quality or face legal repercussions they will be spending a lot longer working on each product and the pace of new technology innovation will slow. Right now, companies are constantly racing to release the newest product before the next guy but this law would put a stop to that. That new TV that uses the new hot web feature, whatever that might be? Expect to wait until after the fad has worn off before your TV supports it.

3) Fewer Products

This should go without saying; While apple is busy making sure their new hotness is safe enough to release and avoid lawsuits they will be making far fewer new products in the future. Enjoy the fact that your favorite company makes 12 levels of the same product all with different features and at different price points allowing you to get the exact model you need and not pay for features you don’t? Say goodbye. If the SANS Institute has it’s way they’ll only be a single model of every product as companies try to combat their skyrocketing development costs.

4) Stagnate Innovation

A friend of mine’s company has recently been working on a small device for monitoring an extreme athletes performance while they jump, spin, twist, flip, and do whatever else they do. In the environment these security professionals envision innovative products like this will never come to market. What if the device provides bad data making a skier believe he/she can complete a maneuver that ends up killing them. Should the makers of the device be held responsible for the malfunction that caused the data that misled the skier? I don’t think so. In this security centric world they imagine no one tries anything new because they are afraid of the consequences when they make a mistake.

5) No More Google, Or Open Source, As We Know It

This may be an inflammatory title but its true. Do you think Google, or Yahoo for that matter, continues to provide the myriad of free services they provide once their legal responsibility for their system’s being compromised? I’m guessing not. No free GMail and no free chat services; What if their software allowed someone to peep into your conversation? Maybe no free search? What happens if a bug in Google’s image search shows obscene content to my daughter, can I sue them?

What about free open source software? Is each contributor to an open source project legally responsible for their individual contributions? Are they all responsible for the entire code-base? The financial burden may be to much to bear without a company behind it. If a law like this is ever passed expect open source to die a fast death.

This is kind of like Einstein trying to explain the theory of relativity to a first grader.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Apparently it doesn’t take much to get on the House Financial Services Committee. Isn’t there a Home Economics Committee we could put her on? Oh wait, no that would include budgeting which is clearly not anybody in Congress’s strong suit.

Ok, I might be getting a little ahead of myself there, but watch this video and tell me you wouldn’t prefer him to our current President.