Lobbying is bribery for rich people. Only instead of being super-illegal it’s encouraged, and instead of letting them bend the law it allows them to simply change it. Take gun control. In the months after Sandy Hook, it looked like there would finally be some movement on this issue. Public support for new laws was over ninety percent, both sides of the house seemed interested and it looked like a vote would sail through. Then the day came and the vote came back ‘no’. So what happened? The pro-gun lobby put forward a convincing argument and senators rationally changed their minds, right?

Wrong. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, the Guardian revealed that all but 3 ‘no’ senators had received thousands of dollars in pro-gun money. In other words: they’d been bribed. And, thanks to lobbying laws, that bribe was legal.

Now, lobbying is rarely this overt, but it’s happening all the time—usually in the form of Washington’s ‘revolving door’. Put simply: a senator will align himself with a lobby group, vote their way and—the moment he’s kicked out of office—get a lucrative job at that same group. It’s about as openly corrupt as you can get in a democracy and guess what? There are approximately zero plans to change it.

If there’s one group of people politicians of all colors are happy to piss on, it’s welfare recipients. Whether they’re talking about ‘Welfare Queens’ existing on the government teat, Obamacare bankrupting us all or food stamps becoming unaffordable; politicians sure do like to put the boot into those taking government money. So it should come as no surprise that the biggest ‘Welfare Queens’ of all reside on Capitol Hill.

In 2011, it was revealed that 23 members of congress were claiming farm subsidies. Of those 23, five were sponsored by the Tea Party: the very same Tea Party that opposes all Federal hand-outs. Between them, the Washington Welfare Queens had raked in over $18 million of your money, often while demonizing others for doing exactly the same thing. No matter where you stand on social security, you gotta admit that’s pretty low.

Remember how I said lobbying was the most-corrupt you could get in a Western democracy? Turns out I lied. Welcome to Britain, where the UK parliament could give Silvio Berlusconi lessons in corruption.

Four years ago, an investigation by the Telegraph revealed that British MPs were using their expense accounts to pay for anything they felt like. And while you or I might be tempted to charge the odd drink or meal to whatever company we work for, these guys were charging for freaking houses. Not only were the charges highly-immoral, they were frequently ludicrous: one politician had the taxpayer pay £1,600 for a duck house and £30,000 for 28 tons of manure; while another claimed £2,200 to have his moat cleaned. As in his actual moat: as in something you only have if you already live in an actual castle. One MP even submitted rental costs for a non-existent property. By the time the dust settled, it became clear the government had been screwing the taxpayer for years, so the whole lot of them were locked in the tower of London and summarily beheaded. At least they would have been if there was any justice in this world.

Nepotism is where useless people get money or power because their mommy or daddy was kinda important. While some families, like that of Kim Jong-Un, take a direct approach—our Western version is more to do with handing out lucrative jobs and contracts to people on the basis of nothing more than sharing a handful of genes.

Last year, the New York Times ran this story reporting on the findings of Washington watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. After trawling through a heck-load of records, the group had discovered 82 lawmakers diverting public and party funds to their relatives, often in the form of lucrative salaries for doing not very much. This included 20 members who used money raised for their own campaigns to campaign on behalf of a son, daughter or spouse. Worst of all, as the NYT editorial noted, the revelations came at a time of eight percent unemployment and worsening poverty: a time when hundreds of thousands of young people were getting thrown on the scrapheap. In other words, plenty of intelligent graduates are being frozen out these jobs in favor of people of no discernible talent—effectively creating a ‘political class’ with no connection to real life whatsoever.

Let’s flip back to the UK for this one. Over there, lying has gotten so routine that two separate stories of made-up government statistics broke in one week. First, an important minister was caught out justifying welfare-robbery by making up facts. Then another high-ranking politician was caught quoting figures from an opinion poll commissioned by a motel-chain, which is about as scientific as it sounds. And that’s just in one week: go back even further and you have a guy who was caught speeding on camera and blamed his wife—despite her being at a public conference at the time.

But these are just a handful of examples. Time and again, we encounter politicians breaking election promises, breaking contracts and just flat-out lying whenever they’re caught being racist. These are the same people trying to make a living off their ‘honest image’: yet experience often shows them to be anything but.

It’s a cliché to say someone thinks he or she is ‘above the law’, but our politicians apparently didn’t get the memo. Whether it’s driving while under the influence, sleeping with prostitutes, embezzlement, getting drunk and starting fights or simply being Nixon, our politicians break the law like it won’t apply to them. And they’re usually right: penniless people who smoke crack get the best part of a decade in prison; rich guys apparently get off with a wrist-slapping six months.

But none of that even begins to touch on the issue of government law-breaking. Put simply, sometimes the entire government makes a law then completely ignores it—as happened recently in England. After a court ruled the government had violated its own minimum wage laws by forcing hundreds of people into near-unpaid labour; the sociopaths in charge voted to bring in another law making them immune from liability. So, to recap: government makes law, government breaks law, government changes law to cover its own ass. There’s a word these sort of people need to hear more often, and that word is “guillotine”.

But our politicians aren’t completely stupid: often they simply vote for what would benefit them to begin with, rather than what would benefit the country. Take the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and the collective hissy fit Washington threw at the thought of a few rich guys paying a little extra each month. But did you ever stop to think who might benefit from those cuts—aside from millionaires?

That’s right: politicians. According to the New York Times, two thirds of senators were millionaires in 2008, while the poorest senator is still earning around 3.5 times the average American wage. Then there’s the massive $19,000 pay rise they awarded themselves in 2009—in other words, at the exact same time the economy was in free-fall and we were being told the country was broke. Not to be outdone by their American counterparts, British politicians later went one further by voting themselves a £31,000 salary increase—about $50,000. That’s a 30 percent increase; seemingly-timed to coincide with devastating UK cuts to public services.

Earlier this year, the daughter of a Mexican official was refused a table at a Mexico City restaurant, so responded by getting her Dad’s inspectors to close the place down. While that case is pretty overt, we here in the West are just as adept at abusing high office—so much so that Business Insider regularly publishes its list of ‘most corrupt members of congress’, and it sure makes for some ugly reading. Their 2012 edition includes a congresswoman who forced her staff to spy on an opponent; a congressman who used campaign funds to finance his daughter’s graduation party; another who offered foreign donors Green Cards in exchange for money; another who allegedly bribed a Federal witness; one who ran a giant Ponzi scheme; several who accepted inappropriate gifts and several more who violated Federal laws. And this list is updated every year with new infractions, new abuses and new redefinitions of the word ‘corruption’. In other words, we could give a Banana-Republic lessons in abuse of power, and no-one’s willing to do a thing about it.

Most of the items on this list deal with some form of hypocrisy—but sometimes, it gets really overt. It may be the moral hypocrisy of talking up God and family values while cheating on your three wives, or evangelizing about raising taxes when you don’t pay any yourself, or running your whole campaign on honesty when you’re really as corrupt as the rest of them.

But what really sticks in the craw is this constant mantra that we’re all suffering equally from this economic Armageddon. We’re not: most of us have seen our taxes rise, our incomes shrink and our jobs get a heck of a lot more precarious. Our politicians, meanwhile, have been living it up: installing hundred thousand dollar beds on five hour flights, ordering expensive designer cushions to perch on and enjoying $60 breakfasts at taxpayer expense. Out of touch is one thing, but these guys seem to be living on a different planet.

Here’s some quick facts: ninety one percent of Americans back moderate gun control measures. Eighty seven percent want the tackling of Federal corruption to become a priority. Fifty percent back legal marijuana. Fifty three percent favor gay marriage. At the time of writing, literally none of those things are being dealt with. Now, I’m not trying to say that majority opinion is always right, or that the government should be ruled by opinion polls. However, when the government consistently supports unpopular measures in the face of hard, scientific evidence, you have to start wondering who they’re working for in the first place. ‘Cause, right now, it sure as hell isn’t us.

The post 10 Ways Our Politicians Are Screwing Us appeared first on Listverse.

If there’s one thing extremists of all three Abrahamic religions have in common, it’s that they don’t like women. Whether its child brides, segregating and threatening children or electronically tracking women, the pious prove time and again that they’re far from down with feminism. So it might shock them to hear one of the most badass warriors in the Old Testament managed to both be awesome and have ovaries.

In Judges 4, the Canaanites decide to go Michael Bay on ancient Israel, sending a heck-load of chariots and horsemen out for some slaughtering. So who’s gonna stand in their way? That’s right: Deborah. In the ancient equivalent of a training-montage, Israel’s first female judge plays Obi Wan Kenobi to the army-captain’s Luke Skywalker; giving him the means to go slaughter those asshole Canaanites. While Deborah stays out the battle proper, she more-or-less directs it from the side lines; meaning even the Bible managed at least one strong female character before Hollywood.

Before anyone gets offended, let me just say that this is simply one interpretation of the Centurion scene. That being said, it’s a pretty convincing one. In the early chapters of the New Testament, a Roman Centurion comes to Jesus, begging him to heal his servant. All well and good, except the translation ‘servant’ doesn’t do it justice. A more accurate one might be ‘boy lover’.

Just to be clear: the Book of Luke was originally written in Greek. In ancient Greek, the word ‘pias’ covers a number of things: such as ‘girl’. It also covers ‘young gay lover’—a definition Kenneth Dover, the world-leading expert on Ancient Greece, favored. Since an erastes-pais relationship involved an older man and a youth, and the Centurion shows way more tenderness for his young ‘pias’ than a rich Roman would for a mere servant, some people think Jesus therefore indirectly gave his blessing to a gay relationship. And if you think that’s heretical wait till you hear about…

However you look at it, the story of Ruth and Naomi is progressive. In a time when being female put you on a social standing roughly around the level of mildew, Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi still managed to fend for themselves. But the interpretations go deeper than that. According to the vice-dean of Chester Cathedral in the UK, Ruth and Naomi were totally in love.

