Guns In America - National Geographic Channel

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http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3825/Overview

i think the first showing on the west coast is at 7pm tonite.

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I didn't find it until it was 10 minutes gone but they're re-running it at 10:00 tonite

Can't tell yet what their conclusions will be (pro or con) about the subject but it ought to be interesting

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A sickening hit piece.
As I said in the other thread, worst line of the night (so far) "if any of the guns are stolen they will end up in criminal hands.":banghead: Duh!!! If they are stolen they are by definition in criminal hands.

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Pretty biased. By 'pretty biased', I mean it was terrible.

That's my $.02. Takeaway message seemed to be "guns are legal, but they ought not be."

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TheCiscoKid wrote:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3825/Overview

i think the first showing on the west coast is at 7pm tonite.

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It just finished. Next showing is at 10.

Interesting about the guy with the shotgun arguing with the dispatcher while two guys were robbing his neighbors' house. The DA in his state let him off the hook but in WA State he would have been prosecuted. He was never under threat to his life, and that's the crux of the issue. In fact according to the story the guys were unarmed, which would have made it worse. I'm going to watch it again and see if I can pick up something I missed, plus the first 10 minutes.

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Richard6218 wrote:

TheCiscoKid wrote:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3825/Overview

i think the first showing on the west coast is at 7pm tonite.

Click to expand...

It just finished. Next showing is at 10.

Interesting about the guy with the shotgun arguing with the dispatcher while two guys were robbing his neighbors' house. The DA in his state let him off the hook but in WA State he would have been prosecuted. He was never under threat to his life, and that's the crux of the issue. In fact according to the story the guys were unarmed, which would have made it worse. I'm going to watch it again and see if I can pick up something I missed, plus the first 10 minutes.

Click to expand...

That is because Texas law allows for lethal force to protect property.

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longwatch wrote:

A sickening hit piece.
As I said in the other thread, worst line of the night (so far) "if any of the guns are stolen they will end up in criminal hands.":banghead: Duh!!! If they are stolen they are by definition in criminal hands.

Click to expand...

I think the proper question is, "What is National Geographic doing airing a program on guns?"

If they want to do a cultural program, they can go to another country, say Britain, and do a piece there. It used to be that when they did a cultural program on/in the US, they did it ona group of people, say the hillbillies in Appalachia. And then it was on their way of life. Not a single aspect of the culture of the entire country. But, its been a while since I watched NG.

I quit reading their mag when I got tired of hearing how everything is in danger of dying, being lost, etc. They had a recent one I bought in a moment of weakness.A spinmeister had invented the word "light-pollution" for too much man-made light glare in the night sky(whoever defines 'too much'). Light pollution?Give me a break.

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Citizen wrote:

longwatch wrote:

A sickening hit piece.
As I said in the other thread, worst line of the night (so far) "if any of the guns are stolen they will end up in criminal hands.":banghead: Duh!!! If they are stolen they are by definition in criminal hands.

Click to expand...

I think the proper question is, "What is National Geographic doing airing a program on guns?"

If they want to do a cultural program, they can go to another country, say Britain, and do a piece there. It used to be that when they did a cultural program on/in the US, they did it ona group of people, say the hillbillies in Appalachia. And then it was on their way of life. Not a single aspect of the culture of the entire country. But, its been a while since I watched NG.

I quit reading their mag when I got tired of hearing how everything is in danger of dying, being lost, etc. They had a recent one I bought in a moment of weakness.A spinmeister had invented the word "light-pollution" for too much man-made light glare in the night sky (whoever defines 'too much'). Light pollution?Give me a break.

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Interesting --- I dumped NG Mag last year for pretty much the same reasons. I got sick of paying to have "global warming" shoved down my throat.

What a lot of this program is about is the gang-bangers, and they are a real problem. They're the ones we are talking about when we say "only the criminals will have guns" But the program spends too much time blaming the guns instead of the real problem.

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I'm watching it now and I'm catching a late rerun of it (11pm mtn time) and so far I have to agree with prior posts on it....and I'm not quite halfway through it yet.

NG is so far making it seem like the guns themselves are evil and good people who come into possession of these evil guns will automatically become a BG. :banghead:

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I think NG has pretty much been taken over by Greenpeace. Even the founder of Greenpeace bailed on that group.

