'Epsilon Given' has left a series of lengthy comments on my last post about gun control (or was it about intuition?). For the sake of convenience, I'm going to reply in a fresh post. He started by making a point that I wish some of his fellow travellers would take a moment to consider -
"Scotland and Arizona, besides having different populations, they also have different cultures, histories, population densities, flora and fauna, mental health institutions, etc. That is, it is not entirely clear that it's justified to compare the two populations (despite both being "common law" institutions)."
There's some truth in that, and I've repeatedly made the point to Kevin Baker and his Fan Club that their own comparisons between different jurisdictions of the US (supposedly 'proving' that gun control causes more crime) are largely nonsensical, because they're often comparisons between affluent, sparsely-populated rural areas where you would expect a low crime rate anyway, and densely-populated urban areas with high rates of poverty. It has to be said, though, that the comparison between Scotland and Arizona is somewhat more meaningful - the raw population sizes are similar, and the urban/rural split of the two jurisdictions aren't a million miles apart. I'm also struggling to see how 'flora and fauna' is much of a factor in influencing the rate of gun crime!
"I'd like to see the claim that knives, or even fists, are somehow "safer" than guns justified: determine the number of violent encounters per 100,000, and compare Scotland's to Arizona's. If knives really are less deadly that guns, then there should be comparable numbers of violent encounters, but less murders, in Scotland."
Your implication that it might be possible to demonstrate that knives are just as dangerous as guns is questionable enough. (No-one would dispute that they're very dangerous - and lethal in many cases - but they're clearly not in the same league as guns because it's easier to escape from an assailant armed with a knife.) But "even fists"? Come now, Epsilon. I'll return to this massive credibility problem later on.
"Let's *really* make sure that the "homicide" figure in Arizona is strictly "murder". American crime reporting has this nasty habit of including justifiable homicide with murder--in part, because justifiable homicide is often determined by a jury."
While we're about it, let's also make sure that all unjustified killings are included in the US statistics. The gunning down of the innocent Aberdonian businessman Andrew de Vries in Texas in 1994 doesn't seem to have been counted, for instance - had it happened in the UK, it almost certainly would have been.
"How do these statistics change over time? If violence increases after guns are banned in Scotland, then it's disingenuous to compare Arizona and Scotland, and then say "See, gun laws work!" It would be equally disingenuous to compare these numbers, if violence *decreases* after a "shall issue" gun permit law is passed in Arizona."
Epsilon, the correlation between gun control regimes and gun death rates is so overwhelming that these technical quibbles simply won't wash. Forget about Arizona and Scotland for the moment - look at Finland. The most liberal gun ownership laws in western Europe, and a country that sticks out like a sore thumb that's gone septic at the top of the leaderboard for gun deaths. In every sense other than its gun laws it's a normal northern European country, easily comparable to its neighbours - so you'd have a near-impossible job explaining that phenomenon away.
It's also worth pointing out that if you talked to average people from the UK and tried to make the claim - as the likes of Kevin Baker have done, seemingly with a straight face - that any increase in violent crime since 1996 has somehow occurred as a result of our strengthened gun laws, you'd be met with a chorus of laughter. The whole concept of householders routinely owning or using guns for 'defensive' purposes was already an alien one prior to 1996. A practice has to have meaningfully existed before its 'removal' can be claimed to have made a difference.
"Why should I trust *any* data? Whenever I try to look up this data on my own, I always run into obstacles obtaining it. The data *I* want never seems to be available--admittedly, I can't look too deeply, because of time constraints--but, in the end, why should I trust data other people select as "important"? A Stupid Example: I requested "guns per gun death"--in part, because I wanted to test the claim "more guns means more death"--but Arizona gun stats are almost non-existent, as is the category of illegal gun stats for Scotland. Even if these stats were available, though, I would have to understand that a statistic like "illegal guns" is, at best, and educated guess, and so my analysis (and conclusions) of such data would probably be meaningless anyway."
The equivalent question is - why should you determine for others what data they consider to be important? I've already pointed out that I personally don't understand the relevance of your interest in illegal gun stats for Scotland. One of the key articles of faith for the American gun lobby is that gun control regimes are totally useless at preventing criminals from getting their hands on illegal weapons. A very low absolute rate of gun homicide in Scotland - covering both legally-held and illegal weapons - is compelling evidence that such a proposition is deeply flawed.
"In my half-hearted attempt to obtain these numbers, I learned that Scotland had a significant drop in violence this last year. Are we comparing a "bad" Arizona year to a "good" Scotland year? How can *that* be fair?!?"
Are we talking about 2009, or 2010? I think Lallands Peat Worrier noted himself that 2009 saw a particularly low number of gun deaths in Scotland, but the disparity between the two jurisdictions in other years was still massive.
"Although I really wish I had the time to gather this data, and crunch these numbers, why should we trust any of this as "meaningful"? Societies change all the time. When we look over all the countries of the world, we see no correlation between "strictness of gun control" and murder rates and even suicide rates."
Simply not true. See above, and here.
"And, when all things are considered, we are talking about very. small. numbers."
I'd have to respectfully suggest that the difference between two gun deaths in Scotland in 2009, and one hundred and ninety-eight gun deaths in Arizona in the same year, is not a "small" one. However, even if it were, as a mathematician you should understand better than most the huge difference between "small" and "not statistically significant".
"And to further complicate things, in America, we have *counter-intuitive* results: Every time a change in gun law is considered, there is a claim that passage of such laws will result in an increase of gun violence. Yet, with Florida's "shall-issue" permits, and lately, the Heller decision that affected Washington D.C., violence--both gun and non-gun--*dropped*. And these aren't just isolated incidents. It happens time and time again, to the point that the debate among criminologists in the United States *isn't* "Do guns cause crime?"; it's "What effect, if any, do guns have in lowering crime?"."
Come now, Epsilon. We've been down a very similar road before. These will be all of America's criminologists - except for all the ones you've dismissed out of hand because of spurious objections to their methodology.
"Something is counter-intuitive if we get a result that we don't expect to come about. The example I just gave was "increased gun ownership decreases gun crimes"--and there are statistics that seem to demonstrate that this indeed may be the case. Often, counter-intuitive conclusions are the results of incorrect assumptions. Here are some reasons why increased gun ownership might not result in increased gun violence:
Guns aren't as lethal as many people think, and alternatives--knives, fists, rocks, baseball bats, bottles, even rope--are more lethal than many people realize. Making guns difficult to obtain and carry may neutralize the first "threat", but these other threats are still there, and much more difficult to control besides!
There's a strong whiff of weasel words here - "not as lethal as many people think", "more lethal than many people realise". We've already seen that you want to plant a seed of doubt in people's minds about the self-evident truth that guns are more lethal than fists - so if you truly think both those 'weapons' are equally lethal, why shy away from making that bizarre claim directly? I think we can probably guess.
"Additionally, it's easier to counter these other threats with a gun, than it is to counter these other threats with like threats; hence, when you have a legitimate need for self defense, you're better off with a gun."
This is the familiar 'have your cake and eat it' argument, so beloved of the US gun lobby - we're expected to believe that the lethality of the weapon in the hands of an attacker makes little or no difference to the outcome ("fists" will be just as good if he has a murderous intent), but in the hands of a defender the lethality of the weapon suddenly becomes all-important, and only a gun will do.
""Shall Issue" permits include a background check for past mental and legal problems. The people who would apply to such things would be law-abiding, and generally healthy mentally. Such people who carry guns aren't likely to go on crime sprees!"
But they do, Epsilon, and they stubbornly keep on doing it. The post-Dunblane restrictions were put in place because a 'law-abiding' person got through a series of background checks, enabling him to legally acquire guns that he used to massacre schoolchildren. The recent inquiry into the Cumbrian massacre last year confirmed that the correct procedures were followed in licencing Derrick Bird to own his weapons legally.
Even leaving these repeated incidents aside, background checks simply aren't fine-tuned enough to discriminate between those people we might be relaxed about owning guns, and those who really shouldn't be allowed to do so for good reasons that fall short of potential mass-killing sprees. If the checks were sufficient, we wouldn't see legally-owned guns falling into criminal hands in the US at a mind-boggling rate, because their owners weren't responsible enough to store them securely. We wouldn't see children accessing their parents' guns for the same reason. And what about abusive relationships? Is the ubiquity of gun ownership in the US intervening positively or negatively in those relationships? In other words, is it more likely to be the abused or the abuser who will be threatening the other with the gun? What evidence I've seen points strongly to the latter conclusion - which, as it happens, is precisely what 'intuition' would lead us to expect.
"Those who take self defense seriously--whether or not they carry a gun--will learn techniques to recognize potential assaults. They'll be more aware of their surroundings, they'll watch out for characters "scoping out" parking lots..."
Yes, I've met people like that, and what a delight it was. Often, they're self-appointed policemen who feel they've got a God-given right to ask other law-abiding people to justify their actions. I'm not sure how arming such arrogance with a gun is supposed to enhance my freedom.
"Those who choose to carry a gun are more likely to be mentally prepared if something bad happens. While it's impossible to know in advance how you'll react if you are in a violent situation, if you've thought about what you'll do, you're more likely to do something that will help protect yourself and those around you."
Preparedness is good, but it helps tremendously if what you're readying yourself to
do isn't wholly counter-productive. Faced with many threats, an attempt to escape may well be the most effective course of action, and 'talking yourself' into feeling that you must react by facing down an assailant with a gun could easily put yourself and others at more risk.
"Those who choose to carry a gun are more likely to recognize the responsibility that lethal force represents, and thus less likely to heatedly argue, and more likely to peacefully pull themselves from an argument before it comes to fighting."
If it's got to the point in the US where the main reason people aren't starting arguments is because they fear they might be shot if they do (or that they might shoot someone else), then you've got a problem as a society. It also strikes me as a fairly obvious curtailment of freedom - an implicit threat that causes a kind of self-censorship when considering whether to express a point of view forcefully, or what might be described as a personal "Finlandisation" syndrome.
In any case, the idea that gun ownership generally makes people calmer and rarely has the opposite effect simply doesn't stack up. I refer you back to the point I made earlier about domestic violence - in the majority of cases, the gun is simply empowering the abuser to be more abusive and terrorising.
"Criminals don't want to get shot. If they have reason to believe their victims will be armed, they are less likely to engage in behavior that can end with them in the hospital, or dead."
That's a very weak point. In large swathes of the US, criminals presumably know that there's a significant risk that anyone they attack may possess a gun. If that had a significant deterrent effect, you'd expect the homicide rate in the US to be considerably lower than in the UK, not two-and-a-half times higher.
"And, yes, I have concluded that every responsible person should know how to use a gun, should carry one, and should be prepared to use it in self-defense--but I have concluded that every responsible person should also know what to do when someone gets injured or sick, or when there's an earthquake, or there is flooding, or a tidal wave, or a forest fire, or a hurricane, or even plague and famine and general societal collapse. Being prepared for danger is a moral responsibility that all of us should accept."
As far as the danger posed by guns is concerned, we all do have a moral responsibility - to take the actions that the evidence suggests will be most effective in collectively protecting ourselves. For some individuals that means the painful necessity of giving up both the right to own an item they're particularly fond of, and the comforting but illusory sense of absolute personal control over their own safety. But whoever said acting responsibly was a pain-free thing?
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query gun. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query gun. Sort by date Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
Word-Search Friday : Conservapedia on Gun Control
Just before I embark on this epic post, a quick reminder that if you haven't already voted, today (Friday) is the last chance to vote for your top ten political blogs and your top ten political bloggers in the Total Politics Blog Awards. In all honesty, it'll be a relief to remove the banner from the top of the page after midnight - it's been making me feel slightly self-conscious!
Anyway, to business. After a bit of a hiatus, here's a disappointingly unalliterative Word-Search Friday, this time devoted to some indisputable facts on the subject of gun control, as revealed by the internet's only 'Trustworthy Encyclopedia'. If only I'd known this stuff before I first got into the 'debate' with the American gun enthusiasts a couple of years ago - I'm quite sure I'd never have maintained my tragic allegiance to the forces of darkness for as long as I have...
And here (in bold) are the words you're looking for -
Genocide : What Conservapedia reveals has "only ever occurred" after the introduction of gun control. It appears Hitler's liberalisation of Germany's gun laws prior to the Holocaust was a mere figment of our imagination, as was the fact that Iraq was awash with legally-owned guns when Saddam Hussein carried out his genocidal atrocities against the Kurds and others.
Superficially appealing : How Conservapedia characterises the argument that gun control "somehow" leads to less crime. I do hope they paid Kevin Baker royalties before inserting the word "somehow" into that sentence.
Shift voters leftwards : What Conservapedia reveals is the inevitable political effect of introducing gun control. A great pity that Hitler did liberalise the gun laws, then - he could have saved the world an awful lot of hassle if he'd simply gone in the opposite direction.
Primarily defensive weapons : What Conservapedia reveals guns are. However, with 15 gun deaths per year for every 100,000 people in the US, we shouldn't entirely overlook the popularity of the "secondary" function of firearms.
Emotionally dependent on government : What Conservapedia reveals gun control makes people. Jeez, guys, for once will you put your trustworthiness and scrupulous encylopedic neutrality to one side and simply call a spade a spade - gun control is for girls.
Finland : a country that Conservapedia reveals has a higher rate of gun ownership than the US, but a lower rate of crime. The fact that Finland also has by far the highest gun death rate in western Europe is, by contrast, merely an astonishing coincidence.
Pekka-Eric Auvinen : A Finnish mass-murderer who Conservapedia invites us to conclude would have been stopped by an "armed citizen" if only Finland had US-style gun laws. For the avoidance of doubt, there is absolutely no contradiction in the fact that Conservapedia has already praised Finland to the skies for having the laxest gun laws in western Europe, and we most certainly have no business entertaining the thought that Auvinen would never have attacked anyone with guns in the first place had the laws not been quite so lax.
Washington DC : A jurisdiction which Conservapedia points out has traditionally had strong gun control legislation, but also one of the highest crime rates in America. In case you're wondering, the fact that Washington DC borders jurisdictions in which legal guns have long been readily accessible, and the fact that there are no border controls preventing those guns from crossing into Washington DC, is of no relevance whatsoever.
The Crusades : A topic which Conservapedia reveals is no longer taught by some history teachers in English schools as a result of gun control. (Seriously - I'm not making this up. The article actually says that.) Others topics that the absence of guns has disgracefully erased from the English school curriculum include the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust.
"Cultural reasons" : Conservapedia's devastatingly convincing explanation for why the much lower gun death rate in "England" has nothing whatever to do with the UK's strict gun control legislation. Statistical evidence? Pah, who needs it, when you've got non-specific "cultural differences" to fall back on. Yet more royalties to Kevin Baker.
"Comparison can be difficult due to the presence of other factors" : Conservapedia's devastatingly convincing explanation for why we should pay no attention to the fact that other countries, such as Japan and Signapore, manage to have both strict gun control and low overall crime rates. Let me guess - would those factors be "cultural" in nature?
"Controversy" : What Conservapedia reveals there has been over the success of Australia's gun control laws of 1996 and 2002, before going on to note in passing that overall gun violence has decreased since they were passed.
"No doubt contributes to its reputation as a peaceful and neutral country" : What Conservapedia reveals widespread gun ownership has done for Switzerland. Did Jimmy Carr learn his deadpan delivery from the Trustworthy Encyclopedia?
As ever, the solution will be here in a few days.
