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Lumifer comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Heh. That's conclusive evidence that you've ever heard only one side of the gun control debate.
The anti-gun side widely uses "gun deaths" numbers which, as you just found out, contain suicides. The pro-gun side subtracts the suicides to get to actual "homicide using a gun" numbers. That's a very early and basic point in the debate.
So the blues, who are in favor of euthanasia, count suicides as a problem, and the reds, who are against it, do not? Ironic.
Not really. It's just demagoguery, dark arts. A bigger number is more useful as a heavy blunt object to beat your opponent over the head with.
You've just found that a major component of this debate was completely foreign to you. Now you've quickly decided that it's so silly you should make fun of it. Use the Try Harder, Luke.
Most of the debate is foreign to me. I've heard general arguments, but I've never once bothered to look into the numbers. I am not ignorant of the debate because I was irrationally assuming no additional information exists. I am ignorant because I never felt the need to stop being ignorant.
If you think the average person who kills themselves with a gun is even in the ballpark of the reference class that the word “euthanasia” suggests, your intuition about the latter needs recalibrating.
Or maybe your intuition about the former needs recalibrating.
Well most of the arguments I heard against euthanasia are slippery slope arguments that euthanasia will lead to increasingly less voluntary euthanasia.
Blues are not uniformly in favor of euthanasia; I'd call that a Grey cluster belief, largely.
Well, means matter, as the saying gos: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/
People commit suicide opportunistically, not (generally) in a planned-out way. So it makes sense that Democrats, who favor government interference in life choices for the greater good, support something that reduces your opportunity space for suicide.
Of course, Republicans also support government interference in life choices for the greater good, just for different things (abortion, birth control access, sexual health education access, etc.). Really, it doesn't matter whether the beliefs are consistent, because nobody really thinks about this and few if any people who are debating gun control bring up these topics.