Look, I promise this article isn’t just going to be me flicking through the Bible, pointing at characters and saying ‘see her? Totally gay’; but the evidence is kinda hard to ignore. Ruth tells the older Naomi she’ll never leave her, even in death, and ‘clings’ to her; a word that in Hebrew is earlier used to describe a husband becoming one with his wife. During their story they declare their love for one another (something they never say to their husbands)—and when Ruth finally gets pregnant, everyone refers to it as Naomi’s baby. And that’s even before we touch on the subtext of Ruth’s speech to Naomi being the most-quoted text at modern (straight) Christian weddings. It’s almost as if God himself sees nothing wrong with being LGBT.

Another thing we rarely associate with religious extremists is racial tolerance. Whether it’s ‘white knight’ types trying to relive the crusades in their trailer park or the KKK being assholes, extreme Christianity seems to involve more racism than a night out with Mel Gibson. At least, it does if you’ve never actually read the Bible.

See, Greek, Roman and ancient Hebrew societies were almost color-blind. While there are plenty of references to slavery in the Good Book, it refers to people considered the spoils of war, or unable to repay their debts. The idea of enslaving someone just for their color would’ve been absurd to Biblical man, and Galatians 3:28 makes that emphatically clear. In full, this little baby reads:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

In other words: you’re all equal, so stop being dicks to each other. And man is that a sentiment we should all get behind.

The story of the Ethiopian Eunuch is entirely about the early Church accepting people who were different. In this case, ‘different’ has the dual meaning of ‘African’ and, well, a ‘eunuch’. And, since the ancient temples weren’t hot on letting in anyone who wasn’t physically ‘perfect’ (by their dodgy ancient standards), you can more or less take it to mean the new Church was open to everyone. Eunuchs, the disabled, slaves, people from across the world… even people with unusual sexual preferences. So, to summarize: the message to take from this massive section of the Book of Acts is “it’s cool, we can all worship here”. Now, if only we can get real life to start reflecting this, we’ll be good.

It’s no secret that Jesus wasn’t exactly down with wealth. Aside from telling a wealthy follower the only way to be saved was to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor, he also famously said it was harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Oh, and that story about ‘the eye of the needle’ being a narrow gate or passage or some such nonsense? Rubbish. As far as anyone can tell, Jesus meant what he said: rich people won’t get into heaven unless they do some serious wealth distribution first. In other words: socialism, or at least a proto form of it. And it’s not just Jesus…

For all the New Testament is a Hollywood reboot of the Torah, Jesus’s pro-poor attitude was still building on some extensive groundwork. Briefly: Exodus 23:6 & 23:11; Leviticus 19:10 & 23:22; Psalms 82:3-4; Proverbs 13:7, 18:11, 21:13 & 22:9; Luke 3:10-11, 1 Timothy 6:10 and James 2:2-4 all preach looking after the needy, giving your possessions to the poor and trying not to act like a rich dick. And that’s just the ones I could be bothered to look up—there’s plenty more. If the Bible has one central, social idea to it, it’s ‘defend the poor from rich guys’. In other words, it’s the sort of thing you should be more likely to find Karl Marx flicking through than Glenn Beck—especially given awesome verses like this one.

The Jubilee is an ancient celebration of extreme awesomeness that we’ve somehow managed to forget all about in the intervening centuries. Simply: it was a time for starting over, a great apocalypse party every fifty years that saw all the crap of the past half-century washed away. Slaves were freed, debts were cancelled, property returned to its original owners and prisoners freed. In other words, it was a God-approved handbrake on enforced inequality, exploitation and extreme wealth accumulation. You know: more or less the exact opposite of what we’ve got now. Man, I’m starting to think God maybe looks less like a kindly old Santa Claus and more like Che Guevara.

Let’s be blunt: there’s a good chance King David—giant slayer, benevolent ruler and ‘King of Israel’—was gay. At the very least, he was like that girl you knew at college who was ‘kinda into’ other girls but now has a husband and six kids.

In Samuel, young-David gets adopted by King Saul and winds up meeting his son, Jonathan. The first thing these two nominally-straight men do when they meet each other? Get naked. Yeah, that was as unlikely back then as it is now. Anything else? Well, there’s 2 Samuel 1:26, where David says Jonathan’s love is “more wonderful than that of women”; 1 Samuel 18:1-4 where he says he loves him more than his own soul; and that verse where Saul blows his top at learning his son is into dudes. But the kicker may be when the two are forced to say goodbye and fall into each other’s arms, ending in a passionate kiss.

But perhaps the most surprising thing about all of these is how little it all seems to matter. Characters are gay and cool, lesbian and cool, castrated African Jews and cool… It’s almost as if the Bible were saying there’s nothing wrong with being gay or poor or lost or simply different and we’re all the same to God. And you know what: even if I’m wrong, wouldn’t it be nice to think that anyway?

The post 9 Surprisingly Progressive Moments In The Bible appeared first on Listverse.

In 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the “North Side Phantom” stole nearly $20,000 worth of jewelry in more than 40 burglaries over several months. Witnesses couldn’t agree on a description. The thief was shot at, but never hit. Police investigation came no closer to identifying the elusive housebreaker until he was caught and arrested. The North Side Phantom was Vincent Donnelly, an 18-year old escapee from the state’s juvenile delinquent facility. After his escape, he slept in the cellars of unoccupied houses in the area and robbed others with the help of his accomplices, four other boys and a girl. To add insult to injury, he stored most of his loot in the basement storage locker belonging to a policeman.

In 1951, Los Angeles women found themselves literally under fire by a “Phantom Sniper” armed with a rifle. The first victim was shot through the lung while making a call at a phone booth. Over the course of a year of public panic, six women were wounded, including a 10-year old girl, one killed, and several others reported near misses. In April 1952, police arrested Evan Charles Thomas, a railroad switchman and father of two, who admitted to carrying a rifle in his car and shooting at women to fulfill an abnormal sexual urge. He readily confessed to the crimes, stating he was glad to be arrested. Thomas was only tried for the murder of Nina Marie Brice, whom he’d shot and killed at a hamburger stand. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber in 1954.

In 1954, beginning in October, women in a Miami neighborhood were attacked and robbed by a “Phantom Rapist.” The perpetrator entered some victims’ houses between 2 and 3 A.M by slitting a window screen or breaking a locked door. Victims said they woke with a towel or pillow over their faces and a knife at their throats. Some women were also ambushed walking home from the bus stop. Following the identification of William Henry, Jr. By a witness, a manhunt ensued that spread as far as Georgia and Alabama. Henry was eventually caught and arrested by Sheriff’s Office deputies. He pled guilty to breaking and entering to commit grand larceny, but not to the attempted rapes. Likely because victims were disinclined to testify in court, those charges were dropped). He was found guilty of two counts of B&E.

Returning to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this time in 1980, we find city officials puzzled by “Phantom Wreckers”—an unauthorized, illegal demolition crew razing condemned, unoccupied houses in broad daylight and taking off with loads of valuable resalable bricks and other materials. The Phantom Wreckers began in the North Side area in March, leaving nothing of the targeted house behind except a rusty metal staircase. By July, they’d stolen another house entirely and removed the brick facing from 5 others. At one address, the Phantom Wreckers were spotted by neighbors, who called the police. The men were arrested, but after receiving a call from a “Mrs. Brown,” who lied and claimed they were authorized to tear down the residence, they were released. While a suit was later filed by the city against a construction company, because the police had no records of the men they’d arrested nor a phone number for the (fictional) Mrs. Brown, the case was dropped.

Young couples in Texarkana, Texas, feared for their lives in 1946 as a murderer dubbed “The Phantom” went on a killing spree. The first murders occurred in March—a man and a woman, each shot in the head, found in the backseat of a parked automobile. Another dead couple was discovered in April. The third couple was attacked in their home. In that instance, the husband was killed, his wife seriously injured. Here, the Phantom left his first clue: footprints in the mud. By May, the town’s teenagers were setting themselves up as bait to try and catch the killer, while citizen vigilante groups patrolled the streets. The murders remain unsolved and the Phantom was never identified or caught. The “Moonlight Murders” formed the basis of the film, The Town That Dreaded Sundown (trailer can be seen above).

Beginning in November, 1976, the Shinjuku ward—the entertainment district filled with shops, clubs, restaurants, and bars—was terrorized by a “Phantom Arsonist” who set a fire in the early morning hours every Tuesday (hence his other nickname in the media, the “Tuesday Devil Arsonist”). Each blaze was started in a garbage can and spread to nearby buildings. Fortunately, no one was injured. Worried residents, well aware of Tokyo’s long history of devastating fires, formed vigilante groups and volunteer motorcycle firefighting patrols. People began keeping flammable trash off the streets. By January 1977, the Phantom Arsonist had set 32 fires without being spotted by a single eyewitness. In February, police arrested a suspect, Shigeru Nagazawa, after he was seen setting a fire in a mailbox. He confessed to the crimes, saying he got a thrill from setting fires.

In the years between 1934-1939, more than 60 homes of rich and famous film stars in fashionable Bel-Air—a Los Angeles community—received midnight visitations from the “Phantom Burglar of Bel-Air” who stole jewelry, furs, bonds, silver, and collectibles worth millions. Despite extensive investigation, police weren’t able to identify the skilled second-story man until the arrest of William Borton AKA Ralph Graham in San Francisco in March 1939. Borton had been caught by plainclothes detectives while trying to fence $80,000 in stolen jewels. Following his arrest, Borton confessed to being the Phantom Burglar. More loot was found inside his home, although not all the stolen property was recovered. After pleading guilty, Borton was sentenced to life in San Quentin due to his record as a habitual criminal—he had served terms in 3 other states. He died in 1949 in a prison fight.