Anyway, to business. After a bit of a hiatus, here's a disappointingly unalliterative Word-Search Friday, this time devoted to some indisputable facts on the subject of gun control, as revealed by the internet's only 'Trustworthy Encyclopedia'. If only I'd known this stuff before I first got into the 'debate' with the American gun enthusiasts a couple of years ago - I'm quite sure I'd never have maintained my tragic allegiance to the forces of darkness for as long as I have...
(Click to enlarge)
And here (in bold) are the words you're looking for -
Genocide : What Conservapedia reveals has "only ever occurred" after the introduction of gun control. It appears Hitler's liberalisation of Germany's gun laws prior to the Holocaust was a mere figment of our imagination, as was the fact that Iraq was awash with legally-owned guns when Saddam Hussein carried out his genocidal atrocities against the Kurds and others.
Superficially appealing : How Conservapedia characterises the argument that gun control "somehow" leads to less crime. I do hope they paid Kevin Baker royalties before inserting the word "somehow" into that sentence.
Shift voters leftwards : What Conservapedia reveals is the inevitable political effect of introducing gun control. A great pity that Hitler did liberalise the gun laws, then - he could have saved the world an awful lot of hassle if he'd simply gone in the opposite direction.
Primarily defensive weapons : What Conservapedia reveals guns are. However, with 15 gun deaths per year for every 100,000 people in the US, we shouldn't entirely overlook the popularity of the "secondary" function of firearms.
Emotionally dependent on government : What Conservapedia reveals gun control makes people. Jeez, guys, for once will you put your trustworthiness and scrupulous encylopedic neutrality to one side and simply call a spade a spade - gun control is for girls.
Finland : a country that Conservapedia reveals has a higher rate of gun ownership than the US, but a lower rate of crime. The fact that Finland also has by far the highest gun death rate in western Europe is, by contrast, merely an astonishing coincidence.
Pekka-Eric Auvinen : A Finnish mass-murderer who Conservapedia invites us to conclude would have been stopped by an "armed citizen" if only Finland had US-style gun laws. For the avoidance of doubt, there is absolutely no contradiction in the fact that Conservapedia has already praised Finland to the skies for having the laxest gun laws in western Europe, and we most certainly have no business entertaining the thought that Auvinen would never have attacked anyone with guns in the first place had the laws not been quite so lax.
Washington DC : A jurisdiction which Conservapedia points out has traditionally had strong gun control legislation, but also one of the highest crime rates in America. In case you're wondering, the fact that Washington DC borders jurisdictions in which legal guns have long been readily accessible, and the fact that there are no border controls preventing those guns from crossing into Washington DC, is of no relevance whatsoever.
The Crusades : A topic which Conservapedia reveals is no longer taught by some history teachers in English schools as a result of gun control. (Seriously - I'm not making this up. The article actually says that.) Others topics that the absence of guns has disgracefully erased from the English school curriculum include the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust.
"Cultural reasons" : Conservapedia's devastatingly convincing explanation for why the much lower gun death rate in "England" has nothing whatever to do with the UK's strict gun control legislation. Statistical evidence? Pah, who needs it, when you've got non-specific "cultural differences" to fall back on. Yet more royalties to Kevin Baker.
"Comparison can be difficult due to the presence of other factors" : Conservapedia's devastatingly convincing explanation for why we should pay no attention to the fact that other countries, such as Japan and Signapore, manage to have both strict gun control and low overall crime rates. Let me guess - would those factors be "cultural" in nature?
"Controversy" : What Conservapedia reveals there has been over the success of Australia's gun control laws of 1996 and 2002, before going on to note in passing that overall gun violence has decreased since they were passed.
"No doubt contributes to its reputation as a peaceful and neutral country" : What Conservapedia reveals widespread gun ownership has done for Switzerland. Did Jimmy Carr learn his deadpan delivery from the Trustworthy Encyclopedia?
As ever, the solution will be here in a few days.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Whittle in the dark
An anonymous poster has responded at some length to my thoughts on Bill Whittle's video about gun rights, so I thought I'd reply in a fresh post. I had taken issue with Whittle's suggestion that a gun ban in the US would punish law-abiding people, by pointing out that the authorities would simply be taking guns away from people who would otherwise be breaking the law. The anonymous poster had this to say in response -
"Um, in actual fact they're not, these laws are not (and will never be) enforced against the major criminal gangs like MS13 or the Latin Kings that reside in the larger U.S. cities, for obvious reasons. No, they're aimed at those people that the lawmakers imagine they can coerce easily into compliance."
Which may or may not be true, but it's gloriously irrelevant either way. The point I was making was a very simple and - as far as I can see - irrefutable one : Mr Whittle cannot credibly claim that people who seek to hold onto illegal weapons are "breaking no laws". That fact does not change however selectively or unsatisfactorily the law is enforced.
I had also talked about the desirability of gun rights advocates "fronting up" to the terrible loss of human life that flows from their absolutist philosophy of personal freedom. This was the anonymous poster's reaction -
"That would be 'the personal freedom to defend one's own life (as well as others lives')'. Which makes your position one of 'people must have their freedom to defend their own lives interfered with and thwarted, in the name of 'protecting lives' (yeah, if I pretend to be interested in protecting lives I will haz the moral high ground not them!)'."
I'm intrigued by this notion that I'm not actually interested in protecting lives. Isn't the constant refrain from the Kevin Baker Fan Club that I'm a "wussy", ie. that I'm scared of guns? Now, why would that be the case unless - whether rationally or irrationally - I genuinely felt that guns put lives at risk? They really can't have it both ways.
I, for my part, have no problem accepting that many gun owners earnestly believe they are protecting themselves, but I've also explained at length why I'm convinced that belief is, indeed, totally irrational. But even if it wasn't, I would absolutely think that it was appropriate to interfere with this particular aspect of certain individuals' freedom, in the interests of protecting the public as a whole. I consider myself a libertarian (not in the American sense of the word), but the basic principle is that freedoms can only be absolute insofar as they don't harm others or interfere with their freedoms. There is ample evidence that the freedom to own firearms does both, and in any case it simply isn't an important enough freedom when weighed against the immense public good of a lower homicide rate (thus protecting the right to life), and an enhanced freedom from fear. The idea that the right to own one specific luxury item should be regarded as being on a par with a fundamental right like free speech is risible. As I've pointed out umpteen times, few gun rights advocates would seriously argue that everyone should have the right to own semtex, or smallpox samples, or nuclear weapons. So if you concede that the right to possess dangerous items is not absolute, what makes guns so special? It comes across as more of a fetish than anything else.
Next, I had quoted from the abstract of an academic study which concluded that -
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide."
The anonymous poster said this -
"One wonders how the researchers arrived at that figure. Did they, for example, check only those homes that had seen a homicide take place, for evidence of (legal*) gun ownership, or did they endeavour to find out how many of the approximate 47-53 million households that have legally owned guns on site, to see how many homicides took place with (legally*) owned guns?"
What peculiar questions, given that the answers (which are mainly in the negative) are there to be found in the short quote I gave. Clearly the researchers were not distinguishing between murder victims on the basis of whether they were gun-owners, or between murders that were committed with legal guns and those that weren't - and nor should they have been. The object of the exercise was to assess the effect of gun laws (or, strictly speaking, the rates of gun ownership) on the overall homicide rate. I don't actually believe for a moment that having a gun at home is much of a deterrent to crime, and in a sense the studies I've cited bear that out - unless criminals have some kind of sixth sense about who does and doesn't possess a gun, why would any murders be attempted at all in a state with lax guns laws? And yet they are, to a frightening extent. But even in the unlikely event that it could be shown that gun-owners do somehow enjoy a magical exemption from the general trend, the overall homicide rate would still be the only relevant issue from the point of view of public protection - unless of course our poster is suggesting that everyone should be pressured into owning a gun, which wouldn't be terribly consistent with a philosophy of personal freedom.
"You will appreciate how one method gives us a very skewed picture that is nonetheless politically useful to the gun ban nuts, whereas the other method demonstrates how rare murders actually are in households with (legally*) owned guns, which puts the lie to the notion that ownership of a gun leads people to murderous outbursts."
I might 'appreciate' that if our poster had actually produced the slightest scrap of evidence that there's any truth in it. I doubt any such convincing evidence exists. In any case, the problem of legal gun-owners themselves committing murder is just the tip of the iceberg. Lax gun laws also cause the following problems that lead to entirely avoidable deaths : legal weapons falling into the hands of criminals in huge numbers, an increased rate of suicide and accidental death, the clumsy or over-zealous use of guns in the name of 'self-defence', the use of guns as a first resort when other means of self-protection (eg. escape) might be much more effective, and a brutalised culture in which gun violence is 'normalised'.
(* I stress 'legally' because if these researchers are including murders committed with illegal guns into their research, as justification for restricting the freedom to protect one's life for people who do not own guns illegally, then that would be seriously unjust, would it not?)
No it would not. See above.
I had also expressed my scepticism at Whittle's view than guns make people "equal". I noted that it really depended on who was holding the gun at any given moment. This was the anonymous poster's reaction -
"Well that indicates that you would be OK with, say, a person confronted by someone intent on their murder, 'holding the gun' at that given moment, which is not the case as you have indicated elsewhere. Rather, your attitude is that as far as you are concerned, there is no way in hell people about to be murdered should be able to prevent their murder by the use of a gun, and to hell with anyone who might find themselves in such a situation."
Hardly. I'm not in favour of anyone being menaced with guns, which is why I'm rather keen on gun control laws that lessen the number of such incidents - as the stastical evidence I've quoted amply demonstrate they do. Is the average rational person really supposed to accept that a much greater likelihood of being attacked with a gun in the first place is a price worth paying for the knowledge that if they purchase a gun, and if they are trained to use it with a high degree of a proficiency, and if they carry it around with them at all times, they might possibly be able to fend off such an attack? Good luck with that one. As I've observed before, it's an astonishingly self-centred world view - as long as the people who happen to like carrying guns around with them feel more safe and empowered, to hell with (to use the poster's own words) the consequences for everyone else. And the irony is that their own sense of security is entirely misplaced - a gun free-for-all puts everyone at more risk.
Lastly, the poster wasn't impressed by my suggestion that Whittle's real message was that "if you want to be equal in his world - more pertinently, if you want to avoid being considerably less equal than you otherwise would have been but for the fact of widespread gun ownership - you have literally no choice but to own a gun".
"His world? Sorry, Whittle isn't personally responsible for the world having people in it who see others as prey, to be abused, robbed, raped and murdered at will."
No, he's not - and at no point did I claim he is. But gun rights advocates (in the jurisdictions where they hold sway) are ultimately reponsible for the ease with which such people are able to arm themselves with deadly weapons. And the consequences of that? I can't really put it better than Mr. Whittle does himself -
"America suffers an appalling number of handgun deaths each year, perhaps eleven thousand of them."
"Um, in actual fact they're not, these laws are not (and will never be) enforced against the major criminal gangs like MS13 or the Latin Kings that reside in the larger U.S. cities, for obvious reasons. No, they're aimed at those people that the lawmakers imagine they can coerce easily into compliance."
Which may or may not be true, but it's gloriously irrelevant either way. The point I was making was a very simple and - as far as I can see - irrefutable one : Mr Whittle cannot credibly claim that people who seek to hold onto illegal weapons are "breaking no laws". That fact does not change however selectively or unsatisfactorily the law is enforced.
I had also talked about the desirability of gun rights advocates "fronting up" to the terrible loss of human life that flows from their absolutist philosophy of personal freedom. This was the anonymous poster's reaction -
"That would be 'the personal freedom to defend one's own life (as well as others lives')'. Which makes your position one of 'people must have their freedom to defend their own lives interfered with and thwarted, in the name of 'protecting lives' (yeah, if I pretend to be interested in protecting lives I will haz the moral high ground not them!)'."
I'm intrigued by this notion that I'm not actually interested in protecting lives. Isn't the constant refrain from the Kevin Baker Fan Club that I'm a "wussy", ie. that I'm scared of guns? Now, why would that be the case unless - whether rationally or irrationally - I genuinely felt that guns put lives at risk? They really can't have it both ways.
I, for my part, have no problem accepting that many gun owners earnestly believe they are protecting themselves, but I've also explained at length why I'm convinced that belief is, indeed, totally irrational. But even if it wasn't, I would absolutely think that it was appropriate to interfere with this particular aspect of certain individuals' freedom, in the interests of protecting the public as a whole. I consider myself a libertarian (not in the American sense of the word), but the basic principle is that freedoms can only be absolute insofar as they don't harm others or interfere with their freedoms. There is ample evidence that the freedom to own firearms does both, and in any case it simply isn't an important enough freedom when weighed against the immense public good of a lower homicide rate (thus protecting the right to life), and an enhanced freedom from fear. The idea that the right to own one specific luxury item should be regarded as being on a par with a fundamental right like free speech is risible. As I've pointed out umpteen times, few gun rights advocates would seriously argue that everyone should have the right to own semtex, or smallpox samples, or nuclear weapons. So if you concede that the right to possess dangerous items is not absolute, what makes guns so special? It comes across as more of a fetish than anything else.
Next, I had quoted from the abstract of an academic study which concluded that -
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide."
The anonymous poster said this -
"One wonders how the researchers arrived at that figure. Did they, for example, check only those homes that had seen a homicide take place, for evidence of (legal*) gun ownership, or did they endeavour to find out how many of the approximate 47-53 million households that have legally owned guns on site, to see how many homicides took place with (legally*) owned guns?"
What peculiar questions, given that the answers (which are mainly in the negative) are there to be found in the short quote I gave. Clearly the researchers were not distinguishing between murder victims on the basis of whether they were gun-owners, or between murders that were committed with legal guns and those that weren't - and nor should they have been. The object of the exercise was to assess the effect of gun laws (or, strictly speaking, the rates of gun ownership) on the overall homicide rate. I don't actually believe for a moment that having a gun at home is much of a deterrent to crime, and in a sense the studies I've cited bear that out - unless criminals have some kind of sixth sense about who does and doesn't possess a gun, why would any murders be attempted at all in a state with lax guns laws? And yet they are, to a frightening extent. But even in the unlikely event that it could be shown that gun-owners do somehow enjoy a magical exemption from the general trend, the overall homicide rate would still be the only relevant issue from the point of view of public protection - unless of course our poster is suggesting that everyone should be pressured into owning a gun, which wouldn't be terribly consistent with a philosophy of personal freedom.
"You will appreciate how one method gives us a very skewed picture that is nonetheless politically useful to the gun ban nuts, whereas the other method demonstrates how rare murders actually are in households with (legally*) owned guns, which puts the lie to the notion that ownership of a gun leads people to murderous outbursts."
I might 'appreciate' that if our poster had actually produced the slightest scrap of evidence that there's any truth in it. I doubt any such convincing evidence exists. In any case, the problem of legal gun-owners themselves committing murder is just the tip of the iceberg. Lax gun laws also cause the following problems that lead to entirely avoidable deaths : legal weapons falling into the hands of criminals in huge numbers, an increased rate of suicide and accidental death, the clumsy or over-zealous use of guns in the name of 'self-defence', the use of guns as a first resort when other means of self-protection (eg. escape) might be much more effective, and a brutalised culture in which gun violence is 'normalised'.
(* I stress 'legally' because if these researchers are including murders committed with illegal guns into their research, as justification for restricting the freedom to protect one's life for people who do not own guns illegally, then that would be seriously unjust, would it not?)
No it would not. See above.