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Welllll ---- after seeing this thing 1-1/2 times it's pretty clear that in spite of their shallow attempt to be objective (the mother going to the range while debating whether to own a gun) the message is ultimately anti-gun (the final scene with the ATF agents shredding the guns). Not bad entertainment but I don't take the message seriously. Rating: one star only

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joeroket wrote:

Richard6218 wrote:

TheCiscoKid wrote:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3825/Overview

i think the first showing on the west coast is at 7pm tonite.

Click to expand...

It just finished. Next showing is at 10.

Interesting about the guy with the shotgun arguing with the dispatcher while two guys were robbing his neighbors' house. The DA in his state let him off the hook but in WA State he would have been prosecuted. He was never under threat to his life, and that's the crux of the issue. In fact according to the story the guys were unarmed, which would have made it worse. I'm going to watch it again and see if I can pick up something I missed, plus the first 10 minutes.

Click to expand...

That is because Texas law allows for lethal force to protect property.

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to protect property The dispatcher told him 14 times not to go outside but he did anyway. And when he announced that he was going to shoot, the dispatcher told himthat protecting property wasn't justification for taking lives. So there must be some latitude allowed in the law, otherwise why would the grand jury have exonerated him? I can't really speak to the legal issue as I'm not a Texan

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Richard6218 wrote:

joeroket wrote:

Richard6218 wrote:

TheCiscoKid wrote:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3825/Overview

i think the first showing on the west coast is at 7pm tonite.

Click to expand...

It just finished. Next showing is at 10.

Interesting about the guy with the shotgun arguing with the dispatcher while two guys were robbing his neighbors' house. The DA in his state let him off the hook but in WA State he would have been prosecuted. He was never under threat to his life, and that's the crux of the issue. In fact according to the story the guys were unarmed, which would have made it worse. I'm going to watch it again and see if I can pick up something I missed, plus the first 10 minutes.

Click to expand...

That is because Texas law allows for lethal force to protect property.

Click to expand...

to protect property The dispatcher told him 14 times not to go outside but he did anyway. And when he announced that he was going to shoot, the dispatcher told himthat protecting property wasn't justification for taking lives. So there must be some latitude allowed in the law, otherwise why would the grand jury have exonerated him? I can't really speak to the legal issue as I'm not a Texan

Click to expand...

Not once did they mention that the two scumbags that ole Joe Horn did away with were repeat immigration violators, drug runners, burglars, etc. The world is a little bit safer because Mr Horn release two POS's from their earthly bonds...

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Greenpeace's founder/leader dude bailed because he was about helping the environment through peaceful actions and education. Which I am totally behind because the earth is our home and if we ruin it our children are the ones to suffer (dammit I sound like a hippy, I'm not I SWEAR!) Greenpeace didn't used to be about that crap where they jam re bar into trees to kill the loggers.

They didn't mention the scumbags because it wouldn't help their case.

So many people think the news is reporting with out bias and that line of thinking is naive. When the teacher broke up your fight in grade school did she ask one person what happened, or both? Because that's the only way to get the whole story. Even if someone were trying to report without taking sides can't, no matter how hard they try, because your subconscious will tell you what questions to ask to sway the results in their favor. It pisses me off that the media is in Iraq for that reason. But that's a whole other bag of excrement, so I digress.

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Citizen wrote:

I quit reading their mag when I got tired of hearing how everything is in danger of dying, being lost, etc.  They had a recent one I bought in a moment of weakness.  A spinmeister had invented the word "light-pollution" for too much man-made light glare in the night sky (whoever defines 'too much').  Light pollution?  Give me a break.  

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OK, Citizen, I take issue with this one. Having been raised by an astrophysicist, I happen to have heard many a lecture on exactly how bothersome light pollution is to folks with a need or desire to observe celestial bodies at night.

Now, you'll find a disproportionate libertarian streak amongst astrophysicists (and other lovers of science fiction ), and so most of them agree with me that it's not something the government should/needs to regulate, but light pollution is a very real thing and in fact an established term used by people with real technical backgrounds, unlike the writers of "nat-geo".