For a week in November 1938, women in the town of Halifax, England were attacked by an unknown “Phantom Slasher” who snuck up on victims at night while they walked on the street, grabbed them, slashed them with a “gleaming instrument,” and vanished into the darkness. The first victim, Mary Sutcliffe, suffered a second later attack. In all, 13 women were wounded, though non fatally. The Phantom Slasher was described as having a flat nose “like a boxer” and blackened teeth. In response, churches, shops, and movie theaters closed at dusk. Scotland Yard detectives organized a volunteer citizen’s watch with 5,000 members armed with sticks, Indian clubs, and pokers to perform night patrols. Panic and hysteria spread to 4 other towns. By December, 5 victims’ reports were proven false. And in January 1939, 3 young women were convicted of malicious mischief and given a 4 week sentence when they cut themselves and made a false police report blaming the Phantom Slasher. The item is included on this list because not all the victims’ withdrew their testimony, and a chance exists the elusive Halifax Phantom Slasher may not have been just a figment of the imagination.

During the American Civil War, US Navy ships blockaded shipping lanes to prevent supplies from reaching Confederate states. Blockade runners, whether for patriotism or profit, snuck past or outran the opposing vessels to bring their goods to market. One such blockade runner’s ship was called the “Phantom,” commanded by William Porter, brother of US Navy Admiral David Porter. The daredevil William Porter was well known for his recklessness and nerve. In 1864, Phantom was spotted off North Carolina. A federal steamer, Connecticut, set out in pursuit. Both ships battled heavy seas as the chase continued for miles down the coast. Five more US Navy ships joined the pursuit and blocked Phantom’s progress. Faced with overwhelming odds, Porter ran Phantom onto the beach, where he and his crew set her on fire before escaping. After the war, Porter returned to the merchant service.

This time, we’re in Bel Air, Maryland. Beginning in July 1986 and continuing in waves until 1990, the “Phantom Fondler” broke into homes between 3-5 A.M. He stole nothing, nor was he violent. Instead, he watched a female victim while she slept in her bed, and touched her leg, feet, abdomen, and sometimes breast. When the woman woke up understandably alarmed by the stranger in her bedroom, he made his escape. The Phantom Fondler left fingerprints, but no other clues. Police investigations turned up nothing. Periods of frequent break-ins and fondling incidents followed by months of silence led investigators to suspect the suspect might be jailed for non-related crimes during those times. At last, police found a fingerprint match: Walter Porter, an area resident recently arrested for breaking and entering. When confronted, Porter confessed to being the Phantom Fondler.

The post Top 10 Phantom Law Breakers appeared first on Listverse.

Imagine reading that Obama had ordered the killing of an American citizen—a teenager—without any arrest warrant, immediate reason or trial by jury. There’d be uproar, right?

Apparently not, because its already happened. In September 2011, the administration signed off on the remote execution—by missile—of Anwar al-Awlaki’s sixteen year old son. Now, Awlaki was an Al-Qaeda operative into the recruiting game in Yemen, but by the time the missile was deployed, he’d been dead for two weeks. According to all sources, his son was neither a threat, or even definitely linked to terrorism. However, the White House still ordered his unlawful execution, tried to hush it up then changed the law to make it legal when the press found out. In other words, Obama gave himself the legal right to kill American teenagers simply because he suspects they may one day become a threat. And he can do this because of:

The nature of terrorism is it can strike anywhere, at any time. That’s what makes it, you know, terrorism. So how do you respond to a threat with no geographical boundaries?

Well, you could declare the whole world a battlefield. In February, the Guardian reported on John Brennan’s decision that the war on terror has no geographic limits. While this may sound like a dull legal-wording snoozefest, the implications are pretty worrying: simply put, if the war is everywhere, then so is the rule of war—those same rules that say we can kill our own citizens without trial. When Senator Rand Paul tried to ask if this included US soil, he received such an endless string of non-replies he saw no option but to launch his famous filibuster in March. And he was right to be scared: while the chances of Obama raining death down on, say, Texas might be negligible, those powers will extend to any and all future Presidents. Want to imagine a Nixon with the ability to kill literally anyone he wants, whenever he wants? Because it could yet happen.

Torturing suspects is a bad idea for many reasons; chief among them being it doesn’t work. That’s not some ‘head in the clouds’ Liberal fantasy either: here’s a former FBI interrogator—once labelled ‘the future of the FBI’—saying it’s basically useless. And here’s the results of a 3-year Senate probe that concluded there was “little evidence” of effective torture. Yet not only have we legalized it during our ‘war on terror’, we now seem incapable of weaning ourselves off it.

Two weeks ago, an independent report concluded inmates at Guantanamo Bay were tortured. Two years before that, a comprehensive human rights study indicated detainees had been beaten, sexually assaulted, threatened with rape, nearly drowned and subject to mock executions. In other words, the exact same kinds of tactics we call ‘human rights abuses’ when used by countries in faraway places with names we can’t pronounce. And still we persist with the fantasy that it somehow keeps us safe.

You could write an entire article on why drone strikes are a bad idea and still have enough material for a sequel. For starters, there’s their annoying habit of killing innocent people. Then there’s the matter of the ‘double tap’, where the drone returns to kill civilians and paramedics tending to the injured. Not to mention the 50:1 ratio, which indicates somewhere around 50 civilians are killed for every terrorist. Or the worrying number of children who are part of that ‘50’. But even that doesn’t touch on the most harmful aspect of all: drone strikes create terrorists.

According to the Washington Post, drone strikes in Yemen have led to a surge in Al-Qaeda recruitment, more than doubling their number. Then there’s the matter of ‘signature strikes’—where people’s lifestyle patterns are studied in some office thousands of miles away, and statistical analysis decides whether they’re probably terrorists and therefore worthy of death. Unsurprisingly, people live in fear of being falsely identified, adding to anti-American sentiment now so widespread, it seems to be guaranteeing future generations of terrorists for us to fight. Ask yourself this: if a Chinese drone came to your hometown and went all ‘Red Dawn’ on your friends and family; would you turn pro-Chinese, or would you do everything in your power to hit back at those assholes? Because, right now, we are those assholes.

Let’s not beat about the bush here: most of us who hear the word ‘terrorist’ will picture a very specific type of person. No matter that the most lethal domestic terrorists in the USA and Norway were white supremacists; or that the Real IRA seems determined to attack the UK. Most of us associate ‘terrorism’ solely with ‘Islam’. And it seems our governments are doing nothing to change that perception.

In 2011, the NYPD and CIA were discovered to be illegally spying on New York’s Muslim communities. Not on ‘suspected terrorists’ or people with ‘links to terrorism’, but on ordinary people who happen to belong to a particular religion. And I mean spying: some AP reporters uncovered detailed maps of the routines of hundreds of US citizens, and a network of surveillance that even covered halal shops, Middle Eastern groceries and restaurants with Islamic owners. In other words, if you have brown skin and a name like ‘Abdullah’, local government apparently sees nothing wrong with drop kicking your right to privacy in the face.

But it’s not just American Muslims who are suffering. All of us, in America and Europe, are steadily losing our hard-won liberties. Take the National Defense Authorization Act: a dull-sounding piece of legislation that means any of us can now be held indefinitely without charge. That little baby was signed into law in 2011, meaning the rest of us can now find out how the 48 Guantanamo Bay detainees who’ve been there a decade without charge feel.

But our loss of liberty doesn’t stop there: a few days ago, a former FBI agent appeared on TV to say the government is automatically recording literally every single phone call and email we make. His remarks fit in with previous revelations about government spying, and confirm a terrifying pattern. That means the call you made to your mom this morning, the angry email you sent your boss, the drunken text you sent the friend you ‘secretly’ have a crush on are all being stored somewhere, and may one day be used against you. If that doesn’t scare you, it sure as hell should.

In a list of ’10 Signs You’re Living in a Police State’, Secret Courts/Evidence would be almost at the top. Yet no-one in government seems to have cottoned onto this, because our courts wheel out the whole ‘secret evidence’ bit like it’s going out of fashion. While the rationale for using it sounds good—“if this were to get out in public, it could cause a security breach”—the effects are as damaging to democracy as howitzer to the face.

Put simply, ‘secret evidence’ allows people to be detained, harassed, monitored and even charged without ever knowing what their crime was. In court proceedings, it can be used to halt a case against the Federal Government (without explanation) or even set up a shadow court-system where people are convicted using evidence no-one can see, in proceedings no-one knows about, for crimes that remain unclear. It’s the sort of thing Franz Kafka used to scream about on restless nights and the US and UK governments can’t get enough of it. In other words, one of the most basic human rights—to a fair trial before a jury of your peers—is being eroded while we sit back and do nothing to stop it.

‘Extraordinary Rendition’ is Washington-speak for ‘kidnapping’. Although practiced in the years before 9/11, the post-Twin Towers world saw a dramatic surge in CIA operatives snatching people from their homes and dumping them in a remote torture camps. According to a recent report, around 54 countries gave a helping hand—even setting up secret prison camps on their own soil. In other words, for over a decade, a vast, brutal network of kidnapping and human trafficking has swallowed the globe—and its being run by the same people who are meant to protect us.

Even worse, it’s not just terrorists they’re targeting. In 2004, Sami al-Saadi and his family were abducted by MI6 from Hong Kong and flown to Libya where they were viciously tortured. Their crime? Opposing Gaddafi—the same Gaddafi we later helped al-Saadi and his friends overthrow. Even more stupidly, a German car salesman with a similar name to a terrorist was kidnapped while on holiday and tortured for five months, before the CIA realized they’d got the wrong man. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so absolutely goddamn depressing.

Last month, it became apparent that the Syrian army was dropping cluster bombs on civilian areas. Since international law states that indiscriminate attacks in populated areas are illegal, the campaign has been branded a war crime. So it should come as no surprise the US uses exactly the same tactics.

In 2009, an American cruise missile hit a village in Yemen where Al-Qaeda operatives were believed to be hiding. When the missile exploded, it rained cluster bombs over the entire hamlet, killing 35 women and children. Five of the women were pregnant; the youngest child was only one year old. Nor did the carnage stop there: nearly a year later a ‘bomblet’ that survived the attack exploded, killing two locals and injuring fifteen more. There is no proof anyone killed was an active terrorist, or the village was anything more than a regular village. In other words: this was a war crime—just like the gunning down of two surrendering militants in Iraq, or the murdering of emergency services personnel with the ‘double tap’ method mentioned above. Yet the government has yet to take responsibility, or even acknowledge the attack ever happened.

