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Brillyant comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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After Sandy Hook, I got angry and convinced guns rights people and the NRA were nuts.
Then I looked at the data for gun deaths in the US and I seem to remember mass shootings are a statistical anomaly. Handguns in 1-on-1 killings are the bulk of the problem.
Then I considered the second amendment and how maybe it's not a terrible idea to have an armed populace should the gov't get corrupt and motivated to oppress. Also, I saw a TED talk that had me convinced income inequality was the cause of gun (and all sorts of) violence, and concluded gun ownership rates (and gun enthusiasm) weren't to blame for anything.
Then I thought an armed populace wouldn't matter against a sufficiently armed gov't. Then I was like, "What do I know about such matters??"
Then I extrapolated this revelation about my ignorance out to include everything, and I recognized I have no idea what to believe about gun rights, or anything else.
Then I went on FB and started arguing with gun enthusiasts, because they seem wrong to all the rational parts of me.
Then back to LW, to sort out my bad epistemological habits...
There's an interesting argument in favor of gun rights that the Reds rarely make, because it requires an appeal to concepts from evolutionary psychology and morality. It turns out that humans are much more egalitarian than other primates, who generally organize themselves into strict dominance hierarchies. The explanation for this (according to Jonathan Haidt) is that early humans developed weapons like spears and axes, which made it easier to kill other humans. So it is relatively easy for a larger, stronger alpha male chimp or ape to dominate weaker males, but a human alpha male bully would often end up getting speared by a lower status rival.
Oh, but they do. “God made every man different; Sam Colt made them equal."
Haha, I stand corrected.
That sounds pretty similar to the argument that high gun ownership makes makes it more difficult for the government to become tyrannical.
Interesting.
One of my (many) irrational iterations of thinking about gun control had me convinced Republicans held such a staunch line on defending gun rights (in part) in order to keep the argument not about economic inequality as a causal driver for all sorts of violence, including guns.
As long as the argument was about he 2nd amendment, assault rifle bans and school shootings, no one would pay attention to the numbers showing strong correlation between gun violence (and violent crime) and disparity in income, and thus no deeper discussion about fiscal/social policy would need to occur.
I don't know about this any more. I want it to be true, because of my Blue team affiliations, but it seems a bit too conspiracy-ish for my liking. (I'm also part of the Anti-Conspiracy Team...which wears a mustard yellow uniform.)
I don't think this is true. Gun violence is not just correlated with poverty, it's also correlated with race. And while it may be disadvantageous to Republicans to emphasize how poverty is bad, it may be advantageous to Republicans to emphasize how blacks and Hispanics are bad.
Race is correlated with poverty, so that's expected. Is there a strong correlation beyond that?
There seems to be, although the studies that I've found with a quick search discuss this in terms of poverty having strong predictive value even after controlling for race (which is probably a less politically charged claim.) However, there are a lot of confounders that are not easy to adjust out of such an analysis.
Conversely, race also has strong predictive value after controlling for poverty.
I've heard a theory that violence in the US is correlated being Southern, not with race. Anyone know whether there's anything to this?
violence is correlated with temperature.
Relevant article. Less technical summary by the authors of that paper here. There is some controversy about what the underlying causal mechanism is. See this article.
Given that a lot of people suspect Republicans of being racist, it would be extremely disadvantageous for them to openly say bad things about blacks and Hispanics.
It may, however, be advantageous for them to do so subtly.
Isn't poverty correlated with race in the U.S.?
According to someone else's post on here, suicides are the bulk of the problem, provided that you consider suicide a problem.
I consider it a basically unrelated problem.
It's caused by guns. If you're considering gun control, most gun-related deaths are suicide, and you consider suicide to be just as bad as any other form of death, then the most important consideration is suicide.
If you assume people won't find another way to kill themselves, and IF you consider suicide to be just as bad, and if you assume gun-related deaths is actually the right metric to judge as to whether or not you want gun control.
I've seen something about this that Google showed me is discussed here. It works out that one in three people who would have killed themselves with gas found another method, and the other two thirds just didn't bother. Ideally I'd find some other statistics along this line, but since I'm lazy and I don't actually care all that much about this issue, I'll just go with that. Accounting for this, and not accounting for people find another way to kill others, there's still a little more suicides caused by guns than homicides.
Robbing people of effective means to die doesn't make suicidal people stop being suicidal. It just forces them to endure whatever unbearable and possibly untreatable pain they are in.
I don't think suicidality (is there such a word?) is a condition one has or doesn't have. If thoughts of suicide can be induced by literature and communities (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide ) then the opposite should also be possible at least in principle.