And "pollution" isn't meant to convey environmentalist overtones. It's merely an extenision of the dictionary definition and its common application to aggregate byproducts of human activity. For a grounded observer, "pollution" is the exact technical term for what human lights at night are.

pollutant (plural pollutants)
A foreign substance that makes something dirty, or impure, especially with waste from human activities.

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Efficiency is just good engineering. Idiots need a term, an epithet to identify poorly designed troffers. These same idiots can identify a poorly designed troffer because even they can see the glare/filament. Astronomers are not often idiots.

ETA: Correct spelling of troffer - light fixture

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Evil Ernie wrote:

Not once did they mention that the two scumbags that ole Joe Horn did away with were repeat immigration violators, drug runners, burglars, etc.

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Joe Horn didn't know those things, either. Even if he had, they were irrelevant to whether or not he was justified to use deadly force.

Their criminal record only seems to have been relevant during the grand jury stage, where the DA left it open to the jurors to conclude that "They needed killin'!", and issue a no-bill.

Justice, in the end, was served. But Joe Horn himself said that if he had a do-over, he wouldn't shoot.

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KBCraig wrote:

Evil Ernie wrote:

Not once did they mention that the two scumbags that ole Joe Horn did away with were repeat immigration violators, drug runners, burglars, etc.

Click to expand...

Joe Horn didn't know those things, either. Even if he had, they were irrelevant to whether or not he was justified to use deadly force.

Their criminal record only seems to have been relevant during the grand jury stage, where the DA left it open to the jurors to conclude that "They needed killin'!", and issue a no-bill.

Justice, in the end, was served. But Joe Horn himself said that if he had a do-over, he wouldn't shoot.

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My guess is that if he had a do-over he would just stay in the house and not be in a position to shoot/not shoot. As I said at the time, while I think he was in the right morally and in that regard I empathized with and supported him. And while I thought that he was going to be found to be in the right under TX law, as a practical matter in this day and age it just wasn't worth the legal risk and hassles to step outside in that particular situation to "fix" that problem.

And now here we are still hearing about it from the antis even though Horn was exonerated.

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I made the mistake of watching that show last night, and I wish I hadn't. It just proves that the media is not only biased but ignorant of the facts they don't wish to convey.

Showing the gang bangers out there doing the crap they do best was one thing, but shedding a negative light on the rights of active citizens just wanting to defend themselves or even hunt is quite another. It was a piece of propaganda, pure and simple. If it wasn't, they would have given equal time to those who actually use guns as their intended purpose as a tool of survival. A gun is a tool for acquiring food, security, and entertainment as innocent or as guilty as an eight year old's baseball bat. People can be killed by strangulation using a pair of panties, but they haven't been the focus of hate and possible elimination by those in power!

But then again, if you are looking to sway the minds of the uninformed, then using a resource as old and well known as NatGeo is a good move. And of course it doesn't hurt that they found as many LEOs as they did with as negative views towards civilian ownership of guns as they did. It reinforces their argument with the all too trusting and naive that ownership by Civvies is not a sensible right.

Too bad the history of gun ownership not only in the USA but also of countries that have complete bans of guns wasn't even mentioned. Perhaps those facts would only work against their agenda. And too bad it wasn't mentioned who was behind this program, I'd like to know instead of just assuming...

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I felt that Morgan Spurlock's episode of 30 Days, "Gun Nation" was pretty fair to our side, perhaps even biased toward our side. It should still be available on Hulu.com

There were two made-for-TV movies that I know of, which dealt with civilian-owned firearms. One was "The Gun" from the early 1970s which shows a revolver being made at a factory and in an admittedly interesting narrative format, is shown passing from person to person. I won't spoil the ending, but it clearly shows an anti-gun bias.

The other was "Right of the People" with Michael Ontkean. In the beginning of the story, some bad guys hold up a diner, and massacre just about everyone in it. He gets his town to pass concealed-carry legislation, and the film attempts to depict the aftereffects of that decision.

Light "pollution" or whatever you wish to call it, is very real. How else would you explain the near-impossibility of seeing a sky packed with Stars in or near a major city? Even in Death Valley earlier this year, I wanted to show my girlfriend at the time how amazing the night sky out there was, but I insisted we drive at least a mile or two away from the resort complex we were staying at to get away from the glare of the buildings and pathway illumination.