WHAT?? That is profiling !!!
Ol' Bonehead Danny Schorr is the primary reason I despise NPR.
Okay, who offered this solution? A little more background please.
I know what it's like to be stalked, and I wish police would enforce restraining orders when they are violated (I know this all too well, and I'm a man). But asking police to predict abusers in advance is just another way of giving up personal control to another government agency. It's not the government's fault that you chose a bad boyfriend. The police are not personal bodyguards.
Give these women guns. Even the playing field. The alternative solution just enforces a victim mentality, which empowers abusers.
I noted particularly the little detail they slipped in right at the beginning: that the woman in question had been in the abusive relationship at the age of 17, when she already had a two-year-old child. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
They explained how the police were losing a valuable opportunity to collect data when they were called to intervene in domestic violence incidents by not getting information such as (a) is this the first instance of abuse involving this perpetrator and (b) was alcohol involved (why not other drugs?). Two things occurred to me: won't virtually every woman say that the boyfriend/husband has repeatedly abused her, and isn't this an awful lot like profiling?
I also heard Bob Edwards engage in a colloqy with a correspondant from the UK in which he (Edwards) asked a question and got an answer that made absolutely no sense; it was just as if the "correspondant" read the wrong scripted answer to the scripted question.
Bob Edwards has been doing Morning Edition for a long time (at least 20 years). I think he is losing it. That's one of the problems for "non-commercial" NPR, that is so beautifully insulated from those nasty competitive pressures and the testosterone production they often engender. There is simply no way to get rid of deadwood, and a Bob Edwards or a Daniel Schorr can hang on literally until they are carried out feet first.
(steely)
There's a 7 day waiting period to buy a handgun.
Of course, you can always dial 911 and pray.
Anyone can own a press, nowadays--you probably have a printer attached to the computer you're using to read this message. The internet, indeed, is the poor man's soap box, with global reach. This is really the practical realization of the First Amendment ideal--we-the-people assaying to transcend our individual ignorance, inexperience, and folly by pooling our individual knowledge, insight, and wisdom. But the seperation of the wheat from the chaff is for each of us individually to discern.Broadcasting, and the high-speed press which is its Public-Relations progenitor, create a seperate PR universe. In that PR universe wisdom, insight, and knowledge come from the elite as an accomplished fact; we-the-people are mere consumers of the wisdom of our betters. In that universe the First Amendment right to speak morphs into the FCC-proclaimed right to be quiet and receive wisdom from on high.
The difference between the First Amendment paradigm and the Public Relations paradigm is the difference between we-the-people as decision-making adults on the one hand, and on hand "the masses" as subjects to be worked upon by PR technique.
NPR, being government owned as well as government licensed, is the purest form of big media. But although the rest of broadcasting is privately owned it is equally government-licensed. Lacking any other definition of objectivity, broadcasting takes its cue from print big media. Print big media avoids flame wars by defining objectivity as consensus. And since faddishness and demagoguey are what sells papers the easiest, big media's "objective" consensus is a continual denial of the lessons of history. Journalism is far too busy hyping its objectivity to ever focus seriously on the tendencies which inhere in its own business model.
The dirty little secret of broadcasting is that its evanescent nature makes it ill-suited to serious consideration. Even more than print journalism, broadcasting is "of the moment;" even more than print journalism it is therefore faddish and demagogic. An enduring medium such as a book or a self-archiving web site is the only tool we-the-people have to scrutinize journalism and broadcasting.
The salient comparison between commercial broadcasting and NPR is not its funding difference but the fact that both posture as being in the public interest--and though both interest people generally, neither in fact is in the interest of preserving the Constitution.
IMHO, restraining orders do worse than nothing. I served on a jury earlier this year in a murder case; the woman's estranged boyfriend had previously broken into her house, beat her up, then stole her car and smashed it up. The very day she received a restraining order against him, he stabbed her to death. The killer thought he was slick by waiting for her by the place where she took an express bus into Manhattan every day instead of showing up at her workplace or home.
Anyhow, my point is that the only thing that would have kept this guy from attempting to kill this poor woman was him having been locked up with no bail after he beat her up and destroyed her car. All the restraining order seemed to do for him was send him into a blood rage and kill her. And I don't even think a gun would necessarily have helped her, as he caught her by surprise and stabbed her at close range. Fortunately, this jerk is finally off the streets (he was sentenced to 25 years to life) but it was too late to save this poor woman's life.