Re: Man hurt using gun to change tyre

Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]

The man, from South Kitsap, 10 miles (6km)

That's 16km ;))

Hey, I just cut-and-pasted! But you're right, of course. I do that
sort of conversion in my head a lot, 'cos I've got a metric-only
speedo/odo pair. If it were 10 km, it'd be about 6 miles; so the
mistake might have been `doing it the wrong way round' or `accidentally
missing out the 1'.

I recently read a BBC 'Ceefax' news report (on the telly) which
laboriously converted all the miles into kilometres - and got the
conversion hopelessly wrong in each case; someone had multiplied by five
and divided by eight but in the wrong direction.

Argh. Why don't people spot that kind of thing? I mean, if you saw a
bunch of mile/kilometre alleged equivalents, and the `kilometre' figure
was consistently less than the `mile' figure, it'd ring alarm bells,
yes?

Some people don't know what the numbers really mean, or whether a km is
longer than a mile or not.

<sigh> Oh, I know, I know - but it's on the national curriculum. :-/

[...]

It's a rare nut that can't be shifted with heat and enough torque. Big
levers, that's what you need. If it's seriously stiff, a seriously big
lever.

I once helped a friend bend a subframe on his Opel Manta back into shape
after he'd rolled the heap. IIRC, the lever was an 8' length of 6"
steel steam main with an angle iron fork brazed to the end ('cos he
could braze but not weld) that slotted neatly onto the frame members.

A local back-street garage I once knew, kept a very long length of
four-by-four that made a nice tommy-bar for their 'spider' universal
wheel-nut spanner. It was longer than a car, and seldom needed more than
two blokes hanging off the end to get a thing moving.

Ye gods! I've never seen that much torque needed to undo anything. Me
and aforementioned chap with the Manta turned all the drying cylinders
in a paper mill using a shorter lever than that. Mind you, they were
all on bearings, but still...

(No pneumatic
tools, you see).

How would a pneumatic tool help you apply huge torque, though?

[...]

Yes, but all the pro-gun types will have to run out of ammo before their
sane neighbours have a chance of getting the guns off them.

Umm. Well, yes, but that's not hard to arrange for, surely? I mean,
the US army and so on do outgun the population by a factor of `nukes,
stealth bombers, cruise missiles' and so on.

I suspect that the people in the armed services are by and large 'pro gun'
so they won't act.

That's why they have to follow orders: it's not up to the armed forces.

I don't expect any US president to even try to order the troops to disarm
the civilians, any time soon.

Well, no. But that's not down to the armed forces, is it?

Getting paid to use guns seems to be one of the
attractions of the military.

That's part of it - but a lot of the attraction is in the fact that it's
not a 9-5 job (unless you're in the RAF) and you don't have any of the
worries that civvies have in running their lives. Your job's secure,
you're given somewhere to live, food on the table provided, all bills
taken care of (they take it straight from your pay), and so on.

That too, and a chance of getting through 'college' at the state's
expense, in the US.

Point.

Being required to stand in front of heavily armed
people who are really really annoyed at the government your uniform
represents, doesn't seem to make it to the recruiting posters, somehow.

Maybe not - but they used the National Guard to attack unarmed people
who were really annoyed at the government represented by the uniform.
The regular army shouldn't object to being told to deal with armed
people of that sort - except, of course, in the 1960s the army disliked
the protestors (although the National Guard were just as much
draft-dodgers as the students).

Owning and
using firearms has become a religion in the USA.

<grin> Well, they've not had their big messy religious war just yet -
maybe now is the time?

As long as they keep it to themselves.

I suppose that's the problem, innit? Thing is, the only other nation
that's as mad on gun ownership as the USA is Switzerland, and you can be
very sure they won't get involved in anyone else's war, unless it's as
mercenaries.

It took centuries for the Swiss to learn how to live together.

They haven't yet, not really - it's why the place is split into cantons.

[snip]

The troubles were not resolved by violence or weapons, they were resolved
(in so far as they have been) by people very carefully /not/ being violent,
but talking instead.

Cubed. But still: while the troubles were still on, and never mind how
come it all got started and carried on and all that, there were people
who did have a use for guns by way of personal protection.

I suspect that the guns operated mostly as a deterrent - if you know the
bugger's got a gun, you'll probably be a bit wary about doing some
things. Or course, that just means that any attacks will be either very
sneaky and clever, or really stupid and bound to fail. Still, I suspect
that they might have done some good even if none of them were ever used.
I suspect that they might never have been used in any case.

[snip]

I suspect the handing out of hand-guns to those people was mostly a
psychological ploy, to give them some sense of not being entirely
helpless.

You could well be right.

Unless you go around with the thing 'cocked' and in your hand all the time,
turning a full circle with each step and carefully sussing out every
person and shadow and opening in sight, the weapon won't actually be of
any use to you. Of course if you do behave like that, the first thing
that'll happen is that everyone else with a hand-gun will feel obliged to
shoot at you.

Good point - but I've no idea how the things were used. I had a vision
of them being kept at home, mostly - although quite what point that
would be given the nature of the threat, I don't know.

[snip]

But if you're faced with an armed nutter, nothing can be relied on to
get you out of it - the best thing is simply to not be there. I've
generally managed that much. But if that fails - well, you just try
everything else that you can think of, and in my case, violence is not
on the cards. I just don't know how to do it. But I do know how to
talk and I can usually turn up the charm - threatening people tend to
get a bit nonplussed when faced with a smiling, charming person being
nice to them. Okay, there's a certain sort of threatening person who'd
just smack you between the eyes if you tried that on them, but I like to
think that I'd have enough judgement to just stay a long way away from
that sort; I certainly try to, any time I spot 'em. I've been known to
leave the building, put it like that.

THe word 'disarming' comes to mind.

That's the basic idea... I can sometimes pull off the most amazing
things when I'm under ultimate pressure. It's a shame I'm utterly
useless most of the time.

Rowland.

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