Monday, April 2, 2018

Statistics, if presented without scrubbing, are simply the presentation of facts. Some about Gun Control

Facts, as they say, are stubborn things.

We've been spending some time looking at the Second Amendment and Gun Control proposals out there.  In doing so, we haven't been all the time "anything at all times" in our arguments, and some of our arguments have been subtle and have dealt with  attitudes and even marketing.  We've consistently argued here a number of things that are repeatedly lost in the current discussion, and particularly are in the current one.  These are:

1.  Violence in the United States, and indeed globally, is way, way down.
2.  Mechanically, there's very little that's really changed with semi automatic weapons for a century or more.

That last item is by far the most important one.  And like most American debates the reduction of the debate to a simple one isn't doing the topic any favors. 

One thing that people might actually want to do, if they're discussing firearms, is look at the actual records.  I've tried to do that, but here somebody else has put it together in a nice graphic form.

https://i.imgur.com/n99yCmY.jpg



This is a pretty simple table, but this pretty much sets out a set of facts that are actually facts.  There's a lot of constant debate on this topic which are based on erroneous arguments and all that will do is lead to a result that's not likely to do anything.

Amongst those arguments, by the way, are the ones that I've heard recently that at least admit a bit of a demographic and then get it wrong.  That is that this is a "white male problem".  That's in correct and racist.

One thing that argument totally seems to miss is that even in this age of diversity, most Americans are in fact "white" and many of those who are not "white" will likely be so categorized in later demographics for the same reason that the Irish and Italians were once not "white". The entire concept of "white" is pretty vague anyhow, but it's worth noting that the majority of any crimes should be committed by whites, and as males commit most crimes, most crimes in the United States should be committed by white males.  Until there's some real statistical analysis of this topic, that argument is suspect.

Particularly as it omits John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who were male but not white males.  Under the weird way that race is categorized it would also omit Nidal Hasan, who should clearly be in this category.  And it would omit Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.  Nor would it include Omar Mateen.  Only Farook and Malik, moreover, can really be argued for omission from this category by categorizing them as terrorist, but then when you start to do that you find that there's a very strong tendency to take out anyone who doesn't seem to quite fit as a terrorist, while taking out those who commit such acts but who aren't from the Middle East as non terrorist.  Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was a self confessed terrorist, for example, but as he was not from the Middle East he's been regarded as simply a sick individual.

He  may have in fact been sick, but the problem with such omissions is that terroristic acts appeal to the sick.  ISIL doesn't really reject people for mental health reasons.  

So, once again, the common analysis here is wrong.

What is correct, and we've noted it before, is that these acts end up being committed by the politically motivated and the mentally ill.  Sometimes they're committed by the politically motivated mentally ill.  Political motivation presents a separate topic entirely, but fortunately for the United States, we don't really see it enough that we need to discuss gun control in that context in this thread, but we will in an upcoming one.

And we're not going to go back over our prior discussion on the what we're seeing socially and societally in regards to the other group other than to note this.  In order to address that problem, you actually need to address that problem.  And none of the current proposals do that. As that's a hard and difficult conversation to have.

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