Bowling for gun deaths

Recently decided to watch Bowling for Columbine again "inspired" by the latest disaster in the US of a three-year old shooting a baby in the head. 



Cory Doctorow also reposted an article from Boing Boing from 2003 wherein Michael Moore tries to defend himself against the gun lobby's attacks on his film - archive.org version

I've just got to the bit in the film, about 50 minutes in, where he describes the gun deaths around the world and wanted to see if things had got better or worse in the 13 years since the film was released. My figures came from Wikipedia, as so many things do, and I cross-matched the numbers from that page with requests to Google saying "France population 2009" and so on.

My figures are not very accurate. Most of the time I've rounded up in the decimal point was more than .6, but I didn't want to make the figures worse than they are; I just wanted a rough idea.

It seems things are getting worse. For each country, I put the deaths reported in Bowling for Columbine, then the total deaths reported on Wikipedia. Those deaths are per 100,000 of the population so I just took the millions value for population, added a zero and multiplied by the deaths reported. Please let me know if my maths is wrong.

Gun deaths

Germany
2001: 381
2010: 1.24 82 = 1,017

France
2001: 255
2009: 3.01 65 = 1,956

Canada
2001: 365
07-11: 2.22 35 = 777

UK
2001: 68
2010: 0.25 63 = 157

Australia
2001: 65
2011 0.86 22 = 189

Japan
2001: 39
2008: 0.06 128 = 77

US
2001: 11,127
2011: 10.3 312 = 32,136

To make it clear:
For France's figures for 2009 you get "2009: 3.01 65 = 1,956"
This means 3.01 deaths by gun fire per 100,000 people. France's population in 2009 was listed as roughly 65 million, so I multiplied 3.01 by 650 (adding the zero to make the 3.01 number pertinent to millions), which gives a depressing 1,956 deaths by gunfire in my extrapolation.

What has depressed me further here is look at the increase in less than 15 years:

Germany 2.67x
France 7.67x (!)
Canada 2.12x
UK 2.3x
Australia 2.9x
Japan 1.97x
US 2.89x

Imagine a world...

Where all the world's films and TV shows were available through a single outlet. Subtitled in different languages, even dubbed if you want that. Where gargantuan servers were not needed to store every single film or show. Where you didn't get Netflix's favourite phrase "Items related to X". Where you pay a single monthly fee to gain access to all this cultural richness (and the stupid stuff). Media from the very start of cinema up to modern-day blockbusters and ratings earners.

Best of all, where this wasn't illegal?

The music industry went through a huge turmoil over the last couple of decades confronted with the pervasiveness of the net and visual media is going through the same now as bandwidth increases dramatically (in the next few days, I'm upgrading to a 1Gbps download/300 Mbps upload fibre service that is cheaper than my 2Mbps/.2Mbps ADSL service was). BitTorrent is the bête noire of all media, but its brilliance is in how it uses everyone's power together to distribute everything.

It is a commonly-held truth that people who indulge in piracy are also some of the greatest purchasers of media at the same time. You might argue that they test the waters by downloading copiously and pick and choose what they want to support with their money. I myself may have downloaded the odd album or film, usually when it's not easily available in any other form or I've been in a hurry, but it has never prevented me from buying said film, TV show, CD or book.

Imagine if these media hoarders were rewarded in some manner by opening up their presumably immense storage to others to make everyone's downloads that bit faster? Where serious collectors of German Expressionism could make their passions available to a larger audience. Let's further imagine a scenario:

You pay a monthly €/$/£ 20 fee. You can download what you like, legally, for that money and the money gets distributed in some fashion to rights owners. If €/$/£ 20 seems too expensive, restrict it with a lower cost offer, say €/$/£ 10 but no HD, or €/$/£ 5 where you can only get three items per month.

For every byte you upload, because you are effectively part of a BitTorrent network, you get paid (somehow) €/$/£ 0.00000000001 (for every GiB you upload you earn €/$/£ 0.01). Rather than spending money trying to punish people you reward them for helping. Heck, the biggest hoarders with the biggest pipes might even turn a profit on the deal, but then if they do the service to all the other users gets that much better.

Stop the vicious circle and turn it into a virtuous one. Like Cory Doctorow says "Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today" (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/). The Internet is a wonderful thing, let's make it work for us.

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

Can I take a moment for a vital public service announcement? I absolutely insist you all read the book in the title of this message. It is nominally what is called a "Young Adult" book, being as its hero is sixteen, but don't let that put you off. I think Doctorow writes some great fiction that has become more and more assured and skilled as time has gone by (but even his earliest stuff is well worth reading), but this latest is a bit different, touching us lot particularly.

Now, Cory usually puts his books up on his website for free download (he says that piracy is better than obscurity) and he hasn't yet done so with Pirate Cinema (actually he has). I hesitate to do what I'm about to but I believe that he intends it to happen. I'm going to pirate his book and give it to you - it's that important. I bought the book as I have done with nearly all his earlier work and will buy Pirate Cinema when it comes out in paperback as usual. In fact I will buy three copies and give them to people (my version of a hail mary?). I would buy more, but in these benighted days I worry that I won't find readers for them (especially given that I am in France).

The book is set in England, Cory's adopted home, and talks about Trent who runs away from home in Bradford to the bright lights and big city of London since he's managed to get his family's internet connection cut because of piracy. The early chapters masterfully set the scene in a near future that is only too imaginable.

This is an ebook. Most people have a device on which to read them these days and if you don't I'm sorry but you do still have a computer on which you can read it. I know it will be less comfortable, but it will be worth it I promise. I have enclosed a link to a zip file
containing the book in four different formats: ePub, PDF, RTF and TXT. They contain the complete work in descending order of faithfulness with the original ePub format.

< Useless original link removed>

Please read it. I urge you, nay implore you to do so. I'm in the middle of a very serious work schedule right now and I have put asidethe time to write this email because I consider it important. Like theUSB keys with Lady de Winter 18 distributed in the book (it will makesense if you read), I want to get this out to as many people as possible and I'm starting with you guys, but that does not mean I'm stopping with you as well...

PS. The fact that this book has exceptionally not been made available on his site doesn't mean that the others have been withdrawn. Go to http://www.craphound.com and get (among others) For the Win about global MMORPG unions; Makers about building stuff; Little Brother about Big Brother and terrorism; Eastern Standard Tribe about living
out of your timezone; Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom about repurposing Disneyland...

This was a message I posted this morning to the movie mailing list I'm on. In a fit of conscience I forwarded to Cory who graciously replied with the correct link, which I shall now post:

http://craphound.com/pc/download/

Please read this book. It is very important.