Ahem: wrt. Tepco, "concentration levels of radioactive cesium being reported some becquerels lower than the actual level" ...
... Normal background level is around 20-80Bq/s. That's because 1 Bq is an incredibly tiny radiation level; the natural Potassium-40 in your body produces around 4000Bq/s. The Hiroshima bomb produced a radiation pulse of around 8 x 1024 Bq.
Upshot: if Tepco were out by an entire order of magnitude, it's insignificant in human terms. To have any risk impact it needs to be considerably more zeros than that.
Bequerel is a rate, i.e radioactive decays per second. The measurements TEPCO and the Japanese government have been reporting at and around the Fukushima Daiichi plant are of how many decays per second occur in a litre of seawater, hence Bq/litre. For comparison regular seawater runs around 11Bq/litre, nearly all of that attributable to healthgiving potassium which has a common radioactive isotope K-40, half-life 1 billion years and a danger to all life on Earth until long after the Sun goes red giant on us
( ... )
I'm not sure the NYC shooting article backs your thesis, given that (a) the shooters were police, not civilians, and (b) NYC has the strictest gun laws in the USA.
A man is high and running around and creating problems and they cops only fire three shots? That seems like restraint to me. (Perhaps it is sad that it seems like restraint.) The report is unclear, but I get the impression they stopped shooting when they figured out they were doing more harm than good. That puts them a couple of steps ahead of most pro-armed-society yahoos.
My thesis is that if the United States were not overflowing with gun-toting yahoos, the police would neither need to be so quick to resort to violence, or even need to be armed at all.
This is a second order effect of the Second Amendment fostering of widespread private gun ownership.
C.f. developed countries like the UK and New Zealand where most police do not go armed at all, and there are vastly lower levels of gun deaths from either civilian or police violence because there are vastly lower levels of gun ownership.
Minor nit: UK police do routinely go armed: just not with guns.
Virtually all beat cops wear anti-stab armour, and carry batons, handcuffs, and pepper spray. They're increasingly adding tasers to that inventory. And they all have TETRA radios to call in tactical firearms teams if they're dealing with an actual armed incident -- knife, sword, or gun. The firearms teams have pistols and semi-automatic carbines and are trained marksmen. So the big difference from US policing practice is that only trained marksmen get actual guns, and the guns only come out when they've been ordered by a senior officer who has been trained and authorized to control lethal force.
(Some forces -- the Nuclear Police and the Transport Police units stationed at airports -- are all armed and routinely carry automatic weapons. But these are special cases.)
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... Normal background level is around 20-80Bq/s. That's because 1 Bq is an incredibly tiny radiation level; the natural Potassium-40 in your body produces around 4000Bq/s. The Hiroshima bomb produced a radiation pulse of around 8 x 1024 Bq.
Upshot: if Tepco were out by an entire order of magnitude, it's insignificant in human terms. To have any risk impact it needs to be considerably more zeros than that.
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A man is high and running around and creating problems and they cops only fire three shots? That seems like restraint to me. (Perhaps it is sad that it seems like restraint.) The report is unclear, but I get the impression they stopped shooting when they figured out they were doing more harm than good. That puts them a couple of steps ahead of most pro-armed-society yahoos.
Reply
This is a second order effect of the Second Amendment fostering of widespread private gun ownership.
C.f. developed countries like the UK and New Zealand where most police do not go armed at all, and there are vastly lower levels of gun deaths from either civilian or police violence because there are vastly lower levels of gun ownership.
Reply
Virtually all beat cops wear anti-stab armour, and carry batons, handcuffs, and pepper spray. They're increasingly adding tasers to that inventory. And they all have TETRA radios to call in tactical firearms teams if they're dealing with an actual armed incident -- knife, sword, or gun. The firearms teams have pistols and semi-automatic carbines and are trained marksmen. So the big difference from US policing practice is that only trained marksmen get actual guns, and the guns only come out when they've been ordered by a senior officer who has been trained and authorized to control lethal force.
(Some forces -- the Nuclear Police and the Transport Police units stationed at airports -- are all armed and routinely carry automatic weapons. But these are special cases.)
Reply
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