I had also expressed my scepticism at Whittle's view than guns make people "equal". I noted that it really depended on who was holding the gun at any given moment. This was the anonymous poster's reaction -
"Well that indicates that you would be OK with, say, a person confronted by someone intent on their murder, 'holding the gun' at that given moment, which is not the case as you have indicated elsewhere. Rather, your attitude is that as far as you are concerned, there is no way in hell people about to be murdered should be able to prevent their murder by the use of a gun, and to hell with anyone who might find themselves in such a situation."
Hardly. I'm not in favour of anyone being menaced with guns, which is why I'm rather keen on gun control laws that lessen the number of such incidents - as the stastical evidence I've quoted amply demonstrate they do. Is the average rational person really supposed to accept that a much greater likelihood of being attacked with a gun in the first place is a price worth paying for the knowledge that if they purchase a gun, and if they are trained to use it with a high degree of a proficiency, and if they carry it around with them at all times, they might possibly be able to fend off such an attack? Good luck with that one. As I've observed before, it's an astonishingly self-centred world view - as long as the people who happen to like carrying guns around with them feel more safe and empowered, to hell with (to use the poster's own words) the consequences for everyone else. And the irony is that their own sense of security is entirely misplaced - a gun free-for-all puts everyone at more risk.
Lastly, the poster wasn't impressed by my suggestion that Whittle's real message was that "if you want to be equal in his world - more pertinently, if you want to avoid being considerably less equal than you otherwise would have been but for the fact of widespread gun ownership - you have literally no choice but to own a gun".
"His world? Sorry, Whittle isn't personally responsible for the world having people in it who see others as prey, to be abused, robbed, raped and murdered at will."
No, he's not - and at no point did I claim he is. But gun rights advocates (in the jurisdictions where they hold sway) are ultimately reponsible for the ease with which such people are able to arm themselves with deadly weapons. And the consequences of that? I can't really put it better than Mr. Whittle does himself -
"America suffers an appalling number of handgun deaths each year, perhaps eleven thousand of them."
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Why 'being right' isn't good enough for them - a cut-out-and-keep guide
Nate has been debating with me in a very measured way on the issue of gun control over recent threads, but nevertheless a point was still reached in the last thread that seems to have come round with uncanny regularity every time I've had exchanges with people who share his views. (Indeed, to adopt the cynical, inward-looking, in-joke-rich vocabulary so beloved of the posters over at Kevin Baker's blog, I could perhaps say that this represents the standard stage #17 of the life-cycle of any encounter with the Baker Fan Club.) Nate had linked to an FBI study purporting to show that 108,000 crimes in a year were prevented due to the private ownership of firearms, and claimed that this disproves my suggestion that handguns have no meaningful function other than to kill and cause injury. I responded with a series of questions that went to the heart of the credibility of any conclusions that could be drawn from the study -
1) How many of the attempted crimes allegedly foiled were actually genuine? This is the most obvious question to ask about a self-reporting survey in which the respondents' word is simply "taken for it", ie. the figures do not appear to be based on police records or any other documentary evidence. As the supposed methods for foiling crimes include something as vague as "scaring people off" with a gun, it does not inspire huge confidence that the alleged crime victim will always have got to the point of objectively establishing that a crime is actually occurring - they may in some cases simply have convinced themselves that this was the case.
2) How many of the attempted crimes were serious and how many were petty? Obviously hugely significant given the claim that Nate is making - that 108,000 'crimes prevented' can be meaningfully weighed against 12,000 people per year murdered with a gun.
3) How many of these crimes could and would have been averted anyway, without the use of a gun? Again, this fundamentally challenges the credibility of the conclusions Nate feels able to draw from the report. It stretches credulity to suggest that a significant number of these 108,000 incidents would not have been stopped by another method - in the UK, members of the public without guns prevent both petty and serious crimes every day of the week.
4) How many of these alleged crimes would have been attempted had it not been for the prevalence of guns in American society? There is absolutely no meaning in suggesting that legal firearms helped you prevent a crime, if the general legality of firearms caused - either directly or indirectly - that crime to be attempted in the first place.
5) How many guns start off as legal but end up being held illegally? This is related to the above point, because if the wide legal availability of (and therefore demand for) guns leads to a massive increase in the number of illegal weapons in play for criminal purposes, it follows almost inevitably that a proportion of the 'crimes prevented' with guns would not have been attempted in the first place had a gun ban been enforced. This is one question that I actually found a partial answer to by reading other sections of the report Nate had linked to, and I think this extract speaks for itself -
"A major theme highlighted in a 1986 survey of incarcerated felons was that theft was an important means of obtaining firearms for those with criminal intentions: 32 percent of surveyed felons had stolen their most recently acquired handgun. Based on the NSPOF, an estimated 0.9 percent of all gun-owning households (269,000) experienced the theft of one or more firearms during 1994. About 211,000 handguns and 382,000 long guns were stolen in noncommercial thefts that year, for a total of 593,000 stolen firearms. Those estimates are subject to considerable sampling error but are consistent with earlier estimates of about half a million guns stolen annually."
6) How many of the 'crimes prevented' can be put down to the values of a paranoid, brutalised society which teaches its children that the next threat is always round the corner, and that 'freedom' can only be won down the barrel of a gun? This is obviously a more intangible point, but it's nevertheless important because Kevin Baker in particular has spoken at great length about how differences in culture can massively affect outcomes in terms of crime. The weaponisation of society is clearly a significant factor in the prevailing culture, thus offering another plausible reason for theorising that a gun ban could have ensured that many of these crimes would not have been attempted in the first place - further calling into question Nate's assumption that these were 108,000 incidents that would have been crimes had a gun ban been in place.
7) How many people were unnecessarily killed or injured by someone 'defending themselves'? This is a question that particularly troubles me given the rather broad definition of legal killing the US authorities seem to use.
8) How many guns being used for defensive purposes have been wrested away and used by an attacker? In these instances people arming themselves with a gun have simply put themselves and others in far more danger.
9) How many accidental shootings have there been from guns that were used carelessly, or not stored properly? Not related to crime, but these numbers would clearly offset any benefit Nate is claiming from gun legality.
10) How many suicidal people have found a quick and easy way out due to having a gun handy, when otherwise they might have stopped to think for longer and found a better solution? Similar to number 9, and again I actually found an answer to both of these questions in the report -
"Of 1,356 accidental deaths by gunshot in 1994, 185 involved children 14 years old and younger. For each such fatality, there are several accidental shootings that cause serious injury. Guns were also the means of destruction in 19,590 suicides, 210 involving children 14 or younger."
In other words, twice as many deaths by gun in these categories than even the sky-high homicide-by-gun rate.
All of these questions are, I think, perfectly logical, and to be frank it's not possible to make much sense of the study without answers to them. But although Nate (to be fair) addressed some of them later, his first reaction was instead to call into question my reasons for asking them -
"What I see is a lot of sound and fury to try to rationalize away a dangerous study that would tear a hole in your core belief than guns are useless tools of thugs and murderers. In your haste to protect victims of gun violence, you try your best to ignore the many examples of people who protected themselves with guns. Again, you can't just sweep them under the rug.
Although I myself am not of this mindset, this is why people accuse you of impure motives: you sympathize with the victims of gun violence but not with the ones who failed to become victims because they protected themselves with a gun. You exhibit herculean effort to convince yourself that all the people who protected themselves with guns are non-existent, incorrect in their judgement that they needed guns, or just made things worse."
Now again, to be fair to Nate, this is a model of impeccably measured debating compared to what I've experienced from many (probably the majority) of Kevin's disciples. However, the content does follow a very familiar pattern - what I'd call the "why isn't being right good enough for us?" pattern, in honour of one of Kevin's trademark cries at moments of particular self-awareness-deficiency. What tends to happen is that the individual in question produces a piece of statistical evidence purporting to show that more guns save lives, or that gun bans fail to save lives, or whatever. Having done so, they declare the matter proved beyond doubt, and sit back to admire their handiwork. When legitimate objections are then raised about the credibility of that evidence, or questions posed about whether it really proves what is claimed of it, the response is not to engage with those questions or supply answers, but instead to indignantly insist that the point has been proved and to assign some significance to the fact that I have not simply conceded this 'indisputable' truth. In Nate's case, he is merely suggesting in his measured way that I am a little blinkered, but unfortunately the more common reaction is screams of "Liar! This proves that he's not arguing in good faith", etc, etc. To be fair, this reaction is in a way not surprising, because there is presumably a great deal of emotional investment in statistics which they badly want to believe constitute unchallengeable proof. But that doesn't make the response any more legitimate.
I went on to point out to Nate that my basic proposition is a very simple one - that the UK has a gun crime rate that is vastly lower than America's, and a general homicide rate that is also much lower. The suggestion from the other side is not merely that our much stricter gun laws have got nothing to do with that (which would be startling enough), but that they are in fact somehow putting us in more danger. That is an almost jaw-dropping, logic-defying belief to hold, and there's a saying in scientific circles that extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof. Frankly, what has been on offer so far hasn't even met the standards of ordinary proof - in almost every case, holes can be found very easily. For instance, Kevin often prays in aid an alleged "convergence" between the British and American murder rates, in spite of the tightened UK gun laws in recent years. He reacts with utter incredulity when it's pointed out to him that this trend might well be caused by other variables that have nothing to do with the gun laws, and that indeed it's perfectly conceivable that the gun crime rate would now be higher still in the UK had it not been for the bans. Frankly, his response is astonishing - for how else can he possibly explain away the much higher baseline gun crime and homicide rate in the US as compared to the UK other than by assuming that these other variables must be hugely important determinants of crime rates? It's nothing short of magical thinking on an industrial scale to present to the world the proposition that Britain's historically lower gun crime/homicide rate has nothing at all to do with gun restrictions, and yet that the supposed current (and very limited) 'convergence' between the two countries somehow must have absolutely everything to do with gun restrictions.
So I'd offer this advice to the KBFC - if you're determined to base your case largely on statistical evidence and want it to be taken seriously by those who do not hold your views (whether opponents or neutrals), stop reacting to legitimate questions with mockery, indignation or outright anger, and instead start answering them. You are the ones that have made the extraordinary claim that your philosophy is literally provable beyond doubt - well, even providing some ordinary proof for that extraordinary claim would be a start. That means proof that will stand up to scrutiny, not assertions that can only be defended with synthetic indignation, mockery or outright abuse. For the record, most of the questions I asked about the FBI study remain unanswered, although as I said Nate did tackle some of them -
- Gun suicides: 19,895/year (and yet Japan has more than 30,000 suicides with virtually no guns)
- Accidental deaths: 731/year
- Unnecessary killings in the name of self defense: included in homicide.
- Legal weapons becoming illegal: I don't particularly care. It is my belief that if someone wants something illegal enough, they will get it. Heck, drugs are totally banned in this country and it hasn't helped a darn thing; any teenager can get whatever he wants. I believe it's the same with guns.
I'm glad he didn't make the direct claim that Japan's suicide rate proves that easy availability of guns is not a problem, as of course that conclusion would not be supportable. There are many variables that affect the suicide rate - the pertinent question is, would the US suicide rate be lower if suicide wasn't made so easy for so many? Could a chunk of those 20,000 deaths be prevented by simple gun control legislation?
The point about unnecessary killing in the name of self-defence being included in the homicide figures is in my view totally unsatisfactory. We've talked at great length about the tragic case of Andrew de Vries, the Aberdonian businessman who knocked on the back door of a house in Texas in 1994 to seek help, and was shot dead by the homeowner who mistook him for a burglar. This was clearly an unnecessary killing in the name of self-defence, and yet it was not included in the homicide figures. It would not surprise me at all if there are many other cases that would fall into the same category.
Nate's most complacent response is of course on the issue of legal weapons that become illegal, and the shocking figures on the theft of legally-owned firearms are testament enough to that.
Finally, Nate also raised a specific question on the previous thread about Switzerland - I can do no better than quote from Political Betting the words of Nick Palmer, until very recently the Labour member of parliament for Broxtowe, and (I believe) a former Swiss resident...
"On Switzerland, the position is not quite as implied by Plato and Richard Dodd above. It’s true that males of military service age are reservists and expected to keep a rifle at home. However, it is illegal for them to store ammunition for it - this would be issued to them in emergency. Despite that, the proportion of murders that are committed with guns is significantly higher in Switzerland than in most other countries in Europe, presumably because it’s easier to get ammo in Switzerland than an illegal gun elsewhere. Becuase crime rates in Switzerland are in general very low anyway, the rate of gun murders doesn’t stand out, but it’s clearly proportionately higher.
Coming closer to home, the death rate in Nottingham from crime has dropped heavily since the 5-year sentence for carrying handguns was introduced. While gang members have taken to carriyng knives instead, the rate of collateral killing in gang clashes has fallen (because you can’t kill a lot of people at once with a knife).
I don’t think there’s much doubt that widespread availability of guns produces more gun crime. Whether you conclude that tighter restictions of gun ownership should follow is a separate argument, but it evades that argument to suggest that there is no effect."
1) How many of the attempted crimes allegedly foiled were actually genuine? This is the most obvious question to ask about a self-reporting survey in which the respondents' word is simply "taken for it", ie. the figures do not appear to be based on police records or any other documentary evidence. As the supposed methods for foiling crimes include something as vague as "scaring people off" with a gun, it does not inspire huge confidence that the alleged crime victim will always have got to the point of objectively establishing that a crime is actually occurring - they may in some cases simply have convinced themselves that this was the case.
2) How many of the attempted crimes were serious and how many were petty? Obviously hugely significant given the claim that Nate is making - that 108,000 'crimes prevented' can be meaningfully weighed against 12,000 people per year murdered with a gun.
3) How many of these crimes could and would have been averted anyway, without the use of a gun? Again, this fundamentally challenges the credibility of the conclusions Nate feels able to draw from the report. It stretches credulity to suggest that a significant number of these 108,000 incidents would not have been stopped by another method - in the UK, members of the public without guns prevent both petty and serious crimes every day of the week.
4) How many of these alleged crimes would have been attempted had it not been for the prevalence of guns in American society? There is absolutely no meaning in suggesting that legal firearms helped you prevent a crime, if the general legality of firearms caused - either directly or indirectly - that crime to be attempted in the first place.
5) How many guns start off as legal but end up being held illegally? This is related to the above point, because if the wide legal availability of (and therefore demand for) guns leads to a massive increase in the number of illegal weapons in play for criminal purposes, it follows almost inevitably that a proportion of the 'crimes prevented' with guns would not have been attempted in the first place had a gun ban been enforced. This is one question that I actually found a partial answer to by reading other sections of the report Nate had linked to, and I think this extract speaks for itself -
"A major theme highlighted in a 1986 survey of incarcerated felons was that theft was an important means of obtaining firearms for those with criminal intentions: 32 percent of surveyed felons had stolen their most recently acquired handgun. Based on the NSPOF, an estimated 0.9 percent of all gun-owning households (269,000) experienced the theft of one or more firearms during 1994. About 211,000 handguns and 382,000 long guns were stolen in noncommercial thefts that year, for a total of 593,000 stolen firearms. Those estimates are subject to considerable sampling error but are consistent with earlier estimates of about half a million guns stolen annually."
6) How many of the 'crimes prevented' can be put down to the values of a paranoid, brutalised society which teaches its children that the next threat is always round the corner, and that 'freedom' can only be won down the barrel of a gun? This is obviously a more intangible point, but it's nevertheless important because Kevin Baker in particular has spoken at great length about how differences in culture can massively affect outcomes in terms of crime. The weaponisation of society is clearly a significant factor in the prevailing culture, thus offering another plausible reason for theorising that a gun ban could have ensured that many of these crimes would not have been attempted in the first place - further calling into question Nate's assumption that these were 108,000 incidents that would have been crimes had a gun ban been in place.
