HaroldWilson
11mo ago
You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29785569/
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.
And because those instances are intentionally given outsized attention by the media who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
Different thing, but you seem to be framing this as a fault of the media but surely if there is blame to be assigned here it has to go to the consumer, given that the media is surely just satisfying the demand for such news which we all demonstrate by consuming it as much as we do.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.
So? It would be absurd to suggest never taking any action on one cause of an ill just because it happened not to be the most important cause. As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.
How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"
I don't think he was saying the action of secession was pro-tyranny, merely that rebellions can incidentally also be 'pro-tyranny', which is hard to dispute in the case of the U.S. Civil War, given what was being fought over.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Most other Western countries seem to be dealing with that problem adequately.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.
This is all very much at the margins of political discourse here but at least in Britain anti-NATO sentiment, which there isn't really that much of anymore, seems to come as much from Sultana-esque young left-wingers as it does from older Galloway-esque ones.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
woman who presents a firearm to a would-be rapist very likely doesn't have an actual crime to report. Likewise for a host of other crimes, from muggings to assaults to murder.
Presumably they have an attempted rape/mugging/etc. to report to the survey?
More generally, every crime successfully completed is