A little Geography

[Stilgar]

I wont go into all the other stuff because no one will beleive even independent surveys or Australian statistics.

What this is for is to show that comparisons between the US and Australia are very hard to make. Now its easy to say the population of Texas and Australia are the same (both near 20 million) so murder the number of murders should be similar. WRONG.
First we need to account for size with the population, meaning Density. Even though most of Australia is the outback, the coastline is very long, spreading people out. To fix this you need to concentrate on an area that is more poplulated, like New South Whales(NSW). But at nearly the same land size as Texas, NSW only has 6 million people. Density is still way off. And since increasing density raises crime rates, and at similar sizes, Texas still has 12 million more people than NSW. There still can be no comparison.
So I rely on groups that all they do is factor in models to correct for these things. Not emails, not snopes, not the NRA, or the brady bunch. I check the source of the report. If the source is reputable then the report should be trusted.
Like an independent International organization that gathered surveys from 17 countries, carried out by each country and turned in to be compiled. Rated Australia worst and the UK second worst in number of crimes per person. Aus had 30% of its population say they were a victim of one a number of crimes like blackmail, theft, and assault.

Here is a quick map showing Texas' population density with Australia's. And yes Texas is at the same scale as Australia.
http://www.wiztechs.com/knightsrealm/proof.htm

[slackmaster]

1. Time for a Top 10 List!

How to tell whether you are in Australia or Texas:

10. Texas has armadillos which can be shot at any time for any reason. Australia has kangaroos which can be shot only for depredation of livestock.

9. Texas has Lone Star Beer. Australia has Foster's.

8. Football in Texas is American Football. Football in Australia is what Texans call Soccer.

7. Cats are allowed to run loose in Texas but may be shot if they're on your property without permission. Cats running loose in Australia are required to be shot on sight.

6. Stealing stuff at night can get you shot in Texas, legally. In Australia you'll just get the living crap beaten out of you and wish you had been shot.

5. If you see hordes of tarantulas crossing the highway one day then hordes of turtles the next day, you are definitely in Texas.

4. The Australian Parliament has fist-fights which are shown live on television. The Texas Legislature occasionally has a third of its members flee to Oklahoma to hide to avoid making a quorum.

3. In Australia opening your lunch means farting. In Texas opening your lunch means opening your lunch.

2. In Australia a "Mexican" is a person from south of the Queensland border. In Texas a Mexican is a Mexican.

1. The toilets flush clockwise in Australia, counterclockwise in Texas.

[CO Liberal]

2. Another Way to Tell the Difference

You stand more of a chance of being shot in Texas than you do in Australia.

[slackmaster]

3. The probability of that happening in either place is so low

That isn't a convenient measure, unlike every item in my Top 10.

[histohoney]

6. Did you read....

the post?
Australia had the higher crime rate.
I admit to being a bit protective, I am a Texan and I've never been shot, or shot at in over 43 yrs. The only thing truley deadly in Texas are the NY and Calif. drivers.(OK,Houstonians too)
It's a BIG state, no need for tailgating and drivng like a bat out of hell will not undo the distances between towns in West Texas.

[Spoonman]

8. Of course not!

Even if they had read it, they will not believe it.
It's a common problem shared by those who insist the sollution is revokation of the 2nd A.

Facts...we don't need no stinking faxes! <snicker>

[CO Liberal]

10. I'm Not Calling for the Revocation of the Second Amendment

I'm calling for its proper interpretation. And I believe that the proper interpretation is the position maintained by the ACLU.

[Spoonman]

12. Oh you mean this one?

ACLU - We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.

I prefer the SCOTUS better defined partial interpretation that many anti's refuse to "find", "read" or otherwise believe.

U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez the Court stated that "'the people' seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution.... it suggests that 'the people' protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community."

But I guess the ACLU knows more than they do.

I like this one too:

Report by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution (1982) -- "The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."

[CO Liberal]

15. ACLU vs. Billy Rehnquist & The Supremes

I'd take the ACLU any day.

[RoeBear]

14. "proper interpretation"

The 2nd amendment: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

Some say the second amendment is about the collective right of the militia to be armed. But that's just silly. Why would there be any discussion of a 'right' for an army to have guns?

[Stilgar]

9. True...

but you stand a greater chance at being blackmailed, pickpockted, have your car stolen, house robbed, assaulted and raped if you live in Aus or the UK. Maybe not in the same day, but you have a much greater risk than in the US.

[LibLabUK]

4. Errrr

"Football in Texas is American Football. Football in Australia is what Texans call Soccer."

Err.. no.

Australians call Aussie rules football, football, and football, soccer and like the rest of the world, American Football, crap :D

Note: I'm kidding about the crap jibe, I played Left Guard at college :)

[Spoonman]

5. Two Things

1. If Foster’s is Australian for beer, why is the Foster’s we get here in Texas brewed in Canada?

2. I don't shoot shoot cats any more, I have yet to find a good recipe for them!

[slackmaster]

7. Same reason Trader Joe's sells "Australian lamb"

Made in Canada.