7) How many people were unnecessarily killed or injured by someone 'defending themselves'? This is a question that particularly troubles me given the rather broad definition of legal killing the US authorities seem to use.
8) How many guns being used for defensive purposes have been wrested away and used by an attacker? In these instances people arming themselves with a gun have simply put themselves and others in far more danger.
9) How many accidental shootings have there been from guns that were used carelessly, or not stored properly? Not related to crime, but these numbers would clearly offset any benefit Nate is claiming from gun legality.
10) How many suicidal people have found a quick and easy way out due to having a gun handy, when otherwise they might have stopped to think for longer and found a better solution? Similar to number 9, and again I actually found an answer to both of these questions in the report -
"Of 1,356 accidental deaths by gunshot in 1994, 185 involved children 14 years old and younger. For each such fatality, there are several accidental shootings that cause serious injury. Guns were also the means of destruction in 19,590 suicides, 210 involving children 14 or younger."
In other words, twice as many deaths by gun in these categories than even the sky-high homicide-by-gun rate.
All of these questions are, I think, perfectly logical, and to be frank it's not possible to make much sense of the study without answers to them. But although Nate (to be fair) addressed some of them later, his first reaction was instead to call into question my reasons for asking them -
"What I see is a lot of sound and fury to try to rationalize away a dangerous study that would tear a hole in your core belief than guns are useless tools of thugs and murderers. In your haste to protect victims of gun violence, you try your best to ignore the many examples of people who protected themselves with guns. Again, you can't just sweep them under the rug.
Although I myself am not of this mindset, this is why people accuse you of impure motives: you sympathize with the victims of gun violence but not with the ones who failed to become victims because they protected themselves with a gun. You exhibit herculean effort to convince yourself that all the people who protected themselves with guns are non-existent, incorrect in their judgement that they needed guns, or just made things worse."
Now again, to be fair to Nate, this is a model of impeccably measured debating compared to what I've experienced from many (probably the majority) of Kevin's disciples. However, the content does follow a very familiar pattern - what I'd call the "why isn't being right good enough for us?" pattern, in honour of one of Kevin's trademark cries at moments of particular self-awareness-deficiency. What tends to happen is that the individual in question produces a piece of statistical evidence purporting to show that more guns save lives, or that gun bans fail to save lives, or whatever. Having done so, they declare the matter proved beyond doubt, and sit back to admire their handiwork. When legitimate objections are then raised about the credibility of that evidence, or questions posed about whether it really proves what is claimed of it, the response is not to engage with those questions or supply answers, but instead to indignantly insist that the point has been proved and to assign some significance to the fact that I have not simply conceded this 'indisputable' truth. In Nate's case, he is merely suggesting in his measured way that I am a little blinkered, but unfortunately the more common reaction is screams of "Liar! This proves that he's not arguing in good faith", etc, etc. To be fair, this reaction is in a way not surprising, because there is presumably a great deal of emotional investment in statistics which they badly want to believe constitute unchallengeable proof. But that doesn't make the response any more legitimate.
I went on to point out to Nate that my basic proposition is a very simple one - that the UK has a gun crime rate that is vastly lower than America's, and a general homicide rate that is also much lower. The suggestion from the other side is not merely that our much stricter gun laws have got nothing to do with that (which would be startling enough), but that they are in fact somehow putting us in more danger. That is an almost jaw-dropping, logic-defying belief to hold, and there's a saying in scientific circles that extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof. Frankly, what has been on offer so far hasn't even met the standards of ordinary proof - in almost every case, holes can be found very easily. For instance, Kevin often prays in aid an alleged "convergence" between the British and American murder rates, in spite of the tightened UK gun laws in recent years. He reacts with utter incredulity when it's pointed out to him that this trend might well be caused by other variables that have nothing to do with the gun laws, and that indeed it's perfectly conceivable that the gun crime rate would now be higher still in the UK had it not been for the bans. Frankly, his response is astonishing - for how else can he possibly explain away the much higher baseline gun crime and homicide rate in the US as compared to the UK other than by assuming that these other variables must be hugely important determinants of crime rates? It's nothing short of magical thinking on an industrial scale to present to the world the proposition that Britain's historically lower gun crime/homicide rate has nothing at all to do with gun restrictions, and yet that the supposed current (and very limited) 'convergence' between the two countries somehow must have absolutely everything to do with gun restrictions.
So I'd offer this advice to the KBFC - if you're determined to base your case largely on statistical evidence and want it to be taken seriously by those who do not hold your views (whether opponents or neutrals), stop reacting to legitimate questions with mockery, indignation or outright anger, and instead start answering them. You are the ones that have made the extraordinary claim that your philosophy is literally provable beyond doubt - well, even providing some ordinary proof for that extraordinary claim would be a start. That means proof that will stand up to scrutiny, not assertions that can only be defended with synthetic indignation, mockery or outright abuse. For the record, most of the questions I asked about the FBI study remain unanswered, although as I said Nate did tackle some of them -
- Gun suicides: 19,895/year (and yet Japan has more than 30,000 suicides with virtually no guns)
- Accidental deaths: 731/year
- Unnecessary killings in the name of self defense: included in homicide.
- Legal weapons becoming illegal: I don't particularly care. It is my belief that if someone wants something illegal enough, they will get it. Heck, drugs are totally banned in this country and it hasn't helped a darn thing; any teenager can get whatever he wants. I believe it's the same with guns.
I'm glad he didn't make the direct claim that Japan's suicide rate proves that easy availability of guns is not a problem, as of course that conclusion would not be supportable. There are many variables that affect the suicide rate - the pertinent question is, would the US suicide rate be lower if suicide wasn't made so easy for so many? Could a chunk of those 20,000 deaths be prevented by simple gun control legislation?
The point about unnecessary killing in the name of self-defence being included in the homicide figures is in my view totally unsatisfactory. We've talked at great length about the tragic case of Andrew de Vries, the Aberdonian businessman who knocked on the back door of a house in Texas in 1994 to seek help, and was shot dead by the homeowner who mistook him for a burglar. This was clearly an unnecessary killing in the name of self-defence, and yet it was not included in the homicide figures. It would not surprise me at all if there are many other cases that would fall into the same category.
Nate's most complacent response is of course on the issue of legal weapons that become illegal, and the shocking figures on the theft of legally-owned firearms are testament enough to that.
Finally, Nate also raised a specific question on the previous thread about Switzerland - I can do no better than quote from Political Betting the words of Nick Palmer, until very recently the Labour member of parliament for Broxtowe, and (I believe) a former Swiss resident...
"On Switzerland, the position is not quite as implied by Plato and Richard Dodd above. It’s true that males of military service age are reservists and expected to keep a rifle at home. However, it is illegal for them to store ammunition for it - this would be issued to them in emergency. Despite that, the proportion of murders that are committed with guns is significantly higher in Switzerland than in most other countries in Europe, presumably because it’s easier to get ammo in Switzerland than an illegal gun elsewhere. Becuase crime rates in Switzerland are in general very low anyway, the rate of gun murders doesn’t stand out, but it’s clearly proportionately higher.
Coming closer to home, the death rate in Nottingham from crime has dropped heavily since the 5-year sentence for carrying handguns was introduced. While gang members have taken to carriyng knives instead, the rate of collateral killing in gang clashes has fallen (because you can’t kill a lot of people at once with a knife).
I don’t think there’s much doubt that widespread availability of guns produces more gun crime. Whether you conclude that tighter restictions of gun ownership should follow is a separate argument, but it evades that argument to suggest that there is no effect."
Thursday, November 11, 2010
My response to Dean of AZ, part two
This is the continuation of my response to a poster on Kevin Baker's blog who attempted to answer the questions I posed back in June about statistics purportedly showing that widespread legal gun ownership in the US prevents crime. The first part can be found here.
My fourth question was - How many of these alleged crimes would have been attempted had it not been for the prevalence of guns in American society? There is absolutely no meaning in suggesting that legal firearms helped you prevent a crime, if the general legality of firearms caused - either directly or indirectly - that crime to be attempted in the first place.
Dean's response - WRONG. Because using ANY FIREARM in the commission of ANY CRIME is ANOTHER CRIME in and of itself. That's like suggesting that the automobile is illegitemate because they are sumetimes used in crime, or that steak knives shoudl be outlawed because they, too, are sometimes used in crime. The existence and presence of firearms, cars, or steak knives DO NOT CAUSE CRIME. To suggest so simply illustrates the depth of your ignorance. PEOPLE have morals, moral and immoral behavior, and inanimate objects cannot be the ends, only the means. If the ends are sufficiently motivated, either by violence, greed, or any other human failing, the means becomes irrelevant. Assaulting someone with a gun, steak knife, and car are all considered "assault with a deadly weapon, and we don't charge the weapon in court.
This is making my head hurt, because Dean is actually agreeing with a significant part of the point I was making, and yet is simultaneously suggesting that this agreement somehow renders me "WRONG". The use of any firearm in the commission of a crime is itself a crime, yes - and it's a crime that's much more likely to occur if there are lots and lots of guns around. Is Dean disputing that? It appears not. Yes, people might instead be committing another sort of crime if they didn't have a gun to hand...but then again they might not. And if they were committing another sort of crime, it's quite likely that it would be of lesser severity. See for example these sources -
"Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded."
"After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide."
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty)."
My fifth question was - How many guns start off as legal but end up being held illegally?
Dean's response - This question is completely unrelated to the stated purpose of the list, which is to bring into question whether or not firearms (handguns in particular, I think) have a legitemate purpose. And, once again, stealing a gun, knowingly possessing a stolen gun, and using a gun in crime is still criminal, and it's not the gun's fault. I don't blame the internet for the idiotic opinions some people express, I blame the person. Once again, if a steak knife has a legitemate purpose, but is then stolen and used in a murder, does that obviate the legitemate purposes of all steak knives? The logic of your argument completely fails.
Firstly, Dean's characterisation of the purpose of my list of questions is wrong, which probably goes much of the way towards explaining why his responses are missing the point so spectacularly. It was Nate, in quoting the statistics in the first place, who was addressing the question of whether guns have a 'legitimate function'. My purpose in asking the ten questions was first and foremost to dispute the credibility of those statistics. Since Dean is for the most part failing to directly address the queries I was actually raising about the meaningfulness of the statistics, and is instead repeatedly 'responding' to other points he assumes I was making, we're not getting much further forward.
For what it's worth, though, on one point we can wholeheartedly agree - I don't blame inanimate objects for any crime. I blame the stupidity of the man-made laws that make it much easier for criminals to use deadly man-made weapons to commit man-made crimes. Once again, Dean isn't even bothering to dispute my central premise - that the legality of guns in the US allows a huge number of weapons to fall into the wrong hands, and thus many of the crimes that the statistics purportedly show have been thwarted with guns would not have been attempted in the first place had it not been for the millions upon millions of legally owned firearms sloshing about. Therefore my objection to the credibility of the quoted statistics on this point clearly stands.
See these sources for further information on the widespread irresponsibility of the fabled law-abiding gun-owning masses, that by extension hands criminals the means to kill, maim and terrorise -
"Many gun owners report storing their guns loaded and unlocked. Gun training is often associated with an increased likelihood of storing firearms in this manner."
"This study indicates that women, when they report a gun in the home, often incorrectly believe that it is stored unloaded and locked up."
My sixth question was - How many of the 'crimes prevented' can be put down to the values of a paranoid, brutalised society which teaches its children that the next threat is always round the corner, and that 'freedom' can only be won down the barrel of a gun?
Dean's answer - The purpose of the legalization of firearms here in the USA is to ensure that the balance of the power rests in the hands of the people. Your folks once threw off the yolk of English repression, did they not? Did they use "legal" weapons (sticks and fists, perhaps?), or was the possession of the swords, spears, etc. used to fight those battles then considered unlawful by the rule of the oppressor?
I've got some fantastic news for Dean - Scotland has moved on since the 14th Century, and even more excitingly, so has England. Scottish nationalists now do not seek to win freedom down the barrel of a gun (or whatever the equivalent weapons were at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn), for the simple reason that we don't need to - we have a democracy (albeit an imperfect one) and since the 1970s the London government has recognised our right to become independent if we so choose. If we were to adopt the paranoia of the American gun lobby, though, we'd all be stashing firearms for a secret militia because "history shows those bastard English can't be trusted". And if we had such a culture, would our crime rate be higher or lower as a result? That was the essence of my question, which once again Dean has totally failed to address.
The Framers knew EXACTLY what they were doing when they put right in the Bill of Rights the assertion that the PEOPLE had a RIGHT to "keep and bear" the most deadly piece of military hardware of the day. You might not agree with that assertion, you clearly do not like it...
Again, it's not so much about whether I agree with it or like it (although I don't) - it's a very specific question about whether having such a gun-fetishising culture increases the crime rate, and if so what the implications are for the credibility of statistics purporting to show that guns are often used to prevent crime. As with questions 4 and 5, the difficulty is that legal gun ownership can't be meaningfully said to have prevented a crime if that crime would not have occurred but for the consequences of legal gun ownership. Nothing Dean says disputes that objection in any way.
Incidentally, to point out the blindingly obvious, "the PEOPLE" of the US no longer entrust themselves with "the most deadly military hardware of the day", so if that was the rationale for the Second Amendment, it's now utterly redundant. Present-day America (just like Britain) exclusively entrusts its most deadly weapons to the authorities, and the citizenry would be helpless if those weapons were ever turned against it. In Britain, we rely on democratic safeguards rather than direct physical protection to ensure that the government's guns are never turned on us - in exactly the same way that you do in the US to protect yourselves from a range of weaponry against which your puny Second Amendment firearm would be about as much use as a key-ring.
...but the fact remains that is OUR supreme law of the land, and it was imagined and included by people far superior in moral character than you or I.
Certain Americans could really do with a good deal more self-awareness when imagining that the mystical flawlessness of their constitution and the process that led to its creation ought to be as self-evident to everyone as it is to them.
My seventh question was - How many people were unnecessarily killed or injured by someone 'defending themselves'? This is a question that particularly troubles me given the rather broad definition of legal killing the US authorities seem to use.
Dean's response - Once again, pretty irrelevant to your question of "legitemate purpose" (see other responses above), unless of course you are trying to assert that even ONE life lost to a firearm is too many. In which case you better get your efforts off this topic and work instead to make your own country safer by banning cars, fatty food, and smoking, which each kill more people every year than firearms do (and that's even without accounting for the "saved" lives, which really should be subtracted off that total).
No, once again, my question related solely to the credibility of Nate's statistics - if some of the people alleged by the statistics to have 'prevented a crime' with a gun killed someone unnecessarily in doing so, that's a harm caused by legal gun ownership, not a benefit. So this is yet another question where Dean has not in any way disputed my actual objection.
My eighth question was - How many guns being used for defensive purposes have been wrested away and used by an attacker? In these instances people arming themselves with a gun have simply put themselves and others in far more danger.
Dean's response - Irrelevant. How many people in the UK have been bludgeoned toi death by items found in the home? Probably a higher number than this question purports to examine. See response to #7.
A fairly wild and improbable assertion there, about which Dean clearly has no idea whether there is any factual basis, and which in any case does not address the problem that a seized gun is likely to be of rather more use to an attacker than most other household utensils he might care to grab. Another question flunked.
My ninth question was - How many accidental shootings have there been from guns that were used carelessly, or not stored properly? Not related to crime, but these numbers would clearly offset any benefit Nate is claiming from gun legality.