Taking away one means of simple suicide at least provides a trivial incenvenience for boundary cases.
It's a commonly cited figure that at least 90% of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental disorder, and here's a paper that claims the figure is as high as 98%. Of course there could be some tautology in the diagnostic methods, but suicidality itself isn't classified a mental disorder.
It bothers me that this fact is usually interpreted to mean that suicides are the result of poor judgment or a disconnect with reality. Mental illness is a common cause of genuine severe suffering.
It would bother me too if the interpretation was that this is always so. I'm not sure how you could reliably investigate the quality of their judgement concerning suicide. Much of the poor judgement might not be so much the mental disorder itself, but normal hyperbolic discounting combined with severe temporary suffering.
Thank you for your reference. I'm not clear whether this is intended to support or reject this point or just provide additional data.
I referred to the first sentence of your comment. My point was given the statistics "suicidal" could just as well be a shorthand for "severe mental disorder". Such mental disorders are usually chronic.
OK. But suicide => mental disorder doesn't equal mental disorder => suicide. So this doesn't support nor deny the original claim.
Suicide is indeed often an impulsive act, in which the urge must coincide with the means.
Stronger evidence for this claim:
Decrease in suicide rates after a change of policy reducing access to firearms in adolescents: a naturalistic epidemiological study.
Use of army weapons and private firearms for suicide and homicide in the region of Basel, Switzerland.
This sort of testimony strikes me as weak evidence. If you've just failed to kill yourself and don't want to be committed, or have been committed but want to be let out soon, this is exactly what you'd say regardless of truth.
That would explain why you said so to a doctor, but not why you agreed to an interview with reporters and said the same thing there.
Replace "suicidal" with "suicidally depressed" and I'll agree.
Depression isn't always chronic, and when it is, you aren't depressed the whole time. It doesn't seem clear to me if a depressed person committing suicide is on average a net loss or a net gain.
I suppose I should have made my position more clear in my earlier comment, and said that that could just as well be a cost to gun control.
Making an open call for interesting papers people may have read arguing for effect (one way or another) of gun legislation on [interesting outcomes]. Gwern, do you know anything, maybe?
No. I don't pay any attention to gun control - too politicized, the data too weak, and too irrelevant to my life to make it worthwhile. (Everyone agrees it's a good idea to be careful with your own guns, and there's little you can do about crime.)
Guns are bit old school. People should be allowed to have their own tanks and fighter jets by now :)
It always amuses me to watch the optimism of gun fanatics who believe they're preparing themselves to resist with their shotguns against a state that has drones and nukes at its disposal.
We have drones and nukes and yet somehow still fighting persisted for a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guerilla warfare is a very real thing.
As for nukes, What would be the point of the united states dropping a nuke on say, a rebellious Chicago? They'd be fucking themselves over. There are plenty of decent arguments one way or the other, but let's not be stupid.
The Syrians and Libyans seem to have done OK for themselves. Iraq and likely Afghanistan were technically wins for our nuclear and drone-armed state, but both were only marginal victories, Iraq was a fairly near run thing, and in neither case were significant defections from the US military a plausible scenario.
They are organized paramilitary groups who buy military-grade weapons and issue them to their soldiers, not random gun toters who fight with personally owned handguns and shotguns.
It seems to me that the main issues in setting up a militia are organization, recruitment and funding. Once you sort that out, acquiring weapons isn't much difficult.
Maybe, but this is the exact opposite of polymath's claim- not that fighting a modern state is so difficult as to be impossible, but that fighting one is sufficiently simple that starting out without any weapons is not a significant handicap.
(The proposed causal impact of gun ownership on rebellion is more guns -> more willingness to actually fight against a dictator (acquiring a weapon is step that will stop many people who would otherwise rebel from doing so) -> more likelihood that government allies defect -> more likelihood that the government falls. I'm not sure if I endorse this, but polymath's claim is definitely wrong.)
(As an aside, this is historically inaccurate: almost all of the weapons in Syria and Libya came either from defections from their official militaries (especially in Libya), or from foreign donors, not from private purchases. However, private purchases were important in Mexico and Ireland.)
I didn't claim that fighting a government is simple. My claim is that the hardest part of fighting a government is forming an organized militia with sufficient funds and personnel. If you manage to do that, then acquiring weapons is probably comparatively easy.
Um, until recently the various Iraqi militants weren't very organized.
Kinda. And until recently they sucked at fighting the government.
Cliven Bundy makes this seem quasi-justified, sadly enough.
Also... Nukes? Useless in this sort of situation.