Gun Confiscation Legislation Introduced in Illinois; Most Anti-Gun Bill Ever

[Bonesinium]

It would be nice if 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242 were enforced and these criminals were thrown in prison where they belong.

 

[cmcgraw2]

We can all rest easy now, the .gov has said there are "very few American citizens" on the list, well, glad we got that cleared up. Trust them, won't you?

There's an interesting discussion on Blue Mass Group mostly supporting ACLU's (and therefore lawful gun owners') objections. One observation is that to have any chance of locating bad guys with their list, they need to include large numbers of innocent people in it..

http://bluemassgroup.com/2015/12/jaff-jacoby-argues-for-arming-terrorism-suspects/

If a person is on the list, what is the likelihood that that person is a terrorist?(2+ / 0-) View voters

This is a classic exercise in Bayesian statistics. I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I’ll take a swing.

The dilemma here is that the construction of ANY such list requires a tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. A “false positive” is when an innocent person is identified as a terrorist. A “false negative” is when a terrorist is identified as innocent.
attibuted to

What lay people simply do not comprehend is that no test can have both a zero false positive rate and a zero false negative rate. EVERY test has a failure rate, and every failure must be either false negative or false positive. So a test designer has to choose whether to bias the errors towards false negatives or towards false positives.

A test that is biased to minimize false negatives detects the guilty parties, and penalizes the innocent. A test that is biased to minimize false positives protects the innocent and allows the terrorists to get away. The overall error rate is reduced ONLY by increasing the sample size.

If the thing being tested for is very rare, and the false positive rate is larger than that, then the overwhelming majority of people on the resulting list will be innocent. Suppose we pick a number for the number of actual terrorists we think are hiding in America. For the sake of this exercise, I’ll use a frequently cited right-wing article that concludes that there are “22 to 35″ “MOA compounds” in the US. Let’s say there are 100 members in each compound (I found no numbers cited in my admittedly brief search). So it sounds like this right-wing source warns of 3,500 Muslim terrorists hidden among us. Just to make the numbers interesting, let’s say that there are 2-3 other kinds of terrorists besides Muslim terrorists also hiding among us.

So let’s say there are 10,000 actual terrorists hiding among us.

The US Census Bureau reports the following about the US population in 2014:
Total population: 318,857,056
Persons under 18: 23.1%
Persons over 65: 14.5%

So the 2014 population of people between 18 and 65 in the US is about 62.4% of the base, or about 198,966,803 people. Lets call that 200,000,000 to make the math easier.

So the likelihood that an American between 18 and 65 is a terrorist is 10,000/200,000,000 — about 0.005 percent.

The figure for the size of the watchlist cited above is at least 1.5 million (the “40 percent” of “680,000″ failures cited by the National Counterterrorism Center is not helpful because no information is provided about how their “680,000″ person subset was selected). If the list were selected through simple random chance, the number of actual terrorists on that list is 0.00005 x 1,500,000, or 750. Since there are only 10,000 actual terrorists (using our earlier assumptions), there can’t be more than 10,000 actual terrorists on the list.

If there are only 10,000 actual terrorists in the population, and 1.5 million on the “watch list”, than there are 1.49 million innocents on the list.

So we know that we have 10,000 real terrorists and 1.49M false positives.

The bottom line? If “Joe Blow” is on the list, the odds are overwhelming against Joe being an actual bad guy.

I know that these numbers are off, we don’t have nearly enough information to get a handle on the actual statistics (which is itself a huge problem after fifteen years of history with such lists).

What we do know is that the primary effect of these lists is to harm innocent people.

(Attributed to Somervilletom)

 

[In God We Trust]

 

[rwl1955]

A top Homeland Security official shot a hole in Democrats’ efforts to deny gun sales to those on the government’s terrorist watch lists, saying Thursday that the list isn’t designed for those sorts of uses.

“I believe it would be apples and oranges,” Alan Bersin, assistant secretary for international affairs, testified to the House oversight committee.

Democrats, including President Obama, have said denying gun sales to those whose names are listed in the unified federal terrorist database is a no-brainer, arguing that recent attacks in Paris and California show just how much carnage can be wrought with firearms in the hands of terrorists.

But Republicans have rejected those moves, saying the terrorist watch list is a fuzzy tool meant to help shape law enforcement investigations, and cannot be used to deny an American his or her Second Amendment rights.

Mr. Bersin said few U.S. citizens are actually on the “No Fly List,” which is a subset of the terrorist watch list. He said it’s less than one name in 1,000.http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/17/dhs-official-dont-use-terror-watch-list-gun-sales/

 

[thormx538]

Hahah wow. I love how the people pushing for confiscation are never the ones that are going to be taking bullets to the face when they kick someone's door in that has decided they are willing to die for their rights and beliefs.

 

[Bonesinium]

Personally I don't think it goes far enough. They need to be pushing for complete confiscation. A total ban. Everyone. Including law enforcement, because after all, with all guns gone they shouldn't need them anyways. I mean, if you want to talk meaningful gun control, this is the only thing that would be meaningful.

 

[namedpipes]

Personally I don't think it goes far enough. They need to be pushing for complete confiscation. A total ban. Everyone. Including law enforcement, because after all, with all guns gone they shouldn't need them anyways. I mean, if you want to talk meaningful gun control, this is the only thing that would be meaningful.

You do realize that would set off Civil War II, right?

 

[LoginName]

You do realize that would set off Civil War II, right?

One can dream, can't they?..

 

[Horrible]

Tell her that Ted Kennedy was on the list, and even with all his power and standing as a US Senator it took him 5 weeks to get off. What chance do us mere plebeians stand?

Ha! I did and referenced the IRS scandal regarding trust in govt.

Don't think it will help any as both parties in this state seem to think that SWATing anyone on the list is a good idea.

Starting to wonder if the Dems are going to be better on this issue and starting to think about voting against my Repub state rep after this crap. With "friends" like this who needs enemiesh

 

[GM-GUY]

Essentially the same thing has been proposed in MA, HD4331. Call your reps.

I hope it passes - MAKE them make the hard decisions, and we will do what we do.


Like I said in another thread - if all your guns and ammo are in one place, you are doing it wrong.

 

[Horrible]

Anyone know if this crap legislation in MA is moving forward? Is it going into committee? Is a vote scheduled?