Dean's response - Once again, not relevant to the report as referenced, however I will have to agree that many, if not all of these incidents are tragic and most likely preventable. How many deaths are caused by inattentiveness behind the wheel, or by drunk driving?? Many, many more, and I don't see you campaigning for the banning of alcohol or the government to require the installation of a breathalyzer in all new autos (although now that I have typed that I can see that coming to the nanny state nearest you, soon). LEGITEMATE PURPOSE - something I believe I have already established in #1-#5 responses, does not get erased by problems caused by misuse and abuse of inanimate objects by careless people.
Yes, I think you're probably getting used to the pattern here - no dispute of the central premise of my objection. Which is just as well, given this weight of evidence -
"For every age group, where there are more guns there are more accidental deaths. The mortality rate was 7 times higher in the four states with the most guns compared to the four states with the fewest guns."
"Both firearm prevalence AND questionable storage practices (i.e. storing firearms loaded and unlocked) were associated with higher rates of unintentional firearm deaths."
As for the comparison with the harm caused by the car, that is one 'inanimate object' that demonstrably has a social benefit that offsets the considerable downsides - whether it outweighs those downsides is of course a matter for debate, although most people seem to tacitly accept that it does. The whole point of the queries I've been raising about Nate's statistics is that they call into severe doubt the unproven assertion that there is somehow an equivalent offsetting benefit from the private ownership of firearms.
My final question was - How many suicidal people have found a quick and easy way out due to having a gun handy, when otherwise they might have stopped to think for longer and found a better solution?
Dean's response - If you care to explore the question, as I am not going to provide references, but in my psychology education for professionals involved in the treatment of those suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, or psychosis (who as a group constitute the vast majority of people who commit suicide), people who WANT to commit suicide will FIND A WAY. Does the availability of a firearm make it easier? Absolutely. But once the decision is made, those people make it happen.
Oh really? This astonishing mass of evidence tells a slightly different story -
"The preponderance of current evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for youth suicide in the United States. The evidence that gun availability increases the suicide rates of adults is credible, but is currently less compelling."
"After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, across the United States, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of suicide, particularly firearm suicide."
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm suicide and overall suicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups. It remained true after accounting for poverty, urbanization and unemployment."
"Changes in the levels of household firearm gun ownership was significantly associated with changes in both firearm suicide and overall suicide, for men, women and children, even after controlling for region, unemployment, alcohol consumption and poverty."
"Even after controlling for rates of attempted suicide, states with more guns had higher rates of suicide. Case fatality rates ranged from over 90% for firearms to under 5% for drug overdoses, cutting and piercing (the most common methods of attempted suicide). Hospital workers rarely see the type of suicide (firearm suicide) that is most likely to end in death."
"Levels of gun ownership are highly correlated with suicide rates across all age groups, even after controlling for lifetime major depression and serious suicidal thoughts. After controlling for divorce, education, unemployment, poverty and urbanization, the statistically significant relationship holds for 15 to 24 year olds and 45 to 84 year olds, but not for 25 to 44 year olds."
So that's that. Ten answers from Dean, none especially convincing, and several that didn't even address the actual question posed. It would be interesting to see if anyone can do better, but as it's taken five months just to get to this point, I won't be holding my breath...
My fourth question was - How many of these alleged crimes would have been attempted had it not been for the prevalence of guns in American society? There is absolutely no meaning in suggesting that legal firearms helped you prevent a crime, if the general legality of firearms caused - either directly or indirectly - that crime to be attempted in the first place.
Dean's response - WRONG. Because using ANY FIREARM in the commission of ANY CRIME is ANOTHER CRIME in and of itself. That's like suggesting that the automobile is illegitemate because they are sumetimes used in crime, or that steak knives shoudl be outlawed because they, too, are sometimes used in crime. The existence and presence of firearms, cars, or steak knives DO NOT CAUSE CRIME. To suggest so simply illustrates the depth of your ignorance. PEOPLE have morals, moral and immoral behavior, and inanimate objects cannot be the ends, only the means. If the ends are sufficiently motivated, either by violence, greed, or any other human failing, the means becomes irrelevant. Assaulting someone with a gun, steak knife, and car are all considered "assault with a deadly weapon, and we don't charge the weapon in court.
This is making my head hurt, because Dean is actually agreeing with a significant part of the point I was making, and yet is simultaneously suggesting that this agreement somehow renders me "WRONG". The use of any firearm in the commission of a crime is itself a crime, yes - and it's a crime that's much more likely to occur if there are lots and lots of guns around. Is Dean disputing that? It appears not. Yes, people might instead be committing another sort of crime if they didn't have a gun to hand...but then again they might not. And if they were committing another sort of crime, it's quite likely that it would be of lesser severity. See for example these sources -
"Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded."
"After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide."
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty)."
My fifth question was - How many guns start off as legal but end up being held illegally?
Dean's response - This question is completely unrelated to the stated purpose of the list, which is to bring into question whether or not firearms (handguns in particular, I think) have a legitemate purpose. And, once again, stealing a gun, knowingly possessing a stolen gun, and using a gun in crime is still criminal, and it's not the gun's fault. I don't blame the internet for the idiotic opinions some people express, I blame the person. Once again, if a steak knife has a legitemate purpose, but is then stolen and used in a murder, does that obviate the legitemate purposes of all steak knives? The logic of your argument completely fails.
Firstly, Dean's characterisation of the purpose of my list of questions is wrong, which probably goes much of the way towards explaining why his responses are missing the point so spectacularly. It was Nate, in quoting the statistics in the first place, who was addressing the question of whether guns have a 'legitimate function'. My purpose in asking the ten questions was first and foremost to dispute the credibility of those statistics. Since Dean is for the most part failing to directly address the queries I was actually raising about the meaningfulness of the statistics, and is instead repeatedly 'responding' to other points he assumes I was making, we're not getting much further forward.
For what it's worth, though, on one point we can wholeheartedly agree - I don't blame inanimate objects for any crime. I blame the stupidity of the man-made laws that make it much easier for criminals to use deadly man-made weapons to commit man-made crimes. Once again, Dean isn't even bothering to dispute my central premise - that the legality of guns in the US allows a huge number of weapons to fall into the wrong hands, and thus many of the crimes that the statistics purportedly show have been thwarted with guns would not have been attempted in the first place had it not been for the millions upon millions of legally owned firearms sloshing about. Therefore my objection to the credibility of the quoted statistics on this point clearly stands.
See these sources for further information on the widespread irresponsibility of the fabled law-abiding gun-owning masses, that by extension hands criminals the means to kill, maim and terrorise -
"Many gun owners report storing their guns loaded and unlocked. Gun training is often associated with an increased likelihood of storing firearms in this manner."
"This study indicates that women, when they report a gun in the home, often incorrectly believe that it is stored unloaded and locked up."
My sixth question was - How many of the 'crimes prevented' can be put down to the values of a paranoid, brutalised society which teaches its children that the next threat is always round the corner, and that 'freedom' can only be won down the barrel of a gun?
Dean's answer - The purpose of the legalization of firearms here in the USA is to ensure that the balance of the power rests in the hands of the people. Your folks once threw off the yolk of English repression, did they not? Did they use "legal" weapons (sticks and fists, perhaps?), or was the possession of the swords, spears, etc. used to fight those battles then considered unlawful by the rule of the oppressor?
I've got some fantastic news for Dean - Scotland has moved on since the 14th Century, and even more excitingly, so has England. Scottish nationalists now do not seek to win freedom down the barrel of a gun (or whatever the equivalent weapons were at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn), for the simple reason that we don't need to - we have a democracy (albeit an imperfect one) and since the 1970s the London government has recognised our right to become independent if we so choose. If we were to adopt the paranoia of the American gun lobby, though, we'd all be stashing firearms for a secret militia because "history shows those bastard English can't be trusted". And if we had such a culture, would our crime rate be higher or lower as a result? That was the essence of my question, which once again Dean has totally failed to address.
The Framers knew EXACTLY what they were doing when they put right in the Bill of Rights the assertion that the PEOPLE had a RIGHT to "keep and bear" the most deadly piece of military hardware of the day. You might not agree with that assertion, you clearly do not like it...
Again, it's not so much about whether I agree with it or like it (although I don't) - it's a very specific question about whether having such a gun-fetishising culture increases the crime rate, and if so what the implications are for the credibility of statistics purporting to show that guns are often used to prevent crime. As with questions 4 and 5, the difficulty is that legal gun ownership can't be meaningfully said to have prevented a crime if that crime would not have occurred but for the consequences of legal gun ownership. Nothing Dean says disputes that objection in any way.
Incidentally, to point out the blindingly obvious, "the PEOPLE" of the US no longer entrust themselves with "the most deadly military hardware of the day", so if that was the rationale for the Second Amendment, it's now utterly redundant. Present-day America (just like Britain) exclusively entrusts its most deadly weapons to the authorities, and the citizenry would be helpless if those weapons were ever turned against it. In Britain, we rely on democratic safeguards rather than direct physical protection to ensure that the government's guns are never turned on us - in exactly the same way that you do in the US to protect yourselves from a range of weaponry against which your puny Second Amendment firearm would be about as much use as a key-ring.
...but the fact remains that is OUR supreme law of the land, and it was imagined and included by people far superior in moral character than you or I.
Certain Americans could really do with a good deal more self-awareness when imagining that the mystical flawlessness of their constitution and the process that led to its creation ought to be as self-evident to everyone as it is to them.
My seventh question was - How many people were unnecessarily killed or injured by someone 'defending themselves'? This is a question that particularly troubles me given the rather broad definition of legal killing the US authorities seem to use.
Dean's response - Once again, pretty irrelevant to your question of "legitemate purpose" (see other responses above), unless of course you are trying to assert that even ONE life lost to a firearm is too many. In which case you better get your efforts off this topic and work instead to make your own country safer by banning cars, fatty food, and smoking, which each kill more people every year than firearms do (and that's even without accounting for the "saved" lives, which really should be subtracted off that total).
No, once again, my question related solely to the credibility of Nate's statistics - if some of the people alleged by the statistics to have 'prevented a crime' with a gun killed someone unnecessarily in doing so, that's a harm caused by legal gun ownership, not a benefit. So this is yet another question where Dean has not in any way disputed my actual objection.
My eighth question was - How many guns being used for defensive purposes have been wrested away and used by an attacker? In these instances people arming themselves with a gun have simply put themselves and others in far more danger.
Dean's response - Irrelevant. How many people in the UK have been bludgeoned toi death by items found in the home? Probably a higher number than this question purports to examine. See response to #7.
A fairly wild and improbable assertion there, about which Dean clearly has no idea whether there is any factual basis, and which in any case does not address the problem that a seized gun is likely to be of rather more use to an attacker than most other household utensils he might care to grab. Another question flunked.
My ninth question was - How many accidental shootings have there been from guns that were used carelessly, or not stored properly? Not related to crime, but these numbers would clearly offset any benefit Nate is claiming from gun legality.
Dean's response - Once again, not relevant to the report as referenced, however I will have to agree that many, if not all of these incidents are tragic and most likely preventable. How many deaths are caused by inattentiveness behind the wheel, or by drunk driving?? Many, many more, and I don't see you campaigning for the banning of alcohol or the government to require the installation of a breathalyzer in all new autos (although now that I have typed that I can see that coming to the nanny state nearest you, soon). LEGITEMATE PURPOSE - something I believe I have already established in #1-#5 responses, does not get erased by problems caused by misuse and abuse of inanimate objects by careless people.
Yes, I think you're probably getting used to the pattern here - no dispute of the central premise of my objection. Which is just as well, given this weight of evidence -
"For every age group, where there are more guns there are more accidental deaths. The mortality rate was 7 times higher in the four states with the most guns compared to the four states with the fewest guns."
"Both firearm prevalence AND questionable storage practices (i.e. storing firearms loaded and unlocked) were associated with higher rates of unintentional firearm deaths."
As for the comparison with the harm caused by the car, that is one 'inanimate object' that demonstrably has a social benefit that offsets the considerable downsides - whether it outweighs those downsides is of course a matter for debate, although most people seem to tacitly accept that it does. The whole point of the queries I've been raising about Nate's statistics is that they call into severe doubt the unproven assertion that there is somehow an equivalent offsetting benefit from the private ownership of firearms.
My final question was - How many suicidal people have found a quick and easy way out due to having a gun handy, when otherwise they might have stopped to think for longer and found a better solution?
Dean's response - If you care to explore the question, as I am not going to provide references, but in my psychology education for professionals involved in the treatment of those suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, or psychosis (who as a group constitute the vast majority of people who commit suicide), people who WANT to commit suicide will FIND A WAY. Does the availability of a firearm make it easier? Absolutely. But once the decision is made, those people make it happen.
Oh really? This astonishing mass of evidence tells a slightly different story -
"The preponderance of current evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for youth suicide in the United States. The evidence that gun availability increases the suicide rates of adults is credible, but is currently less compelling."
"After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, across the United States, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of suicide, particularly firearm suicide."
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm suicide and overall suicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups. It remained true after accounting for poverty, urbanization and unemployment."
"Changes in the levels of household firearm gun ownership was significantly associated with changes in both firearm suicide and overall suicide, for men, women and children, even after controlling for region, unemployment, alcohol consumption and poverty."
"Even after controlling for rates of attempted suicide, states with more guns had higher rates of suicide. Case fatality rates ranged from over 90% for firearms to under 5% for drug overdoses, cutting and piercing (the most common methods of attempted suicide). Hospital workers rarely see the type of suicide (firearm suicide) that is most likely to end in death."
"Levels of gun ownership are highly correlated with suicide rates across all age groups, even after controlling for lifetime major depression and serious suicidal thoughts. After controlling for divorce, education, unemployment, poverty and urbanization, the statistically significant relationship holds for 15 to 24 year olds and 45 to 84 year olds, but not for 25 to 44 year olds."
So that's that. Ten answers from Dean, none especially convincing, and several that didn't even address the actual question posed. It would be interesting to see if anyone can do better, but as it's taken five months just to get to this point, I won't be holding my breath...
Friday, July 29, 2011
Are you YOUNG? Are you MALE? Can you supply your own ROCKS? Enlist with your local crack suicide squad NOW!
Kevin Baker has posted another reply on his own blog. In all honesty there isn't a huge amount to see - it follows his normal practice of saying all the things that have been comprehensively debunked many times before, but saying them LOUDER!!!! (For the uninitiated, that's an affectionate tribute to one of his many delightful catchphrases.) The main gist is that it doesn't matter a damn that the UK with its strict gun control regime has a much lower homicide rate than the US, because the gap used to be wider still, but has "converged" even as successive British governments have introduced progressively more stringent restrictions on gun ownership. But just one problem (the same one as usual) - where is the remotest rational basis for believing, as Baker does, that this "convergence" has actually been caused by the changes in the law? Let's not forget that Baker's first proposition is that the huge difference in murder rates between our two countries can't possibly have anything to do with gun laws or levels of gun ownership, but must have everything to do with the vague, all-purpose explanation "culture". But, by contrast, he simultaneously believes that increases in the British homicide rate over the years can't possibly have anything whatever to do with "cultural" changes (of which there have of course been plenty), but must have absolutely everything to do with the strengthening of the gun legislation. That, as I've now pointed out umpteen times, is magical thinking on an industrial scale.
