The experts agree on gun control

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Bheki Cele and heard him speak informally about the state of crime in South Africa. I don’t know how much of the conversations in private meetings like that are appropriate to disclose, but suffice it to say the man’s impromptu speech gave me hope for this country.

There seem to be a number of issues where the commissioner and I don’t see eye-to-eye, however. There was his emotional reaction to seeing a small replica of “Die Prinsevlag” on a woman’s desk, and then there’s todays news where he’s quoted as saying that only law enforcers should need guns. This is one of the advertisement taglines of Beeld today as well, probably because it’s a topic that’s close to home for the majority of the Afrikaans demographic who are a bit like Texans when it comes to issues of gun control.

Now there’s a good chance that what Cele said is being taken horribly out of context (by me and the media), but considering the ANC’s history with gun control matters, I think it’s fair to assume that it was meant as we interpret it. It also makes sense for governments to not want their civillians armed, or otherwise capable of defending themselves, because it means they can bully or strongarm them into doing whatever they want.

I think it’s important for me to state at this point that I think our current firearm legislation is good. The focus of the law is on preserving the sanctity of life. That is why you aren’t allowed to shoot a fleeing perpetrator, or fire upon people for trespassing on your property. You may only attempt to kill someone who is threatening your, or someone else’s life. That’s a good principle, if practically a little insensible. Generally by the time a robbery gets to the point where someone’s life is threatened it’s almost too late to do something about it (and live).

Our current legislation requires people to prove that they are competent enough to own a firearm. You need to pass an easy test and learn something about the law and firearms you’re applying for in the process. You’re legally allowed a combination of four firearms (neatly outlined at GunFactsSA), none of which may be automatic (unless you are a collector). That is cause for some concern, but for the average citizen that wants to protect themselves, a semi-automatic handgun or pump-action shotgun are good enough.

That said, the statements/threats of disarmament made by the people in government that seem to get to make unilateral decisions about these things, are troubling. They seem to be generally discontent with the level of protection the current law offers us.

If only the law enforcers and military have guns, how will the citizens protect themselves from a corrupt government? The truth is that governments are afraid of their citizens rising up when they’ve had enough, so they want to make sure their citizens have as little power to affect such change as possible. The fact is that despite our modern ‘civilised’ age might still makes right. If a government decides to oppress a people, or decides to wipe them off the planet, kick them out the coutry, or blame them for all their woes then their ability to execute that decision is proportional to the ability those citizens have to protect themselves.

In the words of V (from the film, probably not from the book): “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

Or from a less fictional source: “The [balance of power] would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not others dare not lay them aside. And while a single nation refuses to lay them down, it is proper that all should keep them up. Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.” –Anonymous: Attributed to Thomas Paine, Thoughts on Defensive War, July, 1775 [source]

While Paine was referring to war on the scale of nation against nation, I believe the philosophy can, and must be applied on a smaller scale.

When it comes to gun control, I’m with Chris Rock.

Bernadine Kruger

Last week (Thursday, 10 September 2009) Percyval Matji was found guilty of the murder of Bernadine Kruger. Today, a week later he was sentenced to 12 years in prison

For those who don’t know what this is about, Percyval Matji had driven into the back of Bernadine’s scooter while she was on her way to school in Garsfontein. When she fell the taxi drove over her and she was killed.

This case has been plagued with accusations of incompetence as the police on the scene let Matji leave without taking him into custody. Fortunately nothing came of the slip up and Matji was arrested when the murder charges were brought against him. Of course, then the judge posted a R1000 bail on the condition that Matji disclosed the full details of his other address in Mpumalanga and reported to the police station every day. Patterson increased the bail to R5000 when the prosecution protested that the convicted murderer needed to be placed in custody

Finally, in what is probably the fastest conviction I’ve seen, Matji was convicted of murder and sentenced to 12 years in prison. When Magistrate Edmund Patterson handed down judgment he was quoted as saying, “It was not a mistake. It was not negligence.” In context he was saying that Matji’s actions were deliberate – an obvious  pre-requisite for a murder conviction. On top of the prison sentence Matji was declared unfit to own a firearm and his license and permit to drive were revoked.

Percyval Matji

No justice, no sentence will bring Bernadine back, but I for one hope that this ruling sends out a strong message to taxi drivers everywhere.

You can’t endanger the lives of other road users or the lives of your passengers and get away with it.

With the introduction of competing services in Johannesburg like BRT you no longer hold a monopoly over affordable transportation. You now have to treat your customers like customers and not cattle if you want to keep them.

If you endanger the lives of the people that share the road with you there will be hell to pay. If you continue to treat your customers like dirt, or endanger their lives then you will be minus your livelihood.

Firstly, I wanted to draw a chart of data that wasn’t located in contiguous regions of the spreadsheet. That is, the cells weren’t next to one another. Step one: Create a blank chart. Step two: Right click in the chart and select “Data Ranges.” So far, Excel and Calc work exactly the same.

OpenOffice.org Calc Data Range selection dialog for charts

Step three: After clicking on Y-values, click the little “sheet with arrow” (or “Go To Sheet”) button under Range for Y-Values.

OpenOffice.org Calc Data Range selection dialog for charts

Still, so far so good. But step four is where the wheels come off: Select the cells containing the data you want to display (bold in the picture above). Psych! In Calc you can’t do the usual CTRL+Click you’re used to. It only lets you select a contiguous area of cells. The second you click it goes back to the dialog in the first picture with the cell(s) you selected. In Excel this is obviously not the case otherwise the topic of this post wouldn’t be what it is.

Another thing Calc’s charting feature lacks is the ability to use different types of graphs in the same chart. For instance, drawing a line graph over a bar graph. With OpenOffice charts have to be homogeneous. Hopefully this is just for the time being.

Going back to Office for the first time in years, and trying Excel 2007 at the same time, I have to say that while I love all things open source, in fairness, you get what you pay for when it comes to office/productivity software. If you don’t need all the features and the slick interfaces then there’s no reason to fork out the big bucks for Microsoft Office. If you do need and/or want those things then sadly, you need to pay for them.

The graph I wanted to draw can be seen at the top of my latest article at Hellforge: Recession finally catching up, or do the new games just suck? I’ll syndicate it to Entropy eventually, but I would still like to do a post where I compare GNOME and KDE as shipped with Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04. I was pleasantly surprised by how well GNOME shapes up.