:freak:

[iverglas]

16. one more

In Australia, you will be chided severely for saying "please" in Parliament.

Yup, it was in a Globe&Mail columnist's top 5 weird stories of the week on Saturday.

"Unparliamentary language" indeed. Not quite the "fuddle duddle" that Pierre Trudeau told an opposition member to do a quarter-century ago. Or so he claimed, and it appeared that the stenographers hadn't heard him. Canadian parliamentarians used to be actually rather famous for inventing unparliamentary language that hadn't been disallowed by a Speaker yet, or wasn't *quite* a personal attack. (Hey, maybe that's why I'm so good at that game, and why *I* can tell the difference.)

Anyhow, the rationale is that a member of the loyal opposition need never beg or pray the government for a response to a question, so it is demeaning to the MP's and thus the House's dignity to say "please" when she wants an answer. (Yeah, our oppositions get to demand answers from our governments, face to face, every day the House is in session. And the governments are required to answer, although they may take a few days to get around to it. And then up here, when the PM and the Cabinet leave the House where they've been bombarded with hostile and probing questions all afternoon, they are swarmed by the press in what's called the scrum, and if they try to sneak off without taking whatever medicine the press has for them, they are shunned.)


Anyhow anyhow, back to those muttons that Oz is so famed for.

Sydney has a population of, what was it, 3.4 million? (Glad my population-density map was of assistance, btw.) Here we are:

http://www.essentialideas.info/sydney.html

More than 140 nations have contributed to the Sydney mix, with one third of us born outside Australia and 23 per cent speaking a language other than English at home. Sydney's main other languages are Italian, Chinese, Arabic and Spanish. Less than one per cent of the population is Aboriginal. ... In terms of population, it ranks 57th in the world. ...

70 per cent of us live in freestanding houses, while only 20 per cent live in apartments and 10 per cent live in semidetached houses or terraces. The suburbs have different stereotypes. The far east (around Vaucluse) is perceived to be the home of the very rich, many of European origin. The north shore includes the fairly rich, conservative voters, many of British origin. The inner eastern and inner western suburbs (where there are apartments, terraces and semis aplenty) draw the bohemians, the radicals, the academics, and the upwardly mobile.

The west is home to many recent immigrants, the poor, the hardest workers. And Sydney's southern suburbs contain a mixture of the working class and the nouveau riche (and some who like to display their not-always-legal wealth by mooring boats behind their houses).

Now I won't be deceptive. A good chunk of the "born-outside-Australia" population is from the UK or New Zealand. But of course, there are obviously a lot of second generation immigrants as well -- kids born in those houses where another language is spoken.

I find the figure of 1,188,580 for the population of Dallas. It strikes me that this must not be metropolitan Dallas; isn't that smallish? If it didn't include, say, Plano, it wouldn't really be Dallas, to me. Richardson might be taking it a bit far. But Plano has a lot of those detached houses with what they call "gardens" in Oz.

Yeah ...

http://www.2747.com/2747/world/city/dallas.htm

The city of Dallas extends over 886.8 sq km (about 342.4 sq mi). The Dallas metropolitan area is made up of the counties of Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Henderson, Hunt, Kaufman, and Rockwall. In addition to Dallas, cities with more than 100,000 in population in the area are Garland, Irving, Mesquite, and Plano.

So why not compare metropolitan Dallas and Sydney? Dallas would probably still have the benefit of a handicap on the population numbers.

Or how about, say, Austin and Canberra? Both pleasant little government/university cities, lotsa green space and all that. (I found the clientele at the Austin city lake campground a fair bit too drunk and rowdy for my taste, but I think I might find a few Aussies in that situation about the same.)

Austin, year 2000, pop. 656,562
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/planning/planfaqs.htm

Well, Canberra, year 2000, pop. 303,200
http://www.worldexecutive.com/cityguides/canberra/orientation.html

How 'bout Brisbane? Nope, 2.8 million, too big. My, they got some big towns there, don't they? Well heck, we'll give Austin a handicap; triple Canberra's score. I have no idea what the scores are, I'm just somehow confident that I wouldn't lose if I bet on Canberra to come out on the bottom.

.

[Stilgar]

19. Thanks for making my point

You are compairing a city to a city which is much more similar, however the original statement was for compareing a country to a state. You seem to have dropped that arguement since yesterday, which is good and was my whole point.

[iverglas]

30. damned if I know

... whom you're talking to!

I'm saying if you insist that apples and oranges are being compared, find yourself an apple for the comparison. If you think that apple is still too perfect, put a worm in it. It will *still* taste better than the apple you're holding.

I've offered you a large Australian city with a mix of classes, cultures, languages, colours, origins ... now you go find out the crime and homicide rates for it. And then triple them. And I'm not talking self-reporting surveys, for pity's sake. Talk about yr apples and oranges ...

And you're welcome for that map, eh?

.

