Take your pick.
Gun nuts who say it is "too soon" to discuss gun violence are cowards.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Show and tell
Whether you regard gun mayhem as a mental or a moral issue, this graphic from the New York Times shows that the United States is a failed state. Morally depraved or mentally sick.
Take your pick.
Mass shooters on the Y axis, guns on the X axis. America upper right. Rest of the world lower left.
Gun nuts who say it is "too soon" to discuss gun violence are cowards.
Take your pick.
Gun nuts who say it is "too soon" to discuss gun violence are cowards.
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OK. Well, let's discuss away. I don't give a shit about the 10,000+ non-suicide gun deaths a year and I certainly don't give a shit about the less than 1,000 mass shooting deaths a year and absolutely won't support any significant sort of gun control. Furthermore, I couldn't care less if you think I'm morally depraved or mentally sick and I absolutely think that anti-gun nuts are both of those thinking that clinging to pathetic, unfree lives is a good thing to do.
ReplyDeleteThere. Courageous enough for you?
Well, that escalated quickly.
ReplyDeleteIf this was an old west movie, I would be sneaking out of the saloon now.
Don't worry. Harry's not armed, of course! :-)
ReplyDeleteThough I'm not armed either! Oops, forgot about that minor detail. :-)
ReplyDeleteBret, your attempt at sarcasm -- as I take it -- fails because there really are gun nuts who think that way. On the other hand, if it wasn't sarcasm, I rest my case.
ReplyDeleteHarry,
ReplyDeleteIt was not sarcasm. Bret does value the freedom of anyone to buy an AR-15 over the collateral damage that may create.
Harry, that article is so shot through with crimes against statistics and logic that it is astonishing anyone falls for it.
ReplyDeleteProblem one: Y-axis is quantity, not rate. Of course a country with (US) 330 million is going to have more mass killings than one with 64 million (Philippines).
So use the metric that matters, and the lower left corner spreads out a lot.
Second, one would think it worthwhile to talk about mass killings, not shootings, because the victims are just as dead no matter the means.
Australia has virtually confiscated guns, yet they continue to have mass killings.
Its almost as if you think that without guns the homicidal will decide to binge watch Disney musicals instead.
Oh, and speaking of collateral damage, a significant portion of the US population believes in the inherent right to meaningful self defense.
Think about the collateral damage that would ensue should you achieve your goal -- no matter its failures in logic, evidence, numeracy -- and the government went about confiscating them.
It's neither sarcasm nor really representative in any concrete way of how I actually view the situation.
ReplyDeleteAs you both know, I often play devil's advocate, and I do it more and more as time goes on, and my comment above was definitely in the devil's advocate mode. The sorts of things that trigger me to be the devil's advocate are terms like "gun nut," "coward," "morally depraved," "mentally sick," "coward," etc. and Harry managed to work all of those into a very short post. These are not objective characterizations but completely emotional and subjective. Harry says in a comment above "I rest my case" and apparently also appoints himself prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner who apparently knows objective morality better than anyone else. Oh sure, Harry is certainly entitled to his moral beliefs and is certainly entitled to deign those who disagree with his moral beliefs as "mentally sick" or whatever, but to me, it seems to be a symptom of a complete inability and/or unwillingness to understand other people and their needs, aspirations, beliefs, etc., and that inability/unwillingness, in my opinion, is leading to a lot of unnecessary conflict and even hate in the United States and the world.
Do people actually think what I wrote in my earlier comment? No doubt. Is Harry wrong to criticize them? No, but he's not objectively right either as the emotional verbiage he uses shows. If he was objectively or even non-emotionally right, there would be no reason for him to use such emotional terms, in my opinion.
There is another, even more fatal error to this silly analysis.
ReplyDeleteAssume guns are instrumental in mass shootings. If that is true, taking Russia as an example (17 mass shootings, 12 million guns), there should have been 340 mass shooters in the US over that period, not 90.
Explain that.
[Bret:] Oh sure, Harry is certainly entitled to his moral beliefs and is certainly entitled to deign those who disagree with his moral beliefs as "mentally sick" or whatever, but to me, it seems to be a symptom of a complete inability and/or unwillingness to understand other people and their needs ...
ReplyDeleteIn other words, being completely incapable of thinking clearly.
Which probably is at least part of the reason Harry is just as unable to come even close to correctly analyzing the "evidence" contained in this vapid rubbish. Just as I'll bet the author has absolutely no idea, either.
Bret,
ReplyDelete---
Do people actually think what I wrote in my earlier comment? No doubt. Is Harry wrong to criticize them? No, but he's not objectively right either as the emotional verbiage he uses shows. If he was objectively or even non-emotionally right, there would be no reason for him to use such emotional terms, in my opinion.
---
Why? People can well be right and still be emotional about it.
As I see it, you are not asking for Harry to be fair, you are asking him to be a computer.
Life and death topics usually touch people in emotional ways. Hence abortion, guns and death penalty will always be such hot topics.
