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joe_haldeman
joe_haldeman
04 January 2013 @ 09:39 am
The Right to Keep and Bear Shells  
From Care2Causes -- Anecdote, not science, but . .
Written by Lloyd Alter
Grist points to a study where students put a rubber turtle on the highway and noted that out of 257 cars that passed, seven went out of their way to hit the turtle. That’s 2.7237%. Sarah Miller titled their post People will go out of their way to hit turtles with cars, because people are jerks.
That rang a bell; TreeHugger wrote about a Canadian study in 2007, titled Study Proves 2.7% of Drivers Are Stupid Jerks.
They alternated between placing a plastic turtle, a rubber snake, a white cup and a grease control line on the centre of the road. The grease line helped researchers know how many drivers passed over the centre line by mistake. They hid in the bushes and watched 1900 cars, and found that 2.7% of drivers swerved onto the centre line specifically to run over the reptiles.
Fascinating that two separate studies in two different countries come up with the identical percentage. Take take a lethal weapon that is regulated similarly in both countries, like cars, and the turtle murder rate is identical. Take guns, and the American people murder rate is 8.1 times the Canadian rate. There’s a lesson here
 
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( 5 comments — Leave a comment )
Autopopeautopope on January 4th, 2013 04:48 pm (UTC)
Note that the proportion of psychopaths in the general population is estimated to be on the order of 0.5% to 2.5% of the population. (It's notoriously hard to quantify actually.) I find its proximity to the 2.7% figure is highly suggestive ...
Chris McKitterick: stone monkeymckitterick on January 4th, 2013 05:05 pm (UTC)
This post (and your response) is incredibly creepy.

Let's say we have 300,000,000 people in the US. If 2.7% of them are animal-murderers (a short step from full-blown psychopaths), that suggests we have 8,100,000 psychos-in-waiting.

Whoah.

I wonder what keeps most of them from emerging like murderous butterflies from their cocoons?
Autopopeautopope on January 4th, 2013 07:15 pm (UTC)
The fact is, spree-killing or serial killing is sub-optimal survival behaviour. The vast majority of psychopaths recognize this and avoid it: they may not feel empathy, but they don't want to spend their life in a supermax prison.

Those who aren't avoiding highly risky behaviour are poster children for poor impulse control: thus, they generally get locked up for lesser offenses before they graduate to such lethal mayhem.
houseboatonstyx: smaller-healing-buddhahouseboatonstyx on January 4th, 2013 09:39 pm (UTC)
So when will someone make some fake turtles full of spikes, or explosives? :-)
JPjp7 on January 7th, 2013 03:24 pm (UTC)
What if 2.7 percent of people just really hate turtles? :)

I would think that you could get this up to a 100 percent if you just added the right factors.
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