This is the true position :
Gun control legislation was at one time minimal in the UK, for the very good reason that there wasn't really a gun problem. Rates of gun ownership were always a tiny fraction of what they were in some other countries, especially the US. To listen to Baker's account of what happened, you'd think there was once a US-style gun free-for-all in Britain which coincided with a golden age of peace and harmony. Then those dastardly socialist politicians took all the legal guns away, and all hell broke loose. 'Fraid not, Kevin. Gun control has been progressively strengthened in an attempt not to reverse a former prevalence of gun ownership, but to maintain as far as possible the status quo of a society that is largely unarmed, and in which gun violence is a rarity. It's been like swimming against the tide, unfortunately, and the increasing number of illegal weapons has meant that the legislation has at times felt like damage limitation rather than a comprehensive solution. But the idea that the damage has not in fact been significantly limited, and that the problem would not now be much, much worse if the legislation had not been in place, simply doesn't stand up to the remotest scrutiny.
Now briefly to a couple of Kevin's random jibes -
"But hey! At least they're not killing each other with GUNS! Because somehow that makes a difference."
Kevin, this is really not a hard concept to understand, so just for you, I will try one more time to explain. You're correct that the weapon typically used to commit violence in a society wouldn't matter if the same number of people were going to die anyway, but I'm afraid that isn't the case. Self-evidently there are murders in Scotland (as there are in every country in the world), and those murders are largely carried out with weapons other than firearms, but they are also dramatically fewer in number than would be the case if more violent offenders were armed with guns. That is the relevance of a comparison between the homicide statistics in Arizona and Scotland, two jurisdictions with broadly similar population sizes, but very different rates of gun ownership.
"Back when I wrote What We Got Here is ... Failure to Communicate, I noted that Thomas Sowell pointed out one major difference between those who believe humans are perfectible and those like me who believe human nature doesn't change. Those who believe in human perfectibility believe in solutions. Those like me see trade-offs."
And I pointed out to you at the time that you were ascribing to me a belief in "human perfectibility" that I do not hold, but it seems you had your fingers firmly stuck in your ears on that day as well.
"Hey, maybe he's right. Maybe if the Scots had guns they would kill each other at astronomical rates. Given their obviously hyper-violent culture ...."
Now, the truly frightening thing is that you honestly believe that's a joke. I doubt it would exceed the astronomical US levels of gun murder, but by European standards we could well be facing carnage. Many a true word spoken in jest, Kevin. Still, maybe it wouldn't be so bad - as long as we had crack suicide squads of "young men with rocks" on every street corner, what harm could guns do us?
This is the true position :
Gun control legislation was at one time minimal in the UK, for the very good reason that there wasn't really a gun problem. Rates of gun ownership were always a tiny fraction of what they were in some other countries, especially the US. To listen to Baker's account of what happened, you'd think there was once a US-style gun free-for-all in Britain which coincided with a golden age of peace and harmony. Then those dastardly socialist politicians took all the legal guns away, and all hell broke loose. 'Fraid not, Kevin. Gun control has been progressively strengthened in an attempt not to reverse a former prevalence of gun ownership, but to maintain as far as possible the status quo of a society that is largely unarmed, and in which gun violence is a rarity. It's been like swimming against the tide, unfortunately, and the increasing number of illegal weapons has meant that the legislation has at times felt like damage limitation rather than a comprehensive solution. But the idea that the damage has not in fact been significantly limited, and that the problem would not now be much, much worse if the legislation had not been in place, simply doesn't stand up to the remotest scrutiny.
Now briefly to a couple of Kevin's random jibes -
"But hey! At least they're not killing each other with GUNS! Because somehow that makes a difference."
Kevin, this is really not a hard concept to understand, so just for you, I will try one more time to explain. You're correct that the weapon typically used to commit violence in a society wouldn't matter if the same number of people were going to die anyway, but I'm afraid that isn't the case. Self-evidently there are murders in Scotland (as there are in every country in the world), and those murders are largely carried out with weapons other than firearms, but they are also dramatically fewer in number than would be the case if more violent offenders were armed with guns. That is the relevance of a comparison between the homicide statistics in Arizona and Scotland, two jurisdictions with broadly similar population sizes, but very different rates of gun ownership.
"Back when I wrote What We Got Here is ... Failure to Communicate, I noted that Thomas Sowell pointed out one major difference between those who believe humans are perfectible and those like me who believe human nature doesn't change. Those who believe in human perfectibility believe in solutions. Those like me see trade-offs."
And I pointed out to you at the time that you were ascribing to me a belief in "human perfectibility" that I do not hold, but it seems you had your fingers firmly stuck in your ears on that day as well.
"Hey, maybe he's right. Maybe if the Scots had guns they would kill each other at astronomical rates. Given their obviously hyper-violent culture ...."
Now, the truly frightening thing is that you honestly believe that's a joke. I doubt it would exceed the astronomical US levels of gun murder, but by European standards we could well be facing carnage. Many a true word spoken in jest, Kevin. Still, maybe it wouldn't be so bad - as long as we had crack suicide squads of "young men with rocks" on every street corner, what harm could guns do us?
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Brazilian ballistics
I've been having yet another exchange with Nate and a few others on gun control (this time on his blog), in which I reiterated my fundamental proposition that the huge disparity between gun crime rates in the UK and US, and the substantial difference between the general homicide rates in the two countries, means that the gun rights proponents' argument that our strict gun laws somehow make us less safe utterly beggars belief, and that the onus thus has to be on them to prove that extraordinary claim. Nate's response was that a one-on-one comparison between Britain and the US represented too small a "sample size", and that once other countries are taken into account a different picture emerges. To illustrate his point, he directed me to a Wikipedia 'league table' of countries ranked by their firearm-related death rate.
Looking at the table, my first reaction was frankly bemusement that Nate would choose to highlight statistical evidence relating to western European countries that clearly weakens his own case. Finland in particular sticks out like a sore thumb that's gone septic with its place close to the top of the rankings. It's almost impossible to see what other significant factor distinguishes it from the many western European countries well below it in the table other than its notoriously lax gun laws. And then there's Switzerland, where guns are ubiquitous due to mass military conscription, although ammunition is more tightly controlled. For a small, relatively harmonious country with a low general crime rate and a high quality of life, a gun homicide rate almost four times as high as England and Wales is startling enough - but a general gun death rate sixteen times as high speaks for itself.
However, Nate was naturally keen for me to look beyond these particular details and instead zone in on countries at the top of the pile, such as Brazil and Mexico, which have in his words "extremely strict controls". If my general assumptions were correct, how could I explain that? My answer was that I couldn't off the top of my head, but that the compelling evidence I'd just seen of a correlation between lax gun laws and a high gun death rate in European countries made me more inclined than ever to think there must be an explanation, and a very good one. Brazil and Mexico are of course extremely different both to European countries and to the USA (not least due to levels of poverty), so there may be any number of factors at play. And while I've always said that I'm not remotely interested in the debased "let's fling convoluted statistics around" type of debate that Kevin Baker and his disciples so revel in, I must admit curiosity finally got the better of me, so I had a little rummage around to see if the claims of "extremely strict controls" on firearms in Brazil and Mexico are really telling the whole story. As it turned out, I didn't have to look much further than Wikipedia once again.
In relation to Mexico, although there are 'UK-style' laws that impose even harsher criminal penalties on transgressors, a rather significant caveat leaps out -
"On the other hand, possession of non-military-caliber small arms by citizens is largely a non-issue. Gun politics are thus not the major issue in Mexico that they are in the neighboring United States, since few Mexican citizens have any gun law difficulties."
Mexican citizens are legally allowed to possess :
"* pistolas (handguns) of .380 Auto or .38 Special revolvers or smaller in either case except the .357 Magnum and auto (Sig),
* escopetas (shotguns) of 12 gauge or smaller, with barrels longer than 25 inches, and
* rifles (rifles) bolt action and semi-auto."
Further information :
"Although there is no legal limit on how many firearms an individual can own, UCAM sells one hand gun for home protection and nine more for shooting and/or hunting. Once any individual has purchased ten firearms from the only retail governmental outlet, he cannot get a permit to buy any more. However, private party sales are legal and are largely uncontrolled, and wealthy gun-collecting citizens thus can legally buy more firearms from other private owners.
Collector permits, somewhat analogous to the FFL Category 03 Curio & Relic permits issued in the United States, are easy to obtain from the Mexican Government and allow the ownership of a wide range of firearms, even including military firearms."
So much for the impossibility of a private citizen legally arming himself to the teeth in Mexico. But the nuggets of information on Brazil are even more jaw-dropping -
"The total number of firearms in Brazil is thought to be around 17 million with 9 million of those being unregistered...
Brazil has the second largest arms industry in the Western Hemisphere. Approximately 80 percent of the weapons manufactured in Brazil are exported, mostly to neighboring countries; many of these weapons are then smuggled back into Brazil. Some firearms in Brazil come from police and military arsenals, having either been 'stolen or sold by corrupt soldiers and officers'."
So a country with no fewer than - if my mental arithmetic isn't letting me down - eight million 'registered' weapons, the second biggest arms industry in the Western Hemisphere, and two clearly-identified routes by which a large number of weapons that start out as legal are ending up in the wrong hands. Does that sound to you like a country that has cracked down with any degree of effectiveness on the problems caused by the legality of firearms? Combine these facts with appalling levels of poverty, and Brazil's place on the leaderboard suddenly starts to look a good deal less mysterious.
Looking at the table, my first reaction was frankly bemusement that Nate would choose to highlight statistical evidence relating to western European countries that clearly weakens his own case. Finland in particular sticks out like a sore thumb that's gone septic with its place close to the top of the rankings. It's almost impossible to see what other significant factor distinguishes it from the many western European countries well below it in the table other than its notoriously lax gun laws. And then there's Switzerland, where guns are ubiquitous due to mass military conscription, although ammunition is more tightly controlled. For a small, relatively harmonious country with a low general crime rate and a high quality of life, a gun homicide rate almost four times as high as England and Wales is startling enough - but a general gun death rate sixteen times as high speaks for itself.
However, Nate was naturally keen for me to look beyond these particular details and instead zone in on countries at the top of the pile, such as Brazil and Mexico, which have in his words "extremely strict controls". If my general assumptions were correct, how could I explain that? My answer was that I couldn't off the top of my head, but that the compelling evidence I'd just seen of a correlation between lax gun laws and a high gun death rate in European countries made me more inclined than ever to think there must be an explanation, and a very good one. Brazil and Mexico are of course extremely different both to European countries and to the USA (not least due to levels of poverty), so there may be any number of factors at play. And while I've always said that I'm not remotely interested in the debased "let's fling convoluted statistics around" type of debate that Kevin Baker and his disciples so revel in, I must admit curiosity finally got the better of me, so I had a little rummage around to see if the claims of "extremely strict controls" on firearms in Brazil and Mexico are really telling the whole story. As it turned out, I didn't have to look much further than Wikipedia once again.
In relation to Mexico, although there are 'UK-style' laws that impose even harsher criminal penalties on transgressors, a rather significant caveat leaps out -
"On the other hand, possession of non-military-caliber small arms by citizens is largely a non-issue. Gun politics are thus not the major issue in Mexico that they are in the neighboring United States, since few Mexican citizens have any gun law difficulties."
Mexican citizens are legally allowed to possess :
"* pistolas (handguns) of .380 Auto or .38 Special revolvers or smaller in either case except the .357 Magnum and auto (Sig),
* escopetas (shotguns) of 12 gauge or smaller, with barrels longer than 25 inches, and
* rifles (rifles) bolt action and semi-auto."
Further information :
"Although there is no legal limit on how many firearms an individual can own, UCAM sells one hand gun for home protection and nine more for shooting and/or hunting. Once any individual has purchased ten firearms from the only retail governmental outlet, he cannot get a permit to buy any more. However, private party sales are legal and are largely uncontrolled, and wealthy gun-collecting citizens thus can legally buy more firearms from other private owners.
Collector permits, somewhat analogous to the FFL Category 03 Curio & Relic permits issued in the United States, are easy to obtain from the Mexican Government and allow the ownership of a wide range of firearms, even including military firearms."
So much for the impossibility of a private citizen legally arming himself to the teeth in Mexico. But the nuggets of information on Brazil are even more jaw-dropping -
"The total number of firearms in Brazil is thought to be around 17 million with 9 million of those being unregistered...
Brazil has the second largest arms industry in the Western Hemisphere. Approximately 80 percent of the weapons manufactured in Brazil are exported, mostly to neighboring countries; many of these weapons are then smuggled back into Brazil. Some firearms in Brazil come from police and military arsenals, having either been 'stolen or sold by corrupt soldiers and officers'."
So a country with no fewer than - if my mental arithmetic isn't letting me down - eight million 'registered' weapons, the second biggest arms industry in the Western Hemisphere, and two clearly-identified routes by which a large number of weapons that start out as legal are ending up in the wrong hands. Does that sound to you like a country that has cracked down with any degree of effectiveness on the problems caused by the legality of firearms? Combine these facts with appalling levels of poverty, and Brazil's place on the leaderboard suddenly starts to look a good deal less mysterious.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
We Live in a Free World, I Whittle Down the Wind
While I'm on the subject of gun control, I thought I might as well offer a few thoughts on the Bill Whittle video that Kevin linked to as an indirect response to me the other day. Incidentally, a word of advice - don't ever call Mr Whittle "some random guy on YouTube" in the presence of the KBFC. He is, I am indignantly assured, a Giant Among Men. Here are just some of his pearls of wisdom -
"just because something is fun and scares away weenies doesn't mean that it's stupid"
Clearly he's determined to appeal to our hearts as well as our minds right from the off. Taking delight in scaring off "weenies" with guns doesn't make someone stupid either, but it probably does say quite a lot of other things about them.
"The philosophical substrata for gun ownership is something that most gun-owners understand in their bones"
As Paul Merton would say - that's good!
"They don't need to be told any of what I'm about to tell you because this kind of wisdom is inherent for many people. That's why we call it 'common sense'."
Curious that so many people imbued with this common sense, with inherent wisdom grafted into their very bones (by the Almighty?) are heavily concentrated in certain geographical areas, whereas those of us not quite so blessed also tend to be found disproportionately in particular places. Surely not a coincidence - perhaps there's some kind of 'common sense gene' that Mr Whittle could identify for us? To hell with spreading philosophical substrata to the less fortunate via YouTube - this guy could be in line for a Nobel Prize.
"have you ever wondered why the people who really enjoy telling others what to do and how to live, those fun-loving intellectual elites, seem to be so in love with totalitarian states where people are unarmed, and where survival is utterly dependent on some of the worst people in the world?"
Is he talking about the likes of David Cameron? If so, while I'm not exactly the UK government's biggest fan, I think that particular form of 'totalitarianism' may be getting a slightly bad rap. If, on the other hand, Whittle is seriously asking his viewers why 'the liberal elite' are so in love with leaders like Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin, then the phrase "straw man argument on stilts" springs to mind.
"then ask yourselves, what stands in an unarmed population in the way of determined, heartless bastards like the SS or the Cossacks or the Revolutionary Guard or bands of Hutu militia?"
Absolutely - what has stood in the way of such evil-doers when faced with the "unarmed population" I've been living among all my life? And yet, to date, I've never actually had a Cossack invade my bedroom. Pure fluke, I suppose - I really must update those burglar alarm settings.
"You see, the Framers in their wisdom put the Second Amendment into the constitution to give teeth to the revolutionary, unheard of idea that the power rests with we, the people...
Criminals and criminal regimes throughout all of human history have and will conspire to take by force what they cannot produce on their own and these people must be stopped. The genius of the men who wrote the Second Amendment is that they realised that these people could be anybody, including people like those who wrote the Second Amendment."