Put simply, the war on terror has made hypocrites of us all. When you define a terrorist as someone who targets civilians, women and children with violent weapons of mass destruction to further a political aim; then the definition could be applied to Washington, London, Berlin or any Western ally. By targeting villages, killing aid workers, bombing non-combatants and kidnapping and torturing innocent people, our governments have blurred the line between ‘military action’ and ‘terrorism’. If you disagree, just imagine for a moment an Iranian bomb killed your wife, husband, girlfriend, daughter or whatever—would you stop to rationalize their ‘need to protect their borders’ or would you recognize it for what it was: State-sponsored terror? Because that’s how it feels to hundreds of innocent people across the globe every day when an American missile puts their friends and neighbors in an early grave. In other words, we haven’t just lost the ‘war on terror’; we’re in danger of losing something far more irreplaceable: our own humanity.

The post 10 Reasons The War On Terror Is Killing You appeared first on Listverse.

Investigators spent years trying to find the “Grim Sleeper” – so called because he apparently took a break from killing between 1988 and 2002. His arrest came by chance, when his son was arrested and police took a DNA swab from him. By using a technique called familial DNA search, a match was obtained to the unsolved serial killings and Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested. Indicted of ten murders in South Los Angeles over a span of 20 years, Lonnie Franklin Jr. is also being investigated in the murders of a further 8 women by the LAPD. The known victims were all strangled, shot or both after sexual contact occurred.

Mark Dizon is accused of killing nine people (all of whom he knew personally) during three separate robberies. After the murders, he would steal the victim’s electronic equipment and pawn it. Investigators in the case have called him “obsessed” with these electronic gadgets as he would leave all the victim’s other valuables when robbing them. The local police chief has speculated that he may have wanted to obtain banking details or other financial information to get access to the victim’s pensions. In a weird and unexpected twist, he was arrested after a witness positively identified him from his facebook account’s profile photo.

Also known as the “Cleveland Strangler”, Anthony Sowell’s murderous reign came to a close when he strangled and raped a woman as she was passing out. When the woman came to, she fled his house and returned with the police and an arrest warrant. Sowell wasn’t there but the remains of 11 butchered women were. There were two bodies in the living room, four more throughout the rest of the house, four were buried in the back yard and a skull was the only remains left behind of the final victim. Investigators believe that he murdered more women than the 11 he was charged for, as he lived at the same address for more than 5 years and numerous disappearances occurred during that time.

Samuel Little is a career-criminal. His 100 page rap-sheet is so extensive, that it has provided investigators with an extremely accurate account of his exact whereabouts for the past 56 years. Last year, his DNA was positively matched to three cold case files. Throughout the US, it has been discovered that a massive amount of cold cases matches his M.O. and the dates he were present in specific towns. All of these cold cases have been re-opened and the DNA results are pending. Detectives believe that Little, a former boxer, would punch out the women, strangle them, masturbate over their bodies and leave town.

Mohan Kumar is a former teacher who confessed to killing twenty young women over a span of five years. He befriended his victims, dated them for a few weeks and then persuaded them to elope with him to neighboring towns. After spending a night together, he would ask the unsuspecting victims to drink two cyanide capsules, claiming they were “morning-after” pills. He even went so far as to tell them they would become very sick after swallowing the pills, and that it would be best if they took it in ladies rooms near the bus stands. All his victims died within moments of taking the pills freeing him up to rob them of their jewelry and other valuables.

In 2011, a 29 year old Indonesian woman was arrested after she was found to have murdered (and eaten) more than 30 young women. During her arrest, a massive amount of human remains were found in her refrigerator, including those of her husband. The unnamed cannibal reputedly also hosted various parties where she would serve up some of the human meat to her unsuspecting guests. The woman confessed that an inner yearning and unstoppable desire caused her to eat the victims, and that she would do it all again without hesitation. In Indonesia and specifically in Papa New Guinea, cannibalism was practiced well into the 20th century.

Israel Keyes loved the immense thrill that accompanied a kill. As he studied the other famous serial killers, he devised his own techniques and methods so that nobody would be able to say he copied their ideas. He stashed murder kits (containing shovels, plastic bags, money and Drano) all over the US to simplify the disposal of the bodies. Arrested for the murder of Samantha Koenig, he admitted to seven other murders. During his interviews with the FBI a pattern of abductions, rapes, murders and dismemberment became very clear. On 2 December 2012, he committed suicide in his jail cell. The FBI is convinced that there were more victims and recently requested assistance from the public regarding his travels and other activities.

“I want to clear the intensive care unit. It’s making me itch”

Those are the words of the female doctor suspected of being responsible for the deaths of up to 300 of her patients obtained via wiretap recordings. She has been officially charged with seven murders but investigations are ongoing. The prosecutors in this case believe that the doctor injected muscle-relaxants to her patients before cutting their oxygen supply. Her apparent motive was to free up the beds in the hospital. If Dr. de Souza did indeed murder up to 300 patients, it would make her more prolific than Dr. Harold Shipman, who racked up a body count of 250.

Between 2008 and 2012, scores of children disappeared in the Yunnan province of southwest China. The police’s investigations led them to Zhang’s home where they discovered strips of dried and cured human flesh, preserved eyeballs and various other human remains. The Chinese cannibal not only consumed the children’s flesh, he also fed the meat to his dogs and sold the cured remains as ostrich meat at the village market of Kunming. More than 20 people living within a two-mile radius of Zhang were reported missing, but police could only tie him to 11 victims. Zhang was executed in January 2013.

The prolific Russian serial killer and ex-policeman from Vladivostok is suspected to be one of the worst serial killers in the history of Russia. He has murdered at least 24 women with another 26 possible victims in a neighboring province. Picking up women late at night under the pretense of giving them a ride home, he would take them to forests where he proceeded to torture them with screwdrivers and knives, often times beheading them and raping their corpses. Unable to get a suspect from the DNA left at the scenes for years, Mikhail P was finally arrested when the investigators decided to test it against the DNA of former policemen.

Hestie is a graphic designer, author and entrepreneur living in Pretoria, South Africa. She has a semi-unhealthy obsession with vampires, serial killers, history and of course, Listverse.

The post 10 Recently Caught Demented Serial Killers appeared first on Listverse.

The murder case of former Heisman Trophy winner and star NFL fullback O.J. Simpson captivated US audiences for months. It began with the televised police chase of Simpson in a white Ford Bronco through Los Angeles roads on June 17, 1994.

Simpson married Nicole Brown in 1985, but the couple split in 1992. On June 11, 1994, Simpson and Brown attended their daughter’s play in Los Angeles and then parted ways. Brown went to dinner with friends, and Simpson left to pack for a flight to Chicago scheduled later that night. The next morning, neighbors found Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman murdered outside of Brown’s Los Angeles condo.

Evidence seemed to point in Simpson’s direction. For instance, the limo driver who picked Simpson up to take him to the airport the night of the murder testified that when he arrived at the house and rang the doorbell, no one answered. While waiting, the driver then saw a large black person in dark clothes enter Simpson’s house. Minutes later, Simpson answered the door. Blood was also found in some of Simpson’s belongings, including his white Ford Bronco and a pair of socks.

The trial began on January 24, 1995, after Simpson pled not guilty to the two murders. His defense team was led by Johnnie Cochran, who turned the focus of the trial proceedings to alleged racism of the lead police detective in the case. Since the jury was majority-black, some felt that Cochran manipulated the race issue as a ploy to gain their sympathies. But after more than four months of court proceedings, the jury acquitted Simpson of both counts of murder.

In light of the evidence, many questioned the jury’s decision. And, in the wrongful death civil suit brought by the Brown and Goldman families soon after, Simpson was found liable.

The Lizzie Borden case has been preserved in the public’s memory through the popular rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe,
Gave her mother forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty one.

The murder of Andrew and Abby Borden took place on August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie Borden, thirty-three years old at the time, was arrested for the murder based on these facts: she was home alone at the time of the murders, and there were no signs of a struggle.

After the trial began, the prosecution presented the infamous head of an axe that was thought to be the murder weapon. A friend of Borden’s also testified to seeing her burn a dress after the crime. Borden claimed she burned the dress because it was covered in paint.

Nevertheless, the prosecution couldn’t conclusively prove that she and no one else had killed the parents. And despite rumors circulating that Borden had a bad relationship with her stepmother, witnesses in the trial testified otherwise.

After the case concluded and Borden was found not guilty, another suspect was never found.

Rumored to be the basis of the television show “The Fugitive,” Sam Sheppard’s trial for the murder of his pregnant wife revolved around an unknown murder weapon and questions about a possible intruder. Marilyn Sheppard was murdered in her second-floor bedroom early on the morning of July 4, 1954. Sam had reportedly fallen asleep on a daybed on the first floor and was awakened by his wife’s scream.

But a shadow of doubt was soon cast over Sam when his account of events seemed somewhat unlikely. He claimed that someone had broken into the house, gone upstairs and attacked Marilyn. He said that he ran upstairs and tried to fight off the “bushy-haired intruder” but was knocked unconscious from behind. After waking up, he ran after the person and tried unsuccessfully to overtake him.

There were no signs of forced entry, and opened drawers and his overturned medical bag seemed too tidy for a random break-in. Also, Sheppard’s testimony was given rather stiffly and formally. Evidence of extramarital affairs capped off the prosecution’s case.

The jury found Sheppard guilty of second-degree murder with life imprisonment. But because of how much media attention the case attracted, Sheppard was eventually retried in 1966, where he was acquitted. Interestingly, a civil suit for wrongful imprisonment filed by Sheppard’s son and tried in 2000 found Sheppard liable.

In 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school teacher John Scopes went to court for teaching the theory of evolution to his students. The state’s constitution banned the subject in schools. But Scopes served as more of a pawn; the true purpose of the case was to formally debate the evolution ban in court and to address the controversy surrounding it.