[Superfly]

33. Correction

"Australia has kangaroos which can be shot only for depredation of livestock"

Only if the gubment hasn't confiscated your firearm in their "voluntary" firearm recycling program.

"Cats running loose in Australia are required to be shot on sight."

Ditto

[MrBenchley]

11. Wow...all that hooey

and the Australian bloodbath is STILL an RKBA lie....

Claim: Statistics demonstrate that crime rates in Australia have increased substantially since the government there instituted a gun buy-back program in 1997.
Status: False.

http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/ausguns.htm

[Withergyld]

13. Read it again

It said nothing about crime rate increases. It said that the crime rate in Australia and the UK is higher then the US.

[MrBenchley]

17. And if you buy that

you're probably the sort of person who thinks the NAACP is racist and Ted Nugent isn't.

[Withergyld]

18. No valid refutation

so instead reply with flamebait??
:argh:

[MrBenchley]

20. None needed....

Australia....300 gun deaths a year
Texas.....2,600 gun deaths a year

[Stilgar]

22. I said Crimes per person

or did you miss that every time I have typed it? Again, CRIMES PER PERSON not total number of deaths, not rates of death, CRIMES PER PERSON, say it with me now, CRIMES PER PERSON.

[MrBenchley]

26. Yeah...you did

Now ask me if I care.

[Withergyld]

23. Apples and Oranges

:freak:

[Stilgar]

21. If thats all hes got

to disprove what I wrote then thats just fine. No facts to back it up. Nothing to show he is right, all you have left is flamebait.

[Romulus]

24. that's OK

which region has more gang members? (something that is related to the following):

which region has a higher poverty/ income disparity index?

which region has a higher number of citizens below the poverty level?

which region has an overwhelming, continuous, underground illegal immigrant problem/population, with the accompanying social problems found in any refugee population?

which region has no universal health insurance?

which reason has no real social safety net in place for its citizens?

[demsrule4life]

25. NAACP is that the group that is for the advancment of

colored people as long as they meet their political standards?

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20030828-112122-2522r.htm

[MrBenchley]

27. Gee, dems, Moon's right wing racist propaganda

It's like the cherry on a sundae, somehow....

[CO Liberal]

29. I Was Wondering ...

... when someone would link to the Moonie Times to make a point.

[MrBenchley]

31. Next up, Ann Coulter's views

[demsrule4life]

32. This should meet your needs

http://www.talkleft.com/archives/004142.html

[iverglas]

28. still missin da point

"But at nearly the same land size as Texas, NSW
only has 6 million people. Density is still way off."

Yuppers -- of you're talking AVERAGE density. Who would, and for what purpose?

Check your map again. About half of NSW has what we could pretty confidently call ZERO people per square mile. And more than half of what's left has fewer than 2/sq. mi. This actually doesn't help your case, it ruins it!

Of the 6 million people in NSW, over half live in Sydney (the 57th biggest city in the world). About 4 million, from various reports I see. Your map (like mine) doesn't get quite refined enough to show the urban phenomenon; everything over 10/sq. mi. gets lumped together. We can pretty confidently assume that Sydney has a lot more than 10 people per square mile. And then there's Newcastle (280,000) ... and Wollongong (230,000) ... and Gosford (255,000) ... . The population OVERWHELMINGLY lives in urban agglomerations. Cities. Places with high population densities. We really don't just tack on a great chunk of uninhabited territory to that and say "look! no density!"

(And btw, people really aren't "spread out" along that coastline, either. Just like 75% of Canadians might be "spread out" in a 100-mile-wide band along the US border, even if you don't count all the rest of the country ... but there aren't actually 23 million people all holding hands in a 5,000 mile long chain. Nearly 2/3 of Australians live in the 16 cities listed here, ranging from 2 just under 100,000 to 2 well over 3,000,000, by my quick tally: http://www.citypopulation.de/Australia-UC.html)

Canada's average population density would be even lower than Australia's, I imagine. (50% more people; at least 50% more land area?) And yet St. James Town in downtown Toronto -- a low-income, high-rise housing development that essentially occupies a big city block -- is home to 20,000 people and a few years ago was the most densely populated spot on the planet. Very high ratio of immigrants, too. And a drug and violence problem, worse in the past than more recently, I believe.

http://www.rbebout.com/queen/mtc/2pparl.htm
(That's a really fine site about the modern urban history of a Toronto neighbourhood, for anyone who's interested.)

In Cabbagetown's Census Tract 67, some 1,700 people live on a third of a square kilometre (half the tract; the rest, St James' Cemetery, houses many more dead). St James Town's Tract 65, just one quarter the size, houses more than 15,000. Its population density -- more than 73,000 souls per square kilometre -- is the highest anywhere in Canada.

That's 186,880 / sq. mi., I believe. Can Texas beat that?

.

[FlashHarry]

34. Locking

Please don't start threads simply to continue flame-fests from locked threads.

Thanks.

FlashHarry
DU Moderator