Unfortunately, there was one piece of foresight that the Framers lacked - they didn't realise that their successors in positions of power would have exclusive access to weaponry of such unimaginable destructive force that it would be literally impossible for "we, the people" to defend themselves against a criminal regime with the will to use those weapons. Such hypothetical regimes must indeed be stopped - but how? Well, modern-day America depends on precisely the same shields that Britain relies on to ensure that our authorities' exclusive possession of handguns isn't abused - democratic safeguards and the rule of law. Is this approach naive? Does history tell us that it's doomed to fail? From his alarmist rhetoric later in the video, Mr Whittle clearly believes so. But when he says of the Second Amendment -
"You cannot remove that lynchpin of trust without collapsing the entire structure."
Too late, my friend, that bird has flown. Flown long ago. The supposed safeguards of the Second Amendment are a hollow shell, replaced by a situation indistinguishable from the one we have in Britain, whereby the people have exclusively "trusted" the most deadly weapons to the authorities, and would have no means of direct physical defence if those weapons were ever turned against them. A stubborn attachment to an 18th Century form of defence when faced with a hypothetical 21st Century threat may be disarmingly quaint, but it's no basis for rational law-making.
Amusingly, when I asked Joe Huffman last year how "the people" would actually go about defending themselves against nuclear weapons with their puny Second Amendment handguns, he told me that I simply didn't understand the mindset of an armed population, and that I could rest assured that the survivors of a nuclear attack would mercilessly hunt down the perpetrators. Well, I'm sure that's a great relief to us all.
Incidentally, I've always been curious about how so many American 'libertarians' manage to square their general philosophy with support for the death penalty. What would their advice be, for instance, to someone who had been wrongly convicted and was facing imminent execution? What would their advice be to that person's family? If the primary purpose of privately owned guns is to snuff out tyrannical actions by the government against the individual, can there be a more heinous abuse of the state's power than to take an innocent individual's life? Therefore, would the correct course of action for the family be to attempt to storm Death Row with guns, or should they accept that the rule of law must prevail, however unjustly? If the latter, why? (And please don't insult our intelligence by trying to wriggle out of the dilemma with the fiction that no innocent people are ever sentenced to death in the US.)
"America suffers an appalling number of handgun deaths each year, perhaps eleven thousand of them...but if we attempt to reduce this horrible number by banning handguns we are taking away the property of someone who has broken no laws"
No, we're not. We're taking away the property of someone who would otherwise be breaking the gun control laws we've introduced. As Mr Whittle would say himself - duh.
In other ways, though, I actually like this part of his argument, because it does what I've urged Kevin Baker to do in the past - it defends his philosophy of personal freedom on its own merits, and fronts up to the fact that he believes in it irrespective of the cost in human life. We know that's the case for Baker and his followers anyway, so why the need to use hocus pocus statistics to try to pretend that cost doesn't really exist? Well, I think we all know the answer to that. They know perfectly well that many of their fellow countrymen don't believe that the freedom to own guns is quite important enough to justify absolutely any and every cost, so they feel the battle of statistics is one they must fight - despite the strong whiff of intellectual dishonesty in falsely implying that they might feel differently if it could be definitively demonstrated that thousands of avoidable deaths are caused each year by gun legality. Whittle to his credit doesn't go down that road...or does he?
"It should be abundantly clear by now that the rate of handgun murders in the United States is not uniform. The murder rate of downtown Philadelphia is horrifying, but the murder rate in nearby Valley Forge, let's say, where there are probably more handguns and hunting rifles than anywhere else on the planet, is virtually non-existent."
Oh dear. Hocus Pocus City. Straight back, without passing 'go', to the magical thinking of Kevin and co that holds that the extraordinary disparity between the respective murder rates of the UK and the US can be easily explained away as entirely to do with "cultural factors" and nothing whatever to do with the rate of gun ownership, but simultanenously insists that any selectively culled internal differences in the US that superficially suit their own case must have nothing at all to do with any other factors - even ones as blindingly obvious as the difference between affluent rural areas and urban areas with social problems. Let's refresh our memory about what the evidence actually shows, shall we?
"Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded."
"After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide."
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty)."
Finally, I'm struck by Mr Whittle's suggestion that legal gun ownership makes people "equal" and "levels the playing-field" between the strong and the weak -
"It means that even a schoolteacher can defeat a human predator who may have spent his entire life practicing violence"
Hmmm. Adverts for stocks and shares routinely warn that "the value of your investment may go down as well as up", and I feel that a similar disclaimer ought to be put on claims about the effect of guns on power relationships. It really depends on who is holding the gun at any given moment, doesn't it? We've heard many times before, for instance, about how gun legality empowers a victim of domestic violence to defend themselves with a gun (although some will wonder if walking out of the relationship might possibly be a simpler and somewhat less drastic solution). But does the evidence suggest it's likely to actually be that way round?
"Batterers use of guns : Recent gun owners were 8 times more likely to have threatened their partners with a gun than non-gun owners. Four main types of gun threat against partners were (a) threatening to shoot then, (b) threatening to shoot a pet or person the victim cares about, (c) cleaning, holding or loading a gun during an argument, and (d) shooting a gun during an argument."
So, it turns out that those who abuse power are more attracted to the idea of owning a gun than the most vulnerable, thus unbalancing power relationships between the strong and the weak even further. Who'd ever have guessed such a thing? Nate has suggested to me a couple of times in the past that owning a gun and learning to use it is an empowering experience that enhances confidence and a sense of self. But the example of domestic violence ought to be sufficient to remind us that there are millions of people out there who we actually don't really want to be a) any more empowered, b) any more confident in imposing their will on others, and c) armed with a gun. Mr Whittle tells us in another video that Tea Party conservatives accept human nature as it is and don't kid themselves that they can 'perfect' people. That being the case, it's - again - magical thinking on an industrial scale to imagine that in arming the general 'law-abiding' population you are only empowering 'decent' people. What you're actually doing is making it even easier for untold numbers of arrogant or angry people to abuse their power.
Whittle's real message is that if you want to be equal in his world - more pertinently, if you want to avoid being considerably less equal than you otherwise would have been but for the fact of widespread gun ownership - you have literally no choice but to own a gun, carry it around with you at all times, be trained to use it to a high degree of proficiency, and be blessed with the strength of mind to be ready to calmly use it at a moment's notice. That's an odd sort of 'personal freedom', if you ask me.
Well, I think I've pretty much had my Tea Party fix for the day from Mr Whittle - now I'm off for some tea.
"just because something is fun and scares away weenies doesn't mean that it's stupid"
Clearly he's determined to appeal to our hearts as well as our minds right from the off. Taking delight in scaring off "weenies" with guns doesn't make someone stupid either, but it probably does say quite a lot of other things about them.
"The philosophical substrata for gun ownership is something that most gun-owners understand in their bones"
As Paul Merton would say - that's good!
"They don't need to be told any of what I'm about to tell you because this kind of wisdom is inherent for many people. That's why we call it 'common sense'."
Curious that so many people imbued with this common sense, with inherent wisdom grafted into their very bones (by the Almighty?) are heavily concentrated in certain geographical areas, whereas those of us not quite so blessed also tend to be found disproportionately in particular places. Surely not a coincidence - perhaps there's some kind of 'common sense gene' that Mr Whittle could identify for us? To hell with spreading philosophical substrata to the less fortunate via YouTube - this guy could be in line for a Nobel Prize.
"have you ever wondered why the people who really enjoy telling others what to do and how to live, those fun-loving intellectual elites, seem to be so in love with totalitarian states where people are unarmed, and where survival is utterly dependent on some of the worst people in the world?"
Is he talking about the likes of David Cameron? If so, while I'm not exactly the UK government's biggest fan, I think that particular form of 'totalitarianism' may be getting a slightly bad rap. If, on the other hand, Whittle is seriously asking his viewers why 'the liberal elite' are so in love with leaders like Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin, then the phrase "straw man argument on stilts" springs to mind.
"then ask yourselves, what stands in an unarmed population in the way of determined, heartless bastards like the SS or the Cossacks or the Revolutionary Guard or bands of Hutu militia?"
Absolutely - what has stood in the way of such evil-doers when faced with the "unarmed population" I've been living among all my life? And yet, to date, I've never actually had a Cossack invade my bedroom. Pure fluke, I suppose - I really must update those burglar alarm settings.
"You see, the Framers in their wisdom put the Second Amendment into the constitution to give teeth to the revolutionary, unheard of idea that the power rests with we, the people...
Criminals and criminal regimes throughout all of human history have and will conspire to take by force what they cannot produce on their own and these people must be stopped. The genius of the men who wrote the Second Amendment is that they realised that these people could be anybody, including people like those who wrote the Second Amendment."
Unfortunately, there was one piece of foresight that the Framers lacked - they didn't realise that their successors in positions of power would have exclusive access to weaponry of such unimaginable destructive force that it would be literally impossible for "we, the people" to defend themselves against a criminal regime with the will to use those weapons. Such hypothetical regimes must indeed be stopped - but how? Well, modern-day America depends on precisely the same shields that Britain relies on to ensure that our authorities' exclusive possession of handguns isn't abused - democratic safeguards and the rule of law. Is this approach naive? Does history tell us that it's doomed to fail? From his alarmist rhetoric later in the video, Mr Whittle clearly believes so. But when he says of the Second Amendment -
"You cannot remove that lynchpin of trust without collapsing the entire structure."
Too late, my friend, that bird has flown. Flown long ago. The supposed safeguards of the Second Amendment are a hollow shell, replaced by a situation indistinguishable from the one we have in Britain, whereby the people have exclusively "trusted" the most deadly weapons to the authorities, and would have no means of direct physical defence if those weapons were ever turned against them. A stubborn attachment to an 18th Century form of defence when faced with a hypothetical 21st Century threat may be disarmingly quaint, but it's no basis for rational law-making.
Amusingly, when I asked Joe Huffman last year how "the people" would actually go about defending themselves against nuclear weapons with their puny Second Amendment handguns, he told me that I simply didn't understand the mindset of an armed population, and that I could rest assured that the survivors of a nuclear attack would mercilessly hunt down the perpetrators. Well, I'm sure that's a great relief to us all.
Incidentally, I've always been curious about how so many American 'libertarians' manage to square their general philosophy with support for the death penalty. What would their advice be, for instance, to someone who had been wrongly convicted and was facing imminent execution? What would their advice be to that person's family? If the primary purpose of privately owned guns is to snuff out tyrannical actions by the government against the individual, can there be a more heinous abuse of the state's power than to take an innocent individual's life? Therefore, would the correct course of action for the family be to attempt to storm Death Row with guns, or should they accept that the rule of law must prevail, however unjustly? If the latter, why? (And please don't insult our intelligence by trying to wriggle out of the dilemma with the fiction that no innocent people are ever sentenced to death in the US.)
"America suffers an appalling number of handgun deaths each year, perhaps eleven thousand of them...but if we attempt to reduce this horrible number by banning handguns we are taking away the property of someone who has broken no laws"
No, we're not. We're taking away the property of someone who would otherwise be breaking the gun control laws we've introduced. As Mr Whittle would say himself - duh.
In other ways, though, I actually like this part of his argument, because it does what I've urged Kevin Baker to do in the past - it defends his philosophy of personal freedom on its own merits, and fronts up to the fact that he believes in it irrespective of the cost in human life. We know that's the case for Baker and his followers anyway, so why the need to use hocus pocus statistics to try to pretend that cost doesn't really exist? Well, I think we all know the answer to that. They know perfectly well that many of their fellow countrymen don't believe that the freedom to own guns is quite important enough to justify absolutely any and every cost, so they feel the battle of statistics is one they must fight - despite the strong whiff of intellectual dishonesty in falsely implying that they might feel differently if it could be definitively demonstrated that thousands of avoidable deaths are caused each year by gun legality. Whittle to his credit doesn't go down that road...or does he?
"It should be abundantly clear by now that the rate of handgun murders in the United States is not uniform. The murder rate of downtown Philadelphia is horrifying, but the murder rate in nearby Valley Forge, let's say, where there are probably more handguns and hunting rifles than anywhere else on the planet, is virtually non-existent."
Oh dear. Hocus Pocus City. Straight back, without passing 'go', to the magical thinking of Kevin and co that holds that the extraordinary disparity between the respective murder rates of the UK and the US can be easily explained away as entirely to do with "cultural factors" and nothing whatever to do with the rate of gun ownership, but simultanenously insists that any selectively culled internal differences in the US that superficially suit their own case must have nothing at all to do with any other factors - even ones as blindingly obvious as the difference between affluent rural areas and urban areas with social problems. Let's refresh our memory about what the evidence actually shows, shall we?
"Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded."
"After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide."
"States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty)."
Finally, I'm struck by Mr Whittle's suggestion that legal gun ownership makes people "equal" and "levels the playing-field" between the strong and the weak -
"It means that even a schoolteacher can defeat a human predator who may have spent his entire life practicing violence"
Hmmm. Adverts for stocks and shares routinely warn that "the value of your investment may go down as well as up", and I feel that a similar disclaimer ought to be put on claims about the effect of guns on power relationships. It really depends on who is holding the gun at any given moment, doesn't it? We've heard many times before, for instance, about how gun legality empowers a victim of domestic violence to defend themselves with a gun (although some will wonder if walking out of the relationship might possibly be a simpler and somewhat less drastic solution). But does the evidence suggest it's likely to actually be that way round?
"Batterers use of guns : Recent gun owners were 8 times more likely to have threatened their partners with a gun than non-gun owners. Four main types of gun threat against partners were (a) threatening to shoot then, (b) threatening to shoot a pet or person the victim cares about, (c) cleaning, holding or loading a gun during an argument, and (d) shooting a gun during an argument."
So, it turns out that those who abuse power are more attracted to the idea of owning a gun than the most vulnerable, thus unbalancing power relationships between the strong and the weak even further. Who'd ever have guessed such a thing? Nate has suggested to me a couple of times in the past that owning a gun and learning to use it is an empowering experience that enhances confidence and a sense of self. But the example of domestic violence ought to be sufficient to remind us that there are millions of people out there who we actually don't really want to be a) any more empowered, b) any more confident in imposing their will on others, and c) armed with a gun. Mr Whittle tells us in another video that Tea Party conservatives accept human nature as it is and don't kid themselves that they can 'perfect' people. That being the case, it's - again - magical thinking on an industrial scale to imagine that in arming the general 'law-abiding' population you are only empowering 'decent' people. What you're actually doing is making it even easier for untold numbers of arrogant or angry people to abuse their power.
Whittle's real message is that if you want to be equal in his world - more pertinently, if you want to avoid being considerably less equal than you otherwise would have been but for the fact of widespread gun ownership - you have literally no choice but to own a gun, carry it around with you at all times, be trained to use it to a high degree of proficiency, and be blessed with the strength of mind to be ready to calmly use it at a moment's notice. That's an odd sort of 'personal freedom', if you ask me.
Well, I think I've pretty much had my Tea Party fix for the day from Mr Whittle - now I'm off for some tea.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
My response to the KBFC
As is probably obvious if you've seen the last thread but one, the tragic events in Cumbria on Wednesday have led me to get embroiled in yet another exchange with Arizona-based gun enthusiast Kevin Baker and his ever-delightful Fan Club. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon rebutting various points at Kevin's blog, but as has happened on previous occasions his gang seem to multiply with water, so I'm (not for the first time) going to bail out of a trainwreck of a comments thread and instead give my thoughts here on some of what has been said over the last few hours.
