I always thought about this: since the dawn of violent first person shooters, our self-appointed guardians of morality have been on a crusade to warn us of the dangers of playing video games with a little edge. According to them, if you play long enough, you’ll become desensitized to graphic scenes of death and torture, emerging from behind the console as a murderous monster ready to kill his fellow humans at a mere whim. Now, as video games are getting more and more sophisticated, there’s a renewed sense of panic. But this time, it’s not from the usual suspects. Instead it’s from a tech writer…
Of course on the human end of the question, what’s really happening here is simple scapegoating. We’re afraid of crime, we don’t really understand what motivates some of the most gruesome and violent events we have to live with, and in our fear we turn to an easily available culprit. It’s simpler to blame pop culture and games for vicious robbers and murderers than accept the fact that humans can be both very violent and very irrational, engaging in crimes for many reasons outside of our direct control..
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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