The prosecution team was led by William Jennings Bryan, a former presidential candidate and staunch opponent of evolution. On Scopes’ side, Clarence Darrow aimed to prove that the state ban was unconstitutional. Bryan and Darrow attracted crowds of thousands during the hearings. The testimonies and their statements weighed the validity of Darwin’s theory versus that of the Bible.

Ultimately, Darrow, on behalf of the defense, requested that the jury find Scopes guilty so that the case could continue to the state Supreme Court, where the constitutional ban could be possibly overturned. The jury did so, and the Tennessee Supreme Court eventually dismissed the case.

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley, Jr. opened fire on President Ronald Reagan outside the Park Central Hotel in Washington, D.C. One bullet barely missed the president’s heart. Hinckley was wrestled to the ground by Secret Service agents.

But Hinckley wasn’t a political vigilante. Rather, he was trying to win the heart of actress Jodie Foster, with whom he’d become obsessed after seeing the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”

After moving to New Haven, Conn., where Foster attended Yale University, leaving multiple letters and speaking with her twice to no avail, Hinckley grew more desperate. Hours before the assassination attempt, he wrote her a note detailing his plot to kill President Reagan to prove himself to her.

Hinckley’s defense team set out to prove his insanity, bringing in Hinckley’s psychiatrist and other mental health experts to confirm schizophrenia. The prosecution, however, brought in their own experts, testifying that he was sane enough to plan and carry out the detailed plot.

The jury’s verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity enraged many Americans. An oft-cited ABC News poll—taken the day after the verdict was announced—revealed that three-quarters of people interviewed disagreed with the jury’s decision. Hinckley was transferred to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, and in 2003 was allowed to have unsupervised visits with his family.

When the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped from his crib on March 3, 1932, people across the nation took notice. A ransom note for $50,000 was left in baby Charles’ nursery, and a broken ladder was found outside the window.

Because of the extensive media attention, Lindbergh allowed a mediator, Dr. John Condon, to negotiate with the kidnapper. After a series of five notes, Condon met with the kidnapper and gave him $50,000 for information. Condon was told that the baby could be found on a boat off the New York harbor. But an extensive search revealed neither the boat nor baby Charles.

Then, on May 12, the baby’s body was accidentally discovered in woods near the Lindbergh home. As the search for the kidnapper continued, it focused on tracking any ransom money that had been spent. Investigators traced it to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was arrested after authorities found thousands more at his house.

A jury found Hauptmann guilty on February. 13, 1933. In spite of offers to commute his sentence and monetary help for his wife and son, Hauptmann never confessed and was electrocuted on April 3, 1936.

Set against the southern backdrop of Marietta, Georgia, Leo Frank, a Jewish man, was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a young white woman who worked with him in a pencil factory. The prosecution’s arguments hinged on the testimony of a black janitor at the factory named James Conley. Conley said that Frank had killed Phagan and told Conley to dispose of the body. He also said that Frank had planted notes by the body blaming a black person for the crime.

Crowds inside of the courtrooms continually hurled Jewish insults during the proceedings, underlining the hatred that resonated during that era. The white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan went so far as to form the Knights of Mary Phagan in response.

Despite forensic evidence pointing to Frank’s innocence, he was nonetheless convicted to death by hanging. As a result of the shaky evidence, the governor of Georgia commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Subsequently, an angry mob kidnapped Frank from jail with little resistance and killed him by lynching.

In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Paroles pardoned Frank—a little late, we might add.

The Alger Hiss perjury case launched the career of then-congressman Richard Nixon, the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which investigated potential Communist infiltration in the government.

Alger Hiss worked for the State Department, and was accused by former Communist Whitaker Chambers of being a Soviet agent. On August 5, 1948, Hiss adamantly denied the charge before HUAC.

After Hiss filed a slander suit against Chambers, Chambers produced a packet of typewritten and handwritten notes allegedly belonging to Hiss, as well as photos of State documents allegedly taken by Hiss. These were famously referred to as the “pumpkin papers”, because Chambers had kept them in a hollowed-out pumpkin. As a result, Hiss was charged with perjury, or lying to the court while under oath.

Hiss later admitted to being responsible for the handwritten notes, but the source of the film and the typewritten letters remained contentious. After one jury could not come to an agreement, a second case was mounted that eventually found Hiss guilty and sentenced him to five years in prison. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death.

The Scottsboro Boys Trial represents one of American history’s darkest chapters. Nine young black men ranging in ages from thirteen to twenty years old were arrested on March 25, 1931, for assault charges resulting from a fight that broke out on a freight train in Paint Rock, Alabama. Two white women on the train—Victoria Price and Ruby Bates (who later confessed that she lied)—also claimed that they’d been raped by the group of men.

When the boys were taken into police custody in Scottsboro, the white community rioted outside of the jail, calling for punishment. Within five days, on March 30, the boys were indicted by a grand jury. By April 9, all but the youngest of the group had been sentenced to death by all-white juries.

The case moved to the Alabama Supreme Court in 1932, which upheld the previous convictions. The U.S. Supreme Court then heard the case, ruling that the defendants’ rights had not been upheld—thereby sending the case back for retrial.

After three trials and six years in prison, the charges were dropped for four of the boys: Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright. The other five—Charles Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright and Haywood Patterson—remained in prison, and were eventually released on parole, years later.

Most agree that the trials and investigations surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, are the most controversial in American history. The president was shot three times on November 22, 1963.

Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination after investigators discovered a rifle hidden between two boxes with Oswald’s fingerprints on them, along with empty cartridges in the Texas Book Depository. Two days later, Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald.

On March 14, 1964, Ruby was sentenced to death by electric chair for Oswald’s murder. But the Texas Supreme Court overturned the ruling on the basis that the case’s publicity obstructed Ruby’s right to a fair hearing. Before he could be tried a second time, Ruby died from cancer in 1967.

Despite the work of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations tasked with investigating the assassination, no conclusions as to the motives, and the people behind it, have ever been formed in stone. It is suspected that Oswald acted as part of a group—and his relationship with Ruby also remains in question.

Kevin Shaw is a not-so-intelligent student who is trying desperately to understand the cause of oppression and hatred all over the world.

The post 10 Most Famous Courtroom Trials In US History appeared first on Listverse.

Elisha was a prophet who is believed to have lived during the 9th century B.C. When Elijah, who was Elisha’s teacher, was called up to heaven, God commanded him to appoint Elisha as the new head prophet. He performed a good many miracles, such as conjuring water for the city of Jericho and bringing a woman’s son back to life, but there’s one “miracle” that really stands out. Sandwiched between various blessings and acts of kindness are two verses at the end of 2 Kings Chapter 2—verses 23-24—that seem so completely out of place you almost wonder if they were added as a joke. They weren’t.

Here’s what happened: Elisha was walking into the city of Bethel when a group of kids ran out and started making fun of his bald head. It’s the only mention in the Bible that Elisha was bald, which is probably good—because the next thing Elisha did was curse the children to death. Immediately, two bears ran over and tore the kids to pieces. The most important—most Godly—prophet in the land brutally murdered forty-two children because they laughed at him. He is now a venerated saint.

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Jael—her only role in the Bible was to secure a man’s trust before she killed him. Chapter 4 of Judges describes a battle between two generals: Barak, the general of the Israelite army, and Sisera, leader of the Canaanite army. The two armies met on a river bank and Holy war was waged, ten thousand men fighting ten thousand men. As the tide of battle turned in favor of Barak, Sisera decided to cut his losses and fled into the desert alone. Back at the battle field, the Israelites slaughtered every single Canaanite soldier (“and all the host of Sisera fell upon the edge of the sword; and there was not a man left”).

So Sisera was alone in the desert, and he came across a tent belonging to an ally of his, a man named Heber the Kenite. The man’s wife, Jael, ran out to greet Sisera and welcomed him into the tent, telling him he had nothing to be afraid of. She then hid him under a blanket (Barak was still chasing him), waited until he went to sleep, and then snuck up and hammered a tent spike directly through his forehead, nailing his head to the ground. And verily, through lies, deceit, and backstabbing, the hand of the children of Israel prospered.

King David is, arguably, the most righteous man in the Bible (even though he single-handedly killed and circumcised 200 men for a wife). When David’s son Solomon sidestepped the path of holiness, God decided to lessen his punishment because he had loved David so much. But as several of these examples are going to show, brutality and mass genocide go hand-in-hand with righteousness, and it’s usually the righteous man that leads the slaughter.

In 1 Samuel 27:8-11, David takes an army and invades several neighboring lands. The Bible doesn’t give any reason for him to do this, other than a side note that the people he killed were “of old the inhabitants of the land,” so it seems he was just wiping out the indigenous people. David’s army killed all the men and women in the towns he defeated, then carried all the livestock back to their own land, leaving the towns in ruin.

Even the story of David and Goliath that’s usually told to kids ends before it gets too violent—after David kills Goliath with a stone, he chops off the man’s head and carries it around with him.

Samson was a man to whom God granted superhuman strength to help him destroy the evil Philistines (the Galactic Empire of the Bible). However, he would only have his strength as long as he didn’t cut his hair. Even from the perspective of “a righteous hero that destroys the evil tyrant,” Samson really just brings everything on himself, and then can only get himself out of trouble by killing more and more people, like a little white lie that won’t go away. From any other perspective, he’s a murderous psychopath.

In Judges 14:12-19, Samson makes a wager with thirty men that none of them will be able to guess his riddle; if they do, he’ll give them thirty silk shirts. Lo and behold, they trick his wife into telling them the answer, so Samson, not one to shirk on a debt, takes the honorable route: he runs out and kills thirty men, steals their clothes, and pays the men. This delightful children’s video lightens the mood with an upbeat song. But remember, he murdered thirty men; that’s only five short of Ted Bundy status, and it doesn’t even count the 1,000 he killed later with a donkey bone.

We mentioned Elijah earlier; he was the prophet who appointed Elisha to take his place before God sent a flaming chariot to lift Elijah into heaven. Needless to say, he was fairly holy. During the time that he was a prophet in Israel, there came a period when many of the people began to worship Baal, a heathen god. Elijah was perturbed at this turn of events, and decided to prove himself to the Israelites.

