Gun policy and associated lies
Dec. 21st, 2012 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleI cannot believe how much flap there has been over twenty murders in a country that experiences more than a thousand times that many every year. All because they were clustered in one place, with one perpetrator. All else being equal, is it not prereferable to have twenty children murdered by one madman, than twenty children murdered by twenty madmen? That, at least, is nineteen fewer madmen to contend with.
Unfortunately the media pile-on is not the result of any particular decision, its more like the weather, the confluence of many forces that are beyond human control. The story is not the murders; the story is the story, and the murders are incidental to that. As with 9-11, the reaction to the tragedy is far, far, far more tragic than the tragedy itself. It's like a national autoimmune disease, in which the whole country attacks and injures itself, in a way that is grossly disproportionate to the original assault.
What grates at me most, though, is the poor quality of reporting and discourse, which leaves me wondering whether to add to the manure pile or just ignore it. I think, though, that there is one thing worth saying, and saying very, very loudly:
Anyone who claims that there is a clear relationship between gun control policy and violence is a liar.
This applies to both the conventional liberal and conservative positions. This is a subject that has been studied out the wazoo, and the only consistent result has been that there is no consistent result. This applies not to imaginary scenarios, such as magically teleporting all guns into outer space, but to actions that can be plausibly and realistically carried out, such as mandating gun registration or passing concealed carry laws. Thanks to state level implementation of many different policies, there have been many natural experiments from which we can draw conclusions, and those conclusions are all over the map. Their inconsistency proves their unreliability. Unfortunately, discussion on the subject have been dominated by fabricated statistics that don't bear even a few minutes of scrutiny, and outright fantasies that don't even offer enough substance for critical analysis in the first place.
Never have I seen a subject that has revealed so much willful ignorance and cherry picking as this one. If there is a silver lining to all this, it's that nothing that is done in this area is really going to matter. Even if Obama makes it a priority, Congress has the opposite priority. Even if laws are passed, the demographics of gun ownership will change slowly, if at all. And if the demographics of gun ownership change, the effect on violent crime - which, incidentally, has been steeply decreasing for more than a decade - will probably not change in its unpredictable and always-surprising course. And if by some miracle it did, we would never even know it. The whole thing is just a giant waste of oxygen.
Unfortunately the media pile-on is not the result of any particular decision, its more like the weather, the confluence of many forces that are beyond human control. The story is not the murders; the story is the story, and the murders are incidental to that. As with 9-11, the reaction to the tragedy is far, far, far more tragic than the tragedy itself. It's like a national autoimmune disease, in which the whole country attacks and injures itself, in a way that is grossly disproportionate to the original assault.
What grates at me most, though, is the poor quality of reporting and discourse, which leaves me wondering whether to add to the manure pile or just ignore it. I think, though, that there is one thing worth saying, and saying very, very loudly:
Anyone who claims that there is a clear relationship between gun control policy and violence is a liar.
This applies to both the conventional liberal and conservative positions. This is a subject that has been studied out the wazoo, and the only consistent result has been that there is no consistent result. This applies not to imaginary scenarios, such as magically teleporting all guns into outer space, but to actions that can be plausibly and realistically carried out, such as mandating gun registration or passing concealed carry laws. Thanks to state level implementation of many different policies, there have been many natural experiments from which we can draw conclusions, and those conclusions are all over the map. Their inconsistency proves their unreliability. Unfortunately, discussion on the subject have been dominated by fabricated statistics that don't bear even a few minutes of scrutiny, and outright fantasies that don't even offer enough substance for critical analysis in the first place.
Never have I seen a subject that has revealed so much willful ignorance and cherry picking as this one. If there is a silver lining to all this, it's that nothing that is done in this area is really going to matter. Even if Obama makes it a priority, Congress has the opposite priority. Even if laws are passed, the demographics of gun ownership will change slowly, if at all. And if the demographics of gun ownership change, the effect on violent crime - which, incidentally, has been steeply decreasing for more than a decade - will probably not change in its unpredictable and always-surprising course. And if by some miracle it did, we would never even know it. The whole thing is just a giant waste of oxygen.
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-25 06:50 am (UTC)Kates, B., and Mauser (heh), G. (2010). Would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide? A review of international and some domestic evidence. Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 30(2), 649-694. Retrieved from http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf.
Lott, J. R., & Landes, W. M. (2000). Multiple Victim Public Shootings. Yale School Of Management's Legal Scholarship Network, 1. Retrieved from http://www.thevrwc.org/JohnLott.pdf
P.S.: Australia's model is inapplicable to the U.S. Irrelevant, in fact.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-25 04:15 pm (UTC)If this does indeed constitute a clear relationship, I'm ready to be convinced on this particular point, but again since mass murders are relatively rare things it's not clear how much this should influence policy even if it were.
In the meanwhile, I was kind of disturbed by efforts to suppress firearms research and was thinking of posting about this article as well.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-25 04:28 pm (UTC)