If gun control arguments make me want to shoot myself, does that just prove their point? by Yvain
I have tried to be good.
I have tried not to talk about politics on Facebook, because that's not the place for it, and it only annoys people, and it's not what people want to hear about right after a terrible disaster.
No one else has tried this. I don't think people who post about politics on Facebook all the time realize that everyone else who agrees with them is also posting about politics on Facebook all the time, and so every day I have to scroll through half a dozen image macros making fun of how stupid anyone who doesn't want immediate gun control is, or catchy anti-NRA slogans. The day after the tragedy, there was almost nothing else in my entire newsfeed.
The posts are never "I think we need more gun control". It's always "Anyone who doesn't want gun control has been brainwashed by the NRA and thinks school shootings are great." I am constantly amazed by how small a buffer the average person has between "I don't believe X" and "Believing X is irredeemably evil and we must mock and shame it until the very possibility of expressing it is beyond the pale".
So this blog entry is for everyone who is posting angry calls to action on Facebook. It's not intended to convince you that the pro-gunners are correct. I'm not even sure I believe that myself, although I will take that as a devil's advocate position through most of the rest of this essay. It's intended to convince you that being pro-gun is a sufficiently credible position that you should start to engage with it instead of just trying to mock and shame it.
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Compare Would Baning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence, published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and written by a liberal and conservative working together. Not only do I find their science much better controlled than the average Facebook variety, but they cite other research as well, some of which I've followed up on. And the overwhelming conclusion from people who do the math, whether they are liberal or conservative, is that gun control doesn't work.
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I now think of myself as politically moderate, but the evidence against gun control is so strong I accepted it even back in college when I was super-liberal. Even researchers who previously reported correlations between gun control laws and homicide rates have later corrected themselves after getting new data. I won't say the field is settled, because nothing ever is in population research, but it seems a heck of a lot more obviously-leaning-to-one-side than any of the health-related issues I usually research. I don't want to have to turn this into posting twenty studies and then dissecting each one, but if anyone disagrees with my analysis of the consensus, I invite them to investigate the data themselves ("investigate" does not mean to Google "study that supports gun control" and then leap on the first one that you find).
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Okay, you remember the last terrorist attack? And how people wanted to do everything right now to make sure that it would never happen again? And you, as a reasonable sane liberal, pointed out that terrorist attacks killed fewer people than lightning bolts or meteor strikes or whatever, and you laughed at the naivete of people who were demanding a War On Terror rather than a War On Lightning just because they were gullible and the media had whipped them into a panic?
Right. School shootings kill fewer people each year than terrorist attacks. In fact, all large gun massacres that make the national news combined kill fewer people per year than terrorist attacks (the average year has more massacre deaths, but terrorist attacks, though rarer, are also bigger). Obviously the optimal number of either is zero. But if you think it's outrageous that the government might be monitoring your Hotmail account in order to prevent something as ridiculous and low-death-toll as a terrorist attack, have some sympathy for conservatives and gun owners right now.
"No one else has tried this." -- I have, actually, which is why this post is here. :D
Thanks for the great link, that's the sort of thing I was wanting to see.
-Robin
I don't know how to keep this topic away from http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ , so I'm just going to exhort everyone to try to keep this about rationality and not about politics as usual. I myself have strong opinions here, which I'm deliberately squelching.
So I got to thinking about the issue of gun control in the wake of a recent school shooting in the US, specifically from the POV of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot. Please limit discussion to that *specific* issue, or we'll be here all year.
My question is not so much "Is strict gun control or lots of guns better for us [in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?", although I'm certainly interested in knowing the answer to that, but I think if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.
Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?
That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?
As a first pass I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate and I noted that the US, which is famously kind of all about the guns, has significantly higher rates than other first-world countries. I had gone into this with a deliberate desire to win, in the less wrong sense, so I accepted that this strongly speaks against my personal beliefs (my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements), and was about to update (well, utterly obliterate) those beliefs, when I went "Now, hold on. In the context of first world countries, the US has relatively lax gun control, and we seem to rather enjoy killing each other. How do I know those are causally related, though? Is it not just as likely that, for example, we have all the homicidally crazy people, and that that leads to both of those things? It doesn't seem to be the case that, say, in the UK, you have large-scale secret hoarding of guns; if that was the case, they'd be closer to use in gun-related homicides, I would think. But just because it didn't happen in the UK doesn't mean it wouldn't happen here."
At that point I realized that I don't know, even in theory, how to tell what the answer to my question is, or what evidence would be strong evidence for one position or the other. I am not strong enough as a rationalist or a statistician.
So, I thought I'd ask LW, which is full of people better at those things than I am. :)
Have at.
-Robin