Should I edit the comment, remove all the numbers, and prefix it with "Suppose one did this empirical work, and it came out this way. Then gun control would be bad." Would that be an improvement?
Depends on how exactly would you edit the comment. But if you mean removing the numbers but leaving there your conclusion that gun control would be bad, then certainly it wouldn't be an improvement. Overall I am not suggesting that you should edit the comment, once you have written it.
Cheaper means of signalling? Signalling can't be cheap, or it wouldn't be signalling.
Are you suggesting that there can't be differently priced means of signalling? (Note that I am not refering only to signalling wealth, which has to be expensive. But adherence to a specific community subculture can be signalled quite cheaply. For an extreme example consider proponents of "alternative lifestyles" who often try to visibly minimise their spending to signal their distaste for mainstream consumerism.)
Given that all the problems you pointed out (and your accusation of bias) are on one side, and not having read anything else you've written on the subject, p=0.9 you favour an increase in gun regulation. Am I correct?
Not really. I don't live in the U.S. and have no opinion on that matter. In my country gun regulation exists to some extent but it is politically a non-issue. Most people (me included) don't even know how easy or difficult it is to legally buy a gun and most people (me included) don't have any opinion about gun regulation, one way or another. (Anyway, why it is interesting whether I favour increased gun regulation or not?)
Regarding the heroin example: The point was to illustrate that when considering banning X, the pre-ban market value of X isn't a particularly good measure of loss resulting from the ban. The market value of existing X may greater than the loss from all negative consequences of X, but it still doesn't necessarily imply that destroying all X makes humanity worse off. If the post-ban society ceases to value X (as in the hypothetical heroin example, the former addicts no longer value the drug), it can spend resources formerly invested into X on something else. (Disclaimer: the heroin example as presented is clearly unrealistic for several reasons; I have chosen it because it is a case where it's especially clear that the good in question loses almost all its market value after an effective ban makes it unavailable.)
Edit: Do you realise that this
Yes, I thought of this. I think it's unlikely to be an effect in the real world, where a ban would be least-likely to disarm criminals.
is in conflict with your stated assumption that all gun-related violence would magically stop?
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