In 1 Kings 18:19-40, he called together 450 of the prophets of Baal and gave them a challenge: Kill a bull and put it on an altar, then pray to Baal to light the altar for you. They prayed for hours but nothing happened, so Elijah took a turn. He killed a bull and set up an altar, then prayed to God to light it. Boom, instant fire. The Baal prophets immediately converted to believers, but Elijah wasn’t satisfied. So he took them all down to a river and systematically executed every single one of them.

Elijah actually spent a lot of time proving how holy he was—in 2 Kings 1:9-14, fifty men were ordered to come bring Elijah to the king. Elijah said, “If I be a man of God, let fire come down from heaven and consume thee and thy fifty.” So he killed them all, then did the same with the next hundred men who came for him.

Jephthah was the son of Gilead, a wealthy man, but his mother was a harlot (whore), which meant that he was doomed to be ostracized. True to form, Jephthah was kicked out of his home with no inheritance as a young man (“thou art the son of a strange woman”). After several years had passed, the Israelites went to war (or kept being at war—they were at war a lot). They sought out Jephthah and asked him to return to Gilead, and from there lead their armies into battle against the Ammonites. At this point the king of Ammon asked Israel to just let them live peacefully, and the Israelites’ reply pretty much summed up the reasoning behind every holy war up through the Crusades: “Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess.”

So Jephthah led the charge, but before the battle he made a bargain with God: Let us win, and I’ll sacrifice the first thing that greets me at my home when I return. God kept his side of the deal, and when Jephthah returned home his daughter ran out to meet him. And Jephthah kept his side of the bargain too—he performed a ritual sacrifice of his daughter, his only child, to pay back God.

Jehu became the king of Israel after a violent coup overthrew the previous king, King Jehoram. In the aftermath of the battle, Jehu hunted down and killed all of Jehoram’s royal family and had their heads—seventy of them—piled outside the city gates. Then he ran over Jehoram’s mother in his chariot. But wait, wait until we get to the brutal part.

As the new king, anointed by the prophet Elisha, Jehu had some house cleaning to do. According to 2 Kings 10:18, Jehu put out a fake rumor that he was a Baal worshiper, and asked for all the Baal worshipers in the kingdom to come to a massive sacrifice in his honor. When the people came from throughout the kingdom they were ushered into the house of Baal; it doesn’t say how many there were, but the house of Baal was “full from one end to another.” With every single member of the religion safely clustered in the church, Jehu ordered his army to storm in and massacre them all. That’s one of the literal definitions of genocide. God rewarded Jehu by granting his next four generations a guaranteed seat on the throne of Israel.

The story of how Joshua destroyed the walls of Jericho with the blast of trumpets is the stuff of legend. Elvis can tell you all about it. But like most good Sunday school stories, the genocide comes later. Because once those walls came a-crumbling down, Joshua’s army entered the city and killed the men, women, and children without distinction—”both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”

What the story doesn’t tell is that this wasn’t an isolated battle; Joshua was on a zealous tirade all across Israel. Here are five meaningless words: Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir. Each one of those is a city filled with people which, according to Joshua Chapter 10, the army of Joshua completely devastated. He “utterly destroyed all that breathed.”

Moses is most famous for leading the Israelites out of Egypt; the book of Exodus covers the big stories—the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and receiving the Ten Commandments from God (thou shalt not kill, etc.). It’s Numbers, however, that covers the forty years in the wilderness (which was literally a punishment for not wanting to attack a city). And rather than wandering, the Israelites spent much of this time invading other cities.

After a victorious battle against the Midianites, Moses gave the following ludicrous order: “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” (Numbers 31:17-18). This is literally permission to rape all the little girls in the Midianite cities.

So far we’ve seen nearly a dozen cities completely ravaged and all the inhabitants put to death. We’ve seen commands for rape, religious genocide, the killing of children, and human sacrifice. What we haven’t seen are the burning of whores, a ban on crippled people, or the killing of 70,000 men. There are 134 words in this paragraph, and if we linked a verse on every single word, it wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the acts committed either by God’s hand or under His command that would be considered immoral—or blatantly insane—by today’s standards. But that’s the thing, right? Today’s standards are held to a different moral code than the standards of the 800 years or so before the birth of Christ. But, then again, how does that make any sense?

The post 10 Biblical Figures Who Teach Outrageous Morals appeared first on Listverse.

One of the earlier defectors was a pilot by the name of No Kum-Sok. On September 21, 1953, the twenty-one-year-old pilot suddenly upped and flew his cutting edge MiG-15 fighter plane to Kimpo airbase in South Korea. It was only after he had successfully escaped North Korea that he was given two pieces of very good news. Firstly, he was told that his mother had managed to flee to South Korea back in 1951. Secondly, he learned of the $100,000 reward (about $820,000 in today’s money) being offered by the United States for the delivery of a working MiG-15.

With a newly inflated bank account, he emigrated to the US and changed his name to Kenneth Rowe. After settling in he graduated from the University of Delaware and became an aeronautical engineer, working for some of the biggest names in the field. He retired in 2000, after having spent seventeen years working as an aeronautical engineering professor. Meanwhile, his famous plane is currently on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. It’s probably safe to say that he doesn’t regret leaving North Korea.

But not everyone had such a nice surprise waiting for them on the other side of the border. In 1968, Lieutenant Kim Shin-Jo, along with thirty other hand-picked elite North Korean soldiers, crossed into South Korea armed to the teeth and with only one objective: to assassinate the president. They managed to get within a few hundred yards of the Blue Palace, where he was staying at the time, before their cover was blown. A bloody shoot-out ensued, which left all but two of the assassins dead along with over sixty South Korean soldiers and civilians. The other surviving member of the team managed to escape back across the border, but Kim was captured.

After being imprisoned and interrogated for a solid year, it was determined that throughout the entire fight he had never even fired his weapon. He was released, and in 1970 became a citizen of South Korea. Later that year he heard that all the rest of his family back on the other side of the border were either executed or imprisoned. Struggling with the guilt of that fact, he eventually found God. These days he spends his time preaching, and offering advice to both parishioners and politicians.

While Kim Shin-Jo’s story sounds like it would make for a good action movie, Sung Hae-Rang’s tale is more of a drama. She was the sister of one of Kim Jong Il’s wives, and spent a lot of time with the man himself. Today she lives in an undisclosed location in Europe, hiding from the intricacies of North Korean politics.

According to her story, her involvement with the royal family started in the dead of night on May 10, 1971. She was awakened by a car pulling up outside her home. She rushed out to meet it and came face to face with Kim Jong Il, who told her to get in. As they left, he filled her in on the details. Against his father’s wishes, he had been secretly living with Sung’s sister, but she had given birth to Kim Jong Il’s child, a boy named Kim Jong Nam—a secret which no one could ever be allowed to know about. From then until her defection, she secretly lived with the family, helping to raise their children and becoming quite close to Kim Jong Il in the process.

In 1982, Sung’s son defected to South Korea—and ten years later, her daughter did the same. With nothing left to hold her back, she herself defected in 1996 during a visit to the family’s villa in Geneva, and went into hiding. She lives a quiet life, but has told of her experiences and given some fascinating insights into the late Kim Jong Il’s personality and temperament.

Sung isn’t the only defector to talk about Kim Jong Il’s personal life. Kenji Fujimoto is the pseudonym of a Japanese chef who claimed to have been Kim Jong Il’s personal cook and close acquaintance for almost twenty years, given free rein to travel the world on a sizable salary in order to bring back whatever foreign delicacies the dear leader desired. Suspecting that he was being spied on, and fearing for his life, he defected in 2001. While experts were squabbling over who Kim Jong Il’s successor would be, Kenji asserted that it would be the relatively unknown Kim Jong Un. Obviously, he’s been proven right.

On top of his political insights, Kenji provided tantalizing details of Kim Jong Il’s personal life. He confirmed rumors of a broken collar bone after Kim Jong Il fell off a horse; he mentioned the dear leader’s preference for expensive cognacs; and he spoke of the decadent banquets that would last for days, while the rest of the country starved.

In 2012, Kenji returned to North Korea for a visit at Kim Jong Un’s invitation, and this time he didn’t seem to want to say anything bad about North Korea. He says it’s because the country has changed a lot—but most people seem to think it’s because his wife and child still live there.

While most defectors are understandably keen on leaving North Korea, it’s less common—but not unheard of—for them to go back. In North Korea, returned defectors who denounce the South are often celebrated and paraded down the streets of Pyongyang as evidence of the North’s superiority. But not even that can account for the actions of a twenty-eight-year-old fisherman known only as Lee (it is not him pictured above), who recently stole a fishing boat and escaped to the North . . . for the fourth time.

It’s still unknown why he keeps returning, or how he manages to avoid imprisonment when he goes there. In fact, it’s not even known how he managed to sneak past the heavy security at the border. According to South Korean military officials, he and his stolen fishing boat simply entered a blind spot on the radar and then weren’t spotted again until it was too late. Perhaps when he defects back again, they can ask him how and why he did it.

Unfortunately, not everyone has Lee’s ninja-like ability to slip back and forth across the border at will. That’s where Phillip Buck comes in. After fleeing North Korea back in the 1950s, Buck became a pastor and eventually moved to the US in the 1980s, becoming a citizen in 1989. But it wasn’t long before he decided to return, feeling that he was able to do more good over there.

In 1997, during a famine in North Korea, Buck built a small noodle factory to help feed as many as he could. But his most important work is still in use today: an organization—and a series of refugee shelters—dedicated to helping those who’ve fled to settle down and start new lives.

Over the years, his organization has helped hundreds of refugees find peace in the South, despite strong opposition from Chinese authorities who regard the refugees as illegal immigrants. In 2002, Buck had a narrow escape after one of his safe-houses was infiltrated and raided. The refugees staying there were deported, but Buck himself wasn’t present at the time. In 2005, however, they finally caught him in the city of Yanji, along with fourteen North Korean immigrants. For his part in running the organization, he was imprisoned for fifteen months, before being released with the help of the US embassy. As a condition of release, he is no longer allowed to visit China, so he now dedicates himself to helping from afar. His organization is still actively helping North Koreans escape the country.