Someone calling themselves 'The Happy Rampager' told me this -
"Let’s face it, you’re the type who puts his own satisfaction ahead of other people’s lives. Mine, the 12 dead, everyone in the UK whether they agree with you or not. You also think you can fling mud to hide the fact that you hold other people’s lives in contempt. What sort of person does holding other's lives in contempt make you?"
A comment that's plainly beneath contempt, but it's worth just pointing out the supreme irony of it being said by someone who clearly puts the personal satisfaction and pleasure of owning a gun before everything else, including other people's lives, safety and peace of mind. The 12 people he referred to were gunned down by someone who owned weapons on exactly the same legal basis as he does. It seems quite likely that without a gun licence, Bird would not have succeeded in killing so many, and perhaps would not have killed at all. There is, therefore, at least an arguable case for asking legal gun owners to accept some small disappointment in return for greater public safety and reassurance. Is 'Happy Rampager' prepared to be socially responsible and make that sacrifice? It seems not, and perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise given his deeply unfortunate choice of moniker.
The poster Ken (who has been making some utterly baffling points all day) followed up with this observation about me -
"Why, it makes him a slave who knows he is a slave, can imagine nothing else, and will not rest until everyone else is likewise enslaved (as witness his ill-disguised glee over National Health coming to America)."
I wasn't trying to disguise my glee - yes, I do believe that health care is a basic human right, not just a perk for the well-off. I'm not quite sure what the value of all this high-minded stuff about the 'freedom of the individual' is if someone is too ill to do anything with that nominal freedom. But the Alice in Wonderland notion of being 'enslaved' by a decent standard of universal healthcare is indeed one to conjure with!
On the broader issue of liberty, I wrote at some length last year about what a limiting freedom it is that can only be guaranteed by the constant possession of a firearm, along with non-stop vigilance and the readiness to use the weapon at any time. That really is a counsel of despair, and yet it's precisely the sort of world more lax gun laws would condemn us to, as people would probably have to consider purchasing a gun whether they 'freely' wanted to or not - because they'd need one to protect themselves against all those countless 'decent, law-abiding' gun-owners they'd suddenly be having brushes with on a daily basis. There must be a deeper, richer freedom out there to be won than that.
'Geek with a 45', in response to my suggestion that it is legitimate for the authorities to disarm private gun owners if mandated to do so by democratic legislation, had this to say -
"No, Democracy, in and of itself, is not the highest value. While it is may be necessary for a free society, it is hardly sufficient."
Agreed, the rights of individuals and minorities need to be enshrined, otherwise you can end up with extreme outcomes like a majority ethnic group making a 'democratic' decision to wipe out the minority. But, in truth, Europe on the whole does a better job than the US of protecting the rights of individuals - by far the most important of which is the right to life. No European country other than Belarus takes the lives of its own citizens, whereas unfortunately most US states still have the death penalty on the statute book.
On the issue of guns, there are two potential rights that can be afforded citizens, but that plainly clash with each other - a) the unlimited right to amass tools for the purposes of self-defence, and b) the right not to be attacked, and perhaps even more importantly, not to have to live in constant fear of being attacked by fellow citizens. Which of these rights should be accorded precedence? I'd say the latter, every time.
Ed "What the Heck" Man, at the end of an interminable exchange in which he imagined (bless him) he was toying with me, finally answered my question -
"I never claimed that these items were as quick and efficient as a gun. (Though in this latest incident, it's entirely possible to kill more people in the same time frame using a baseball bat than this guy killed using his guns.)
What they do accomplish is also to multiply force, even if not as much as a gun does. So even if a person doesn't have a gun available, they can (and will) still find a way to kill. Agreed?
When faced with someone intent on committing violence, how do you stop them? (Remember, you've already agreed that violence comes from the individual's intent, not the gun.)
That point has already been dealt with on the previous thread. Without a phenomenal number of private citizens undergoing a phenomenal level of training, it is simply not very likely that just any old bod with a gun is going to stay cool enough to bring such a frightening and totally unanticipated situation to a clean end. It may even make matters much worse, and lead to more lives being lost. But even accepting your flawed premise for a moment for the sake of argument, your fellow poster Matt gave the game away - he claimed that, in America, people are stopped from committing these massacres "ALL the time". Whereas this was only the third incident on this scale in the UK in the last twenty-five years. Quite clearly, quick 'stops' to these situations on most occasions would not be sufficient to offset the number of lives lost as a result of the hugely greater number of gun attacks occurring in the first place.
Britt said -
"You banned all handguns in 1997. Yet there are still handguns in the UK. In fact, there is more handgun crime every single year. Explain that Jimbo. Handguns banned means zero handgun crime? Right?"
No, it means fewer handguns, and less handgun crime, than would have been the case had the ban not been implemented. That is not the same thing - as has been repeatedly pointed out to Kevin - as saying the level of handgun crime has fallen in the UK since the late 1990s.
Scott Ganz -
"James Kelly demonstrates this mental hitch rather well, focusing entirely on THREE incidents of legally-owned guns being used in atrocities while THOUSANDS are murdered in less sensational ways."
This (ie. the disproportionality point) was something else we went into last year, and it was one of the few points that Kevin made that gave me some pause for thought. However, having reflected on it, the view I came to was that even if only a small number of lives can be saved, these incidents still justify relatively draconian gun laws because the right to own a luxury item like a gun simply isn't important enough. It's not like the brutal logic of weighing up the mind-boggling number of traffic deaths in a year against the huge benefits to society of easy travel.
There was, predictably, quite a reaction when I pointed out that the right to proportionate self-defence is enshrined in law in the UK.
Ken : You lie.
Kevin Baker : No, he doesn't. Well, "enshrined" is a complete fabrication . . .
Ed : You know, I could have sworn that you were arguing for banning shotguns and .22's. Furthermore, I could have sworn that we were challenging you on imposing that desire on others through government force. Are you now changing your tune on that?
Don't be obtuse, Ed. The comment from Kevin, meanwhile, is slightly baffling - the law does indeed provide for proportionate self-defence, and it's as "enshrined" as any law can be in a country that does not have a written constitution.
And back to Ken again. He asked me why, if I believed so strongly that private gun ownership was undesirable, I didn't simply unilaterally go and confiscate people's guns, without any need for legislation. (What a fascinating insight into the mindset of the KBFC.) I pointed out that I believed in democracy and the rule of law, as opposed to 'might is right' and the imposition of one's will by force. But it turns out that Ken doesn't seem to see any distinction whatsoever between democratically-mandated action by the authorities (eg. the collection of taxation), and an individual arrogantly taking action by himself -
"How is any action on the basis of "Do this or I'll imprison/kill you" appropriate? To say that it's okay for the (G)overnment is to say that some people are more equal than others and enjoy prior claim to the property of their lessers. On moral grounds, taxation under coercion is most certainly theft.
Ability is certainly heterogeneously distributed, but on what basis can the legitimate claim that 'Government Agent over there is a better person than regular people, and therefore enjoys a prior claim to my life and property?'"
But, Ken, as I've already pointed out, it's only in your country (well, yours is the only major one in the western democratic world) that the government reserves the extraordinary right to literally take the lives of its own citizens by judicial means.
UPDATE (couldn't resist this one) :
Carnaby : With the conclusion that we ought to increase the restrictions on legally owned firearms. Well, given that logic, how do we solve the following problem here in the USA: you're (anyone) far, far more likely to be shot in the US by a black person than a white person. Furthermore, you are far, far more likely to be shot by a black person using an "illegal" gun than anyone using a "legal" gun. Your solution, James?
A massive policy effort to raise the educational and living standards for black people up to the national average, and then the differential will disappear over time. Unless you're about to tell me that black people are somehow innately more prone to violence. Of course, rational gun control laws would reduce the problem in itself, without the slightest need for racial discrimination in its implementation.
Phew. And, that ladies and gentlemen, was my response to a small selection of the points raised by the KBFC!
Someone calling themselves 'The Happy Rampager' told me this -
"Let’s face it, you’re the type who puts his own satisfaction ahead of other people’s lives. Mine, the 12 dead, everyone in the UK whether they agree with you or not. You also think you can fling mud to hide the fact that you hold other people’s lives in contempt. What sort of person does holding other's lives in contempt make you?"
A comment that's plainly beneath contempt, but it's worth just pointing out the supreme irony of it being said by someone who clearly puts the personal satisfaction and pleasure of owning a gun before everything else, including other people's lives, safety and peace of mind. The 12 people he referred to were gunned down by someone who owned weapons on exactly the same legal basis as he does. It seems quite likely that without a gun licence, Bird would not have succeeded in killing so many, and perhaps would not have killed at all. There is, therefore, at least an arguable case for asking legal gun owners to accept some small disappointment in return for greater public safety and reassurance. Is 'Happy Rampager' prepared to be socially responsible and make that sacrifice? It seems not, and perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise given his deeply unfortunate choice of moniker.
The poster Ken (who has been making some utterly baffling points all day) followed up with this observation about me -
"Why, it makes him a slave who knows he is a slave, can imagine nothing else, and will not rest until everyone else is likewise enslaved (as witness his ill-disguised glee over National Health coming to America)."
I wasn't trying to disguise my glee - yes, I do believe that health care is a basic human right, not just a perk for the well-off. I'm not quite sure what the value of all this high-minded stuff about the 'freedom of the individual' is if someone is too ill to do anything with that nominal freedom. But the Alice in Wonderland notion of being 'enslaved' by a decent standard of universal healthcare is indeed one to conjure with!
On the broader issue of liberty, I wrote at some length last year about what a limiting freedom it is that can only be guaranteed by the constant possession of a firearm, along with non-stop vigilance and the readiness to use the weapon at any time. That really is a counsel of despair, and yet it's precisely the sort of world more lax gun laws would condemn us to, as people would probably have to consider purchasing a gun whether they 'freely' wanted to or not - because they'd need one to protect themselves against all those countless 'decent, law-abiding' gun-owners they'd suddenly be having brushes with on a daily basis. There must be a deeper, richer freedom out there to be won than that.
'Geek with a 45', in response to my suggestion that it is legitimate for the authorities to disarm private gun owners if mandated to do so by democratic legislation, had this to say -
"No, Democracy, in and of itself, is not the highest value. While it is may be necessary for a free society, it is hardly sufficient."
Agreed, the rights of individuals and minorities need to be enshrined, otherwise you can end up with extreme outcomes like a majority ethnic group making a 'democratic' decision to wipe out the minority. But, in truth, Europe on the whole does a better job than the US of protecting the rights of individuals - by far the most important of which is the right to life. No European country other than Belarus takes the lives of its own citizens, whereas unfortunately most US states still have the death penalty on the statute book.
On the issue of guns, there are two potential rights that can be afforded citizens, but that plainly clash with each other - a) the unlimited right to amass tools for the purposes of self-defence, and b) the right not to be attacked, and perhaps even more importantly, not to have to live in constant fear of being attacked by fellow citizens. Which of these rights should be accorded precedence? I'd say the latter, every time.
Ed "What the Heck" Man, at the end of an interminable exchange in which he imagined (bless him) he was toying with me, finally answered my question -
"I never claimed that these items were as quick and efficient as a gun. (Though in this latest incident, it's entirely possible to kill more people in the same time frame using a baseball bat than this guy killed using his guns.)
What they do accomplish is also to multiply force, even if not as much as a gun does. So even if a person doesn't have a gun available, they can (and will) still find a way to kill. Agreed?
When faced with someone intent on committing violence, how do you stop them? (Remember, you've already agreed that violence comes from the individual's intent, not the gun.)
That point has already been dealt with on the previous thread. Without a phenomenal number of private citizens undergoing a phenomenal level of training, it is simply not very likely that just any old bod with a gun is going to stay cool enough to bring such a frightening and totally unanticipated situation to a clean end. It may even make matters much worse, and lead to more lives being lost. But even accepting your flawed premise for a moment for the sake of argument, your fellow poster Matt gave the game away - he claimed that, in America, people are stopped from committing these massacres "ALL the time". Whereas this was only the third incident on this scale in the UK in the last twenty-five years. Quite clearly, quick 'stops' to these situations on most occasions would not be sufficient to offset the number of lives lost as a result of the hugely greater number of gun attacks occurring in the first place.
Britt said -
"You banned all handguns in 1997. Yet there are still handguns in the UK. In fact, there is more handgun crime every single year. Explain that Jimbo. Handguns banned means zero handgun crime? Right?"
No, it means fewer handguns, and less handgun crime, than would have been the case had the ban not been implemented. That is not the same thing - as has been repeatedly pointed out to Kevin - as saying the level of handgun crime has fallen in the UK since the late 1990s.
Scott Ganz -
"James Kelly demonstrates this mental hitch rather well, focusing entirely on THREE incidents of legally-owned guns being used in atrocities while THOUSANDS are murdered in less sensational ways."
This (ie. the disproportionality point) was something else we went into last year, and it was one of the few points that Kevin made that gave me some pause for thought. However, having reflected on it, the view I came to was that even if only a small number of lives can be saved, these incidents still justify relatively draconian gun laws because the right to own a luxury item like a gun simply isn't important enough. It's not like the brutal logic of weighing up the mind-boggling number of traffic deaths in a year against the huge benefits to society of easy travel.
There was, predictably, quite a reaction when I pointed out that the right to proportionate self-defence is enshrined in law in the UK.
Ken : You lie.
Kevin Baker : No, he doesn't. Well, "enshrined" is a complete fabrication . . .
Ed : You know, I could have sworn that you were arguing for banning shotguns and .22's. Furthermore, I could have sworn that we were challenging you on imposing that desire on others through government force. Are you now changing your tune on that?
Don't be obtuse, Ed. The comment from Kevin, meanwhile, is slightly baffling - the law does indeed provide for proportionate self-defence, and it's as "enshrined" as any law can be in a country that does not have a written constitution.
And back to Ken again. He asked me why, if I believed so strongly that private gun ownership was undesirable, I didn't simply unilaterally go and confiscate people's guns, without any need for legislation. (What a fascinating insight into the mindset of the KBFC.) I pointed out that I believed in democracy and the rule of law, as opposed to 'might is right' and the imposition of one's will by force. But it turns out that Ken doesn't seem to see any distinction whatsoever between democratically-mandated action by the authorities (eg. the collection of taxation), and an individual arrogantly taking action by himself -
"How is any action on the basis of "Do this or I'll imprison/kill you" appropriate? To say that it's okay for the (G)overnment is to say that some people are more equal than others and enjoy prior claim to the property of their lessers. On moral grounds, taxation under coercion is most certainly theft.
Ability is certainly heterogeneously distributed, but on what basis can the legitimate claim that 'Government Agent over there is a better person than regular people, and therefore enjoys a prior claim to my life and property?'"
But, Ken, as I've already pointed out, it's only in your country (well, yours is the only major one in the western democratic world) that the government reserves the extraordinary right to literally take the lives of its own citizens by judicial means.
UPDATE (couldn't resist this one) :
Carnaby : With the conclusion that we ought to increase the restrictions on legally owned firearms. Well, given that logic, how do we solve the following problem here in the USA: you're (anyone) far, far more likely to be shot in the US by a black person than a white person. Furthermore, you are far, far more likely to be shot by a black person using an "illegal" gun than anyone using a "legal" gun. Your solution, James?
A massive policy effort to raise the educational and living standards for black people up to the national average, and then the differential will disappear over time. Unless you're about to tell me that black people are somehow innately more prone to violence. Of course, rational gun control laws would reduce the problem in itself, without the slightest need for racial discrimination in its implementation.
Phew. And, that ladies and gentlemen, was my response to a small selection of the points raised by the KBFC!
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