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You will be surprised to learn that chaos did not reign in the years prior to widespread filming of public activities -- I guess if the guy wanted to take her toys away himself I'd be OK with that, but would recommend just ignoring her. Going to the cops is just weak -- do you record speeders with a dashcam and call them in?
You will be unsurprised to be reminded of the fact that the years prior to ubiquitous handheld cameras were also the years of greater ethnic homogeneity and stronger Leitkultur.
Would if I could! This is a law and order country, and everyone needs to do their part.
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At least in the UK, things were kept reasonably orderly in part because the police were usually local and knew everybody, and because they were freer to make assumptions about who was up to no good.
When you have to apply the laws completely equally and show no evidence of prejudice, the laws are going to have to get a lot more onerous and specific.
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Do you think the difference in the damage a 12 year old and an adult could potentially do with an axe is really so significant?That seems ludicrous to me. If I would call the police on anyone older than a toddler waving an axe and threatening people, I do it equally on a 12 year old, because they still have the strength to kill many members of society.
"Take her toys away himself". So it's not important enough for the police, but it's also somehow important enough to initiate a violent confrontation over? This doesn't make sense.
Uh, if I saw a toddler with an axe I’d 100% take it away before they take their own foot off.
Yes, I specified older than a toddler and actively threatening people.
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Absolutely so. Have you ever done any fighting, for play or for sport or for real? Have you ever, as an adult, tussled with a kid? Have you ever used a knife or an axe, in any capacity, against anything other than foodstuffs?
Yes, no, yes.
All it takes is 1 bad swing or stab. Any bladed weapon at all is a huge equalizer.
You might say your odds of not dying are overall quite high as compared to a knife wielding adult man. Sure, but the difference in potential damage is not that significant, as differences in strength are more than made up for by weapons.
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Yes, no, yes. Agree or disagree: a 12 year old can inflict a fatal axe wound in 1 swing on an adult. If the adult wasn't aware or stood still and did nothing, and the 12 year old is truly murderous, this seems entirely plausible to me. Agree or disagree?
Extrapolating from there, even if the adult is actively engaged in the confrontation, any confrontation where one bad swing at your neck after you stumble on a rock or whatever will kill you is not where you want to be, even if your odds are overall quite good. Hence why I call the potential damage significant. I see very little difference in the potential damage that can be inflicted.
Having any bladed weapon at all is the real equalizer here
Yes, if the adult behaves like a passive slab of meat, then I suppose the potential damage is similar.
A win for semantics.
Yes, I suppose if you ignore all of the complexity and randomness that arises in a real confrontation, then I guess the risk is basically zero. Strong beats weak 100% of the time apparently.
Are you intentionally being hyperbolic or do you really not see any spectrum at all between being "a passive slab of meat" and strolling up and disarming the child with strong adult hands with absolutely zero fear or injury like a badass?
If you would like to assign numbers to your unearned confidence, what rate of adult deaths or serious injury in these confrontations would you accept as presenting a credible risk?
With a size and strength differential as large as between the average 12-year-old girl and the average adult man, I'd say >90% is a safe bet for success, and a coin toss for success without injury? The numbers are made-up nonsense of course, but that's my extremely rough guess.
The question was about whether there was a significant difference in the potential damage caused by children VS adults using axes, to which I strictly answer "Yes, in the situation the topic revolves around". If you posit some alternate setting, then feel free to adjust the parameters until they align with your goals.
As alluded to above, I'm not fond of these numbers games. Combining them with the vagueness of "presenting credible risk" doesn't help. And as far as the confidence goes...sure, it's unearned. I've never been in a life-or-death struggle against a 12-year-old girl armed with an axe.
I didn't posit an alternate setting to align with my goals. I posited a setting where you could plausibly trip on a rock as you go towards this assailant to dearm them.
I just don't know what to say if you think this is a totally contrived, imaginary scenario that I made up to align with my goals. People trip on rocks or stumble or something equivalent all the time, especially in surprising, violent situations.
Can you explain why this is suddenly an alternate setting that I've contrived? What about this is so unbelievable?
The understanding of potential damage which I have already set out should be clear. I of course do not mean that every swing is equivalent in direct strength. That would be absurd.