One person helped by Phillip Buck was a woman with the alias of Song Ee Han, who currently lives in Virginia with her two daughters. Her escape began in 1997, during North Korea’s famine. Facing starvation, she and her husband decided to take the risk of crossing into China to find food. Their first trip was a success—as was the second. But only days after returning from their third trip, both she and her husband were arrested.

In custody, while three months pregnant, she was kicked and beaten before being released without explanation. Her husband was less fortunate, and died on a prison train. Song returned home alone, only to find that all the rice they had stashed through the house had been confiscated after their arrest. In the following months, both Song’s mother and her newborn baby boy died, while her eldest daughter left home to find food, but never returned.

On top of everything else, the whole family had been tarnished by the arrests and were now regarded with suspicion by their own neighbors. It came to a head one night in July 1998, when two police officers knocked on Song’s door and told the family to leave—and that if they failed to obey, the officers would burn the house down.

With no other options, Song gathered her remaining children and began the long walk to China—a distance of almost a hundred miles over rough terrain. Her youngest son didn’t live through this difficult journey. Song and her remaining family spent a decade in China, and were caught and deported several times. Eventually—after the entire family was arrested and sent back to North Korea in 2006—Phillip Buck intervened by bribing North Korean guards to let them escape once again, and then securing them refugee status in the US.

In 1987, as a member of North Korea’s spy agency, Kim Hyon Hui and her partner bombed Korean Air Flight 857, killing all 115 people on board. They were caught in Bahrain, where her accomplice committed suicide with a cyanide pill hidden in a cigarette. She tried to do the same, but was stopped at the last moment. When it became apparent that she was from North Korea, she was flown to Seoul under heavy guard for questioning. She was expecting to be tortured, as her instructors had told her she would, but was instead treated kindly and shown around the city. She soon came to realize that much of what she’d been led to believe about the world outside North Korea was a lie—and she broke down, confessing everything.

In 1989, Kim Hyon Hui was sentenced to death for her role in the terrorist attack. She was then pardoned by South Korea’s president at the time, who viewed her as a brainwashed victim more than a perpetrator—or, depending on how cynical you are, as a free ticket to increase public support. She went on to publish an autobiography and even marry one of the South Korean officers who had investigated her. The proceeds of the book were sent to the families of those who died on the flight. These days, having been named a traitor to North Korea, she lives in an undisclosed location.

On February 12, 1997, Hwang Jang Yop and his aide walked into the South Korean embassy in Beijing and announced that they were defecting. What makes this particularly amazing is that Hwang Jang Yop was, and probably always will be, the highest-ranking North Korean to ever defect. He was, in fact, one of the key creators of Juche, the ideology behind Kim Jong Il’s entire rule. Three days after he walked into the embassy, another defector named Yi Han Yong (the nephew of Sung Hae Rang from number three in this list) was shot dead outside his home in South Korea in an attack widely thought to be retaliation for Hwang’s defection.

Both Hwang and his aide had much to say about how things were in North Korea, but most startling was the announcement that North Korea would stop at nothing to reclaim the South, and that war was inevitable—a prediction which so far hasn’t panned out. Other than that, Hwang didn’t miss any opportunity to point out that Kim Jong Il was nuts, and that the cult of personality around North Korea’s ruling family wouldn’t end well.

Gone are the days when North Korean refugees were greeted as heroes in South Korea. There are over 20,000 North Korean refugees currently living there, and tensions are starting to become apparent. Defectors are often stereotyped as bland, sexless, unfashionable, and uneducated thieves.

In an effort to combat such attitudes, a TV show called “Now on my way to Meet You” was launched in South Korea, featuring a cast composed entirely of North Koreans. It’s a hybrid talent show featuring singing, dancing, skits, gossip, and fashion talk—but it also has a serious side, with cast members regularly discussing things like their escapes and the families they left behind on the other side of the border.

The show’s creators said it was an effort to combat some of the negative stereotypes about North Korean refugees—but is it working? Kind of. It doesn’t seem to have changed the stereotype of thievery, or the fact that most North Korean refugees end up working poorly paid menial jobs—but it does, at least, make them seem stylish. And really, any news about North Korea these days—so long as it doesn’t involve ludicrously cartoonish threats—is probably good news.

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Now, let’s be clear: it is totally possible to be both rich and a decent human being. But it often takes a special type of person to squeeze into that fabled, global elite—and that sort of person rarely gives a damn about anyone else. After all, right this very second, the ultra-rich are:

“Trickle down” economics work by removing barriers to investment—meaning that the rich splash a lot of money around and the effects of that reach ordinary guys like you or me. All well and good—until the super-rich decide that investing is a fools’ game, because hoarding is where it’s at. Suddenly, the trickle down model inverts, and the economy becomes like a giant vacuum-cleaner, sucking money from the middle class’s pockets and dumping it into Mr Burns’ bank account. And thanks to things called tax havens, there it stays—forever.

Does that sound paranoid? Here are some figures: research published in The Guardian estimates that the ultra-rich are hoarding thirty-one trillion dollars abroad. That’s more than the American and Japanese economies combined. Worryingly, the effect of all this hidden wealth on the rest of us is far from benign. With all that lost revenue fleeing its country of origin, governments are forced to push up taxes to cover the shortfall. In other words, you, I, and everyone reading this has to cough up more and more, so that some billionaire can pay less and less. And while we’re on the subject of taxes…

Let’s face it—no one likes paying tax. There’s nothing worse than getting to the end of a grueling month and learning that the Federal government has taken a nice fat slice of your hard-earned pay check. So why shouldn’t the One Percent keep what’s rightfully theirs?

Well, the reason most of us put up with and pay our taxes is that we tend to use the things they buy. Public transport, Medicare, police officers, and firemen are all pretty indispensable things which any society needs to function; as are judges, the military and unimportant-seeming things like roads. If we all stopped paying our taxes, all these things would vanish. Since even the staunchest of Tea Partiers expect to be protected from motorcycle gangs and rogue nuclear states, obviously someone has to pay tax. Unfortunately, that “someone” tends to be shorthand for “anyone but us.”

It’s been obvious for years that the most powerful think they’re above the law, but it’s only recently that the law has started agreeing with them. Take the case of HSBC. In 2010, it came to light that the bank had been quietly looking the other way while violent Mexican drug cartels funneled billions of dollars through their systems. According to reports, this money was linked to drugs, terrorists, international fraud, and a whole host of other evils. So when the time came to sentence the clowns in charge, the law threw the book at them, right?

Nope. Authorities decided to swap prosecution for a 1.9 billion dollar fine, despite the bank having helped rogue states like Iran and pre-revolution Libya flout US and international law.

Why did they essentially get away with this? Because the shock of confiscating HSBC’s banking license would have destabilized the world economy. In other words: these guys thought they were above the law, and the law proved them right—which seems to support Shakespeare’s remark in King Lear, “Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.”

So it should come as no surprise that they’re at it again, this time illegally laundering money in Argentina.

We in the West are very proud of democracy: it’s what sets us apart from psychopathic monsters like Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong-un. Or at least it would be, if our own psychopathic billionaires weren’t busy dismantling it.

Meet the Koch Brothers. You’ve probably heard of them: multi-billionaires, libertarians and one-time backers of Herman McCain’s spectacularly failed presidential bid. But did you know that they also tried to bring back segregation in Wake County schools, overthrow the judicial process in Florida, and blackmail their employees into voting Romney?

And these guys are only one face of this anti-democratic hydra. Here’s their buddy David Siegel threatening massive job-losses if Obama gets re-elected. And here’s some other man of dubious character forcing his employees to attend a pro-Romney rally, or else lose their jobs.

Just to be clear: this is the sort of thing we used to laugh at the Soviet Union for doing. When your definition of “democracy” is “making everyone do what I want them to do,” you’ve officially made the transition from “employer” to “cut-price dictator.”

There are very few issues that rise above political, ethical, and legal debate and become universal absolutes. One of those absolutes is that slavery is wrong. The only people who think otherwise are bad guys in recent Tarantino movies. So it should come as no surprise that several multi-national companies implicitly endorse the practice.

Take tobacco giant Phillip Morris: in 2010, it was revealed that a plantation they owned in Kazakhstan was forcing children as young as ten to work thirteen hour days for pennies. That would be bad enough—but according to that same link, the plantation was also complicit in human trafficking and a system whereby workers “bought” their freedom—a system once used by the goddamn Nazis.

But wait—there’s more. Until a massive campaign last year, Hershey’s knowingly used child labour in their cocoa fields, while Victoria’s Secret supported an African farm where children as young as thirteen were held captive and routinely beaten. In other words: that sexy lingerie your girlfriend sometimes wears when you’ve been really good, is made primarily from children’s tears.

There’s a myth that the very-rich are “wealth creators.” The One Percent, we are told, are the guys whose tax dollars make this country work, the ones who keep our economy turning over. Well, hold on…

A study published by the BBC in 2009 reported that high-flying bankers destroy £7 in the economy for every £1 they are paid. Top advertising executives destroyed £11, while accountants to the super-rich were calculated to wipe £47 from the system for every £1 they receive.

Meanwhile, The Guardian crunched some figures and found that, while productivity in the USA had risen 119% between 1947 and 1979, it rose only 80% in the following thirty years. Basically, at the same time instant earnings exploded for the One Percent, money began to vanish for everyone else. In real terms, this means that most of us are no better off in 2013 than we would have been—doing the same job—in 1978. In the decades before that, real earnings had risen across the board. Now, they only rise for the very rich.

Sometimes, destroying the democratic process just isn’t enough; you’ve gotta take on the environment too. Yep, it’s the Koch brothers again, up to more Disney-villain-esque shenanigans. Welcome to Crossett, where people are getting sick and a Koch-owned chemical plant is pumping some seriously nasty stuff into the rivers. No link has yet been proven, but it’s worth noting that the Brothers have previously been held responsible for three hundred separate oil spills across six states, and for dumping a known carcinogen into the skies above Texas and then trying to cover it up. So, yeah, their record isn’t great.