It is easy to conceive of a moral system where your individual freedom to a minor treat (having an AR-15) should never be above even a relatively small number of lives, such as the ones lost to mass shootings. In such a moral system, Harry's accusation makes sense.
Now, you do not share that moral system with him, and probably most of your fellow citizens don't either (otherwise there would be a few fixes in gun laws by now), but you are surely aware which moral system he is talking about.
Bret, if there is 'no doubt' that people hold the views I castigated, then your objection is merely to tone and you are not being adevil's advocate.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what 'objectively right' means. you either object to child murder or you don't. It is objectively true that gun nuts contribute to an excess of child killings. As you say, some people are OK with that.
Unstated is that they assume it won't be their children.
If, at the end of each year we toted up the number of children shot to death and selected an equal number of children of gun nuts and shot them, too, it wouldn't make much of a difference in the overall death statistics, and we could just write it off as part of the price of being armed.
And if you think the 2A is so important, how could you object?
... you either object to child murder or you don't. It is objectively true that gun nuts contribute to an excess of child killings. As you say, some people are OK with that.
ReplyDeleteMore kids die from drowning than guns. Clearly, then, unless you just don't care about children, you must be advocating the elimination of swimming pools.
Oh, wait. You aren't.
And just as puzzling, there are deaths nearly uncountable with which you are perfectly happy.
ReplyDeleteHarry wrote: "...you either object to child murder or you don't."
ReplyDeleteYou're implying that gun rights advocates are ok with murdering children. That's simply not objectively true. They obviously universally object to that. They simply view the tradeoffs differently than you do and you are unable to get past your emotional baggage and put yourself in their shoes and see that.
Here's the thing. If the only way to save gun rights was to put all children of gun rights advocates including my own children, into some Hunger Games like lottery to be killed by someone horrible (you apparently, right?) on a one-to-one basis with other children who were "murdered" , then I would do it without hesitation. The odds would still be far, far lower than them dying in a car crash and I let them drive around in cars.
I lost millions of distant cousins in WWII and before, at least partly because they were disarmed, so I don't take the disarming of the population lightly.
Clovis wrote: "In such a moral system, Harry's accusation makes sense."
ReplyDeleteYes, but it's an emotional accusation and not an objective one. I've read your comment several times and I'm not quite seeing what you're getting at - I'm guessing probably something with more subtlety than I can grasp.
My characterization of Harry's position is also based on reaction and the likelihood of convincing anyone. Do you think that the tens of millions of "gun nuts" will somehow be convinced by being called "morally depraved," "mentally sick," "coward," etc.? Do you think those who are neutral will be convinced by hearing tens of millions of fellow americans being called "morally depraved," "mentally sick," "coward," etc.?
If Harry had an objective "case" to actually convince people (and actually wanted to convince people), he would be very foolish to use those terms.
So it's only tone that bothers you. Got it.
ReplyDeleteThe case is guns = kids or not. It's simple, really.
I consder it important to speak up about depravity, fascism, stuff like that. I bet you never challenged, say, Pat Robertson about calling immorality by its name.
The case is guns = kids or not. It's simple, really.
ReplyDeleteThe murder rate in the US is roughly half what it was in the early 1990s. Which is also when gun laws were greatly relaxed in much of the US, leading to a huge increase in gun ownership.
The correlation between increased gun ownership and declining murder rate is extremely high, especially compared to the non-existent (France more mass shooters per gun than the US, BTW) correlations this article clings to.
If the authors -- and you -- are going to get on the correlation hobby horse, then you can't get off it when the ride gets rough.
History is clear: fewer guns, more dead kids.
It's simple, really.
Skipper,
ReplyDelete----
The murder rate in the US is roughly half what it was in the early 1990s. Which is also when gun laws were greatly relaxed in much of the US, leading to a huge increase in gun ownership.
----
You know that's not the whole history.
Murder rate fell across the board, in states with guns and states without it. In some states with guns the fall was steeper, but the final bottom line does not keep relationship with gun ownership. So your case is much weaker than you paint it.
So it is not so simple, really.
[Clovis:] You know that's not the whole history.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I know that's not the whole story. However, it is far closer to the whole story than this assault on reason is.
If a very tenuous correlation that ignores as much as it includes -- do you think Iraqi's are particularly worried about mass shootings? -- is something we should take seriously, then a far tighter correlation should be a slam dunk.
Particularly given their thesis: the huge number of guns in the US is instrumental in the number of mass killings. If that is indeed the case, then it requires a great deal of explanation, none of which is even hinted at, as to why that the rapid and substantial increase in guns didn't lead to an increase in gun deaths.
As it happened, confiscationists at the time were quite certain that liberalized gun laws would lead to slaughter in the streets. (Just as they were certain that eliminating restrictions on carrying guns in national parks would lead to slaughter there, too. That didn't happen, either.)
At some point, you think there would be some 'splaining to do.