Must've been a mindmeld of some sort! :D

Aye lad, or we have crossed some dimensional rift, and are somehow being pulled to Trekdom!
Engines on full reverse, All hands battle stations!
=P

I wasn't responding to the thread, I was responding to your post, which was a tad...venomous.

That being said, in regards to the original OP, I've never understood the riots that occur with sports. I live in Portland and here, the people just don't give a damn if the Blazers lose. I was here in 1997 or 1998 when they were up against the Lakers in the finals and lost, nobody really did anything.

I honestly don't know the type of people that riot because I stay far away from them when I do, but I would imagine college age kids with lots of alcohol in their system. Then you combine them with all the criminals who see it as a good opportunity to riot and all hell breaks loose.

We the Blazers man, we know were going to loose eventually ;-)
Canucks probably thought they had the series in the bag or something...that and I think hockey and beer are like baseball and hotdogs, and that does indeed lead to a volitile mixture...when I heard about the riot and saw that their team lost not by one point but four, I thought, why would they riot? They didn't loose because of a bad call, they lost because the other team played better....People will turn to violence so quickly its hard to see, and when a mob turns to violence, trouble. Luckily it is only Canadians with this violence gene! LOL I'm kidding people ;p

Well, I'd rather that some hooligans rob my home and trash my car than shoot me dead.

Technically, the US had significantly more homicide per person than Canada last time I checked (something like almost triple the rate).

Now, whether you can infer from this fact that all Americans are violent idiots is a bit of a stretch (technically, anyone who is paraplegic cannot be too violent so the assumption has been refuted by simple logic right there).

Also, saying that it's because it is the US is a bit of a cop out and unfair.

More accurately, it could be said that to remedy this state of affair some things would have to change in the US.

But even then, it's a relative thing.

Maybe the changes required to reduce homicide rates would be unacceptable to most Americans in which case the higher homicide rate would be considered a fair trade off.

I mean, atm, it's something like 5 homicides per 100 000 person?

That's like 0.005% chances of getting popped next year and about 0.3% chances of getting popped over a 60 years span.

Now, if you include that the data is skewed by some inherently risky lifestyles (like gang members), you can infer that the chances of being murdered in the US is even lower if you live a normal life and that to a large extent, maybe the medias are blowing it out of proportions ;).

I'm kinda bored, and my plane crashed during landing in IL-2 Sturmovik 1946. I think I'll go out and do some rioting and murdering.

I died on the very first level of Ultima Underworld. I am going to riot.

I crashed my AH-64 in ArmA II, time to drink my own piss.

Errrr....riot.

It would be even better to have them build motorways, just think how many problems would this simple solution sorted out ;)

That's gun homicides per 100,000, and even that's not entirely correct, since half of that number is suicide by gun, and a portion is from self defense as well. You're twice as likely to die in a car accident than getting shot to death here.

And that!:)
I don't really understand why we don't have that system here.

Convicted soccer hools biuld motorways, so people can come see that Euro 2012 thing. That's redemption.:D

American Football is only coincidentally played with a ball that is about a foot long. It's nothing to do with the kicking (non-US Americans used to refer to the sport as "gridiron" because of the way the field was chalked out; the rules have changed a lot since then, but there's still a Canadian Gridiron league somewhereaboots). The same is said to be true of what the rest of the world calls football. It was an umbrella term named so because the "peasant folk" played ball games "on foot", rather than on horse like the nobility (polo, etc). Naturally, the term was thought up by said nobility when observing said peasantry, who couldn't read or write to record the history of the word. Or so the story goes...


In a place where one isn't likely to or easily able to get ahold of a gun, one would make due with other sorts of weaponry, right? And think about all the unreported or misreported homicides?

Actually, I believe it was homicide, period (gun or not) and homicide implies one person killing another, not suicide.

EDIT:

Here is one for the US:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

And, here is one for Canada:

http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/legal12a-eng.htm

Assuming 30 millions (we're more than that now), thats ~2 per 100 000 citizens.

Homocide is roughly equivalent to what folks in England would call an "unlawful killing" And it encompasses a lot more than just murder.