At the same time, they campaigned to keep formaldehyde off the list of known carcinogens, despite overwhelming evidence for its inclusion. Then there’s their commitment to neutering the EPA, even where its involvement might save lives. In short, these guys are to environmental protection what one of their chemical spills is to the actual environment—an utter disaster.

You probably remember the financial crisis: the economic meltdown that nearly destroyed the world, and created this never-ending recession. You probably also remember who caused it. Yeah, those same super-rich finance types responsible for every single other bad thing on this list. But they seem to have forgotten who exactly bailed them out.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs hoovered up roughly twenty billion dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts. To put it another way—our money saved their incompetent asses. The result? CEO Lloyd Blankfein offered this non-apology for his bank’s role in destroying the world economy, while quietly awarding his senior staff nearly the entire bailout fund in bonuses. Ex-Barclay’s boss Bob Diamond went one better, asking people to stop bashing bankers even as his bank was illegally fixing the Libor Rate.

But what sticks most in the craw is this recent report, which found that bailed-out banks took money earmarked for small businesses and used it for anything but. So, to recap: our money bailed the banks, who then told us to stop whining while they misdirected yet more of our money into a giant circle of corrupt hypocrisy. There’s a word for that sort of behavior, and it’s not suitable for a family website.

In 1315, Venice was the place to be. A rapidly expanding economy, a burgeoning middle class, and a society in which anyone could rise to the top through hard work, all contributed towards an economic powerhouse. Sound familiar? Well, the next bit should too: the ruling class got fed up with these uppity merchants gadding about in their solid gold pantaloons, and put a stop to it. Specifically, they killed social mobility stone dead by forcing non-nobles out the political process, and then forcing them out of the economic one too. As Chrystia Freeland noted in the New York Times, this killed off the rising middle class and effectively doomed Venice to centuries of near-poverty. And guess what? It’s happening again.

In the days of Horatio Alger, Henry Ford, and Benjamin Franklin, the US used to have one of the highest rates of social mobility anywhere on earth. Now it has the lowest in the developed world. Forty-two percent of children born at the bottom of society will stay there, meaning we’re that we’re excluding an enormous part of the poor from potentially reaching the middle class.

At the same time, the middle class is getting hit with the biggest squeeze on its living standards in decades, while watching their own chance to reach the top slowly disappear. Put simply, we’re killing the middle class—and just as in Medieval Venice, that’ll prove to be a one-way ticket to oblivion. A one-way ticket for all of us; even the super-rich.

In sum: unless a handful of greedy fools start sharing their loot, America as we know it may well be done for.

The post 9 Ways the One Percent Are Screwing You Over appeared first on Listverse.

If you compared gun ownership levels with homicide rates, what would you expect to see? Fewer people willing to start a fight when everyone is armed? No correlation at all? Well, not exactly: according to decades of data analyzed by the Harvard School of Public Health, guns and homicides go together like Nicholas Cage and terrible movies.

Put simply, if your fellow citizens have easy access to guns, they’re more likely to kill you than if they don’t have access. Interestingly, this turned out to be true not just for the twenty-six developed countries analyzed, but on a State-to-State level too.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you definitely won’t get shot in Massachusetts—just as it’s entirely possible that you’ll live ninety years in Arizona and never experience the slightest harassment. But statistically, the trend holds true. And on the subject of statistics…

There’s a widespread perception that committing suicide is like planning a wedding or something; you sit down, give it a lot of thought, set a date, and get on with it. But study after study indicates that suicide is not so much a rational decision, but something people do on the spur of the moment—meaning that a lack of access to a death-shooting murder-stick at that critical moment could be the difference between life and death.

It might sound far-fetched, but look at the evidence: according to this report in the Boston Globe, States with high levels of gun ownership have a suicide rate almost twice as high as those with low ownership levels. Even more worrying, people who committed suicide were found to be seventeen times more likely to live with guns at home than not. Now, you might assume that gun owners or gun owning States are more likely to have mental health issues (for whatever reason), but research shows this isn’t true. So you have a bunch of people exactly as miserable as people in other states, but anywhere between two and ten times more likely to end up “going the Heming-way.”

For all the claims of politicians that they represent the public, the truth is that they basically don’t. For every “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” type sticking up for the little guy, there are about two hundred others doing their best to trample him into the ground.

Case in point: at least fifty-four percent of Americans support very strict gun laws, with that number rising to a whopping ninety-one percent (LINK 6) when it comes to common-sense stuff like required background checks. You may recognize this as the same common-sense policy Congress recently shot down in what can only be assumed was an effort to become even more unpopular.

This support for gun control, by the way, is pretty bipartisan: even with controversial stuff like reinstating the assault weapons ban, roughly half of Republicans are in favor, along with a majority of Democrats and Independents. In other words, people are largely pro-gun control—it’s the politicians who aren’t.

Between 1982 and 2012, the US had roughly sixty-two mass shootings. That’s an astonishing number—but it’s not what I’m driving at. Instead, this research by Mother Jones (scroll down halfway) shows that, of those sixty-two shootings, forty-nine were perpetrated using legal weapons.

And guess what? Half of all mass shooters used assault weapons or high-capacity magazines—meaning that a few sensible restrictions could have saved a heck-load of lives. While someone really determined to pull off a massacre could do it using a handgun, shotgun or even a musket if they had to, they’d be pretty unlikely to kill anywhere near as many people as they would with, say, an AR-15 assault rifle. So putting controls on the assault rifle has to be a good thing, right?

Unlike Congress, the Australian Parliament likes action. In 1996, a mass shooter killed thirty-five people in Port Arthur in a massacre so pointlessly depressing I’m not going to mention a single other detail. Two weeks later, the conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, launched perhaps the most aggressive clamp-down on gun ownership in history.

Around 650,000 automatic and semi-automatic weapons were destroyed and a whole raft of checks and controls brought in. The end result? The first decade of the law alone saw a fifty-nine percent drop in Australian gun-homicides, while non-firearm-related homicides stayed level. In other words, people didn’t switch to machetes or poison so much as they stopped killing altogether. As for mass shootings: well, Australia’s gone all the way from eleven a decade (1986-96) to zero.

No other passage in the US Constitution is as hotly debated as the Second Amendment. In full, this controversial sentence reads:
“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.”

Although most people focus on the “bear arms” part, the real key word is “militia.” The thing is, in 1791, no-one really knew if this whole “Union” thing was going to work out. Many of the States distrusted each other, and everyone distrusted big government. The possibility of invasion was frighteningly real, and the Second Amendment was put in place to make sure that a citizen’s militia could defend the principles of the constitution.

What the Second Amendment didn’t do was grant any drunken asshole the right to stagger into a gun shop and buy an assault rifle without a single background check. In 1939, the Supreme Court even ruled that:

“The Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with the view of its purpose of rendering effective Militia.”

By 2008, they’d extended that to cover self-defense in the home—something else that doesn’t require a high-capacity magazine and the ability to kill everything within a three block radius. But that’s all they’d extended it to: there’s no constitutional “right” to carry a concealed weapon, no “right” to use armor-piercing bullets—just the right to defend yourself against intruders. And as Stephen King famously said: “if you can’t kill an intruder with ten rounds, you need to go back to the shooting range.”

Let’s be frank: very few of those who support gun control guys want an absolute, total ban on weapons. Personally, I think that if someone wants to buy a rifle and go hunting in the weekend, it’s their business and has nothing to do with me. Equally, if you simply feel safer knowing that you have a shotgun in the house to defend your kids, fair enough.

But there’s no conceivable reason to own an AR-15, a pump action shotgun, armor-piercing bullets or a high-capacity magazine. Firing a semi-auto at a piece of cardboard is no more “sport” than using a bazooka to play pool is “leisure.” It simply appeals to the fraction of the population who dream of re-enacting Scarface’s last stand, every time they get a letter from the IRS.

I mentioned in the introduction that the United States has more guns per capita than Yemen—but that doesn’t even begin to describe our love of guns. According to data published in the the Guardian, gun ownership in the US is literally the highest in the world. Not in the “developed world,” or the West; in the whole world. That makes Americans more heavily armed than Russians, Pakistanis and people from Afghanistan .

Even Latin American countries overrun by drug cartels, with murder rates comparable to war zones—such as Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala—have fewer guns per capita. Even literal war zones, like Somalia and D.R. Congo, have less heavy weaponry. When you feel more inclined to arm yourself than guys who live in a failed nation state where the average life expectancy is less than fifty years, it might be time to think about slowing down.

Of course, we could just as easily go in the opposite direction. If everyone was armed, no mass shooter would stand a chance, right? Not exactly. When Mother Jones crunched the numbers, they found that successful interventions by armed civilians had occurred in only 1.6 percent of all mass shootings since 1980. In other words, it happened a single time in thirty years.

In two other cases, armed civilians managed to subdue a killer after the shooting had already happened, which you could argue is still a good thing. But plenty of less-fortunate people who tried to get involved have only wound up adding to the casualty list. In 2005, for example, Brendan McKown and Mark Wilson both tried separately to confront an armed shooter. McKown was blasted into a coma, while Wilson was instantly killed.

The trouble is, you might be an ace down the range—but when you’re in the middle of utter carnage, it’s another thing altogether. That’s why one of the few possibly successful interventions—at the end of the 2002 Appalachian School of Law shooting—came from an ex-cop. Training makes a hell of a difference.

The last big myth about owning enough firepower to rival Pablo Escobar is that it’ll protect you when the government comes. It won’t. A psychopathic Federal Government would have the entire US Army at its disposal, along with enough firepower to destroy the planet several times over. The best anyone making a “last stand” could hope for is to get out alive, instead of re-enacting the finale of the Waco Siege.

All that security assault weapons and their ilk might offer anyone is security of mind—which honestly doesn’t seem worth it, stacked up against everything else on this list.

The post 10 Arguments for Gun Control appeared first on Listverse.