Edit: also, 90% chance of success is a fascinating statistic. You're telling me that a grown man has a 10% chance of failing (which means what, death, being irreversibly injured, the kid escapes, what?) and yet they should be completely confident and have little qualms about this confrontation because the potential damage is negligible. Do you routinely take approximate 10% chances on your life or well-being?
Yes you could trip on a rock. So could your assailant. It doesn't disadvantage you any more than your opponent. This sub-scenario that might make it easier for a little girl to kill you doesn't seem any more likely than the sub-scenario in which the little girl trips and you can disarm her with even greater ease.
Any of those, yes.
As I understand it, what you meant is, roughly, "the ability to kill with an axe". Which, yes, alright, a little girl has and an adult man has - but only if reduced to a binary without quantification. The little girl's ability to kill with an axe is far inferior to that of an adult man to do the same, and I would argue (as we have been going back and forth on for a while now) that an adult man even has a greater ability to kill without an axe than a little girl has with one.
They should be able to. Certainly they have the physical means for it. The "potential" damage as in worst-case is certainly severe and fatal, but the "expected" damage is far lower than that.
No. But neither am I routinely threatened by little girls with axes. I take great pains not to live in that kind of place, after all.
I do absolutely insist that an adult man should consider himself equipped and able to take that risk when it is called for. Especially when the alternative is, say, leaving his smaller kids to fend for themselves while he legs it.
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Everybody is a badass on the Internet.
Badass: Can beat a little girl, even if she holds a knife.
Look on the bright side; the bar for badassery is now so low that normal dad-behaviour makes you practically Chuck Norris!
(FTGE)
FTGE?
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Yes, it is extremely significant -- that guy is twice her weight, 1.5-2 feet taller (with corresponding reach advantage), and probably three times as strong. Taking an ax from that girl is literally candy from a baby.
See my previous comment; ftge.
Not what I said; I don't think it's important at all, but you should deal with it yourself if it bothers you so much. Cops in the UK have no guns either; what magic are they going to wield that makes it feasible for them to deal with this Very Serious Threat that you yourself do not possess?
The magic of "they are not going to have a world of shit come down on them for laying a finger on a 12 year old girl".
You simultaneously admit that UK is statist (and bemoan it) and still pretend that "intruding on the monopoly on even minor violence" is an option in a statist country.
There's this thing called "anarcho-tyranny", or "two tier policing" as the Brits would have it.
Does this thing mean that a man grabbing at a 12 year old girl ostensibly to take away bladed tools will be vindicated by police and/or by the public?
Hopefully?
This wouldn't even raise an eyebrow when I was a kid, even if the adult stranger threw in a free can of whoopass for the kid. Admittedly those were different times, and Britbongistan is not Eastern Europe.
Well, it is not my impression that unrelated adults are allowed to discipline other people's children now, not in Britain at least. Admittedly I do not live there.
The way you discipline other people's children in Britain now is by filming them carrying axes and swords, and the State carries out the punishment by proxy.
It's been hinted at in other places in the thread- the state of mind of the filmer was relevant. Was he primarily concerned with public safety, or was he getting that rush of power, that delightful (and stereotypically British) moral treat, that getting to call the cops on someone else is?
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I think this is a terrible recommendation for someone who is bothered by this behaviour.
Regardless of whether the police are more armed than you or not, I think it should be fairly self explanatory why there are both legal and practical reasons why it's preferable for the police to deal with this situation, again, assuming it bothers you. They have legal authority, there may be multiple of them, and the assailant will likely respond differently to them than a random stranger.
You haven't actually explained, why "should you" deal with it yourself? You open yourself up to legal liability. You invite the risk of being harmed in an escalation of the conflict. The only benefit I can see is that you can potentially dearm the assailant faster than the authorities can get there and do so. But if they're so minor of a threat anyway in your eyes, then that doesn't matter very much. So what is the upside?
Also, you are equivocating between the damage a 12 year old can do against an adult man who is already facing and confronting her vs the absolute damage they can do. If this person is waving an axe around people in public threatening them, I think it's totally reasonable to have a valid concern they might hurt someone more vulnerable.
I also think that while you're probably right in a lot of situations it only ever takes one or two unlucky swings/stumbles for the underdog to win. I don't agree that the threat is so minimal as to be essentially ignored
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What she could do is one thing, what she's likely to do is another. A kid who's raided daddy's tool shed to look tough needs a stern talking-to from her parents or other authority figures, but frankly, as much because of the risk of injury to herself as anything else. It's not that much easier for a kid to kill or seriously injure someone with a hatchet of the type seen in the video relative to, say, an ordinary hammer. Would you call the cops on a young kid waving a hammer around a playground? I'd try to do something, if I felt civic-minded, and I might involve the police if I had to, but "record evidence in case this goes to court" would not by my first or even my third move. If it did get as far as A Police Matter™ I would feel I'd failed in my intervention; that I'd escalated the situation way beyond what should ideally happen.
While I appreciate that you make your point fairly reasonably, this still seems like a bit of a ludicrous reaction to me. I agree that in the majority of situations, a kid waving an axe or a hammer around is not very likely to murder someone. but as a stranger and not the responsible parent of this child, it is not my job to assess how serious they are about harming me with an axe and I think it is not a realistic proposition to expect any other sane adult stranger to waive their safety in the face of someone threatening them because it's not LIKELY to turn out with them murdered. I do not have the skills to categorically determine which type of axe waving person is in front of me.
From personal experience, while a normal kid might wave a hammer around, no kid that I associated with to my knowledge ever actively threatened someone with a tool like that once they were anywhere close to their teens. This is not 'normal' behaviour to be gently course corrected imo. I think it's kinda serious.
Pulling out a phone and recording is a bit of a weird move in most situations I agree, but I could see a situation where it might seem reasonable in the moment if they started threatening to accuse you of things and you thought you had a chance to "prove" otherwise in the heat of the moment.
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No, but I call in potheads behind the wheel. Granted, how much of this is due to concern for public safety and how much of it is because I hate pot I couldn't tell you.
Can you tell me more? How often? Do you see them smoking a bowl to know it’s pot? Or do you spot a hot box? Smell or sight?
Rex asks frantically as he throws blunt papers and bongs out of his car.
...in his mind, before suddenly snaps back to reality and realizes he's still parked in front of the Circle-K and hasn't even put the keys in the ignition yet. Whoa. Shit... wait, where are the keys...?
"SNITCHES could be here" he thinks, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be SNITCHES anywhere."
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I, for one, wouldn't be surprised to learn that chaos did not reign in the years prior to widespread filming, because as far as I know those years largely overlapped with the years when children harassing random citizens could be beaten, and such applications of minor corrective violence were overlooked by law enforcement. Today are not such times. Neither is ignoring underage hooligans in the making a recipe for a pleasant society.
If someone speeds through a pedestrian crossing and nearly runs a crossing person over in a display of wanton negligence, I wholeheartedly support the right of that person to throw a brick through that car's window, and if there is no such right, I consider submitting video evidence to the police the next best thing.
Everybody be all libertarian 'till the tweens start a'yellin' I guess -- fuck this gay earth.
(you too @hydroacetylene)
ED: comment applies to you too, not fuck you too, lol
I'm not a libertarian, and when libertarians act as if libertarianism means you must tolerate fists being swung within 1cm of your nose as long as they don't hit you, I am further repulsed by it.
"Displaying an ax in one's possession" == "swinging fists"; got it.
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I am not a libertarian and think it's perfectly reasonable for holding a weapon in your hand to be a serious crime.
I would classify a small knife and a hatchet as tools rather than weapons. If she had a gun then sure, call the police. A hatchet, though? Where do you draw the line? Can she have a butter knife? Can she have a mallet? Can she have a stick? What if it's a sharp stick?
At some point you have a long and pointless list of banned items, and yet anyone who wants a "deadly weapon" of equal effectiveness to anything on that list can easily get one by just hammering nails into a baseball bat. What have you accomplished?
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Really? You interact with hundreds of people holding much more dangerous weapons than that ax in their hand(s) everytime you drive somewhere -- does that specific girl really seem like a threat to you?
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At no point in my life have I ever been a libertarian.
OK -- I'm curious your opinion of the UK's blade bans then, actually -- ID to buy kitchen utensils, yea or nay?
Because that's pretty much already at the cartoonish authoritarianism that libertarians would have put at the bottom of the slippery slope 20-odd years ago -- if you think that's fine, is there any line you'd draw on state power?
Gentlemen can buy knives, chavs can't. No need for ID. Class discrimination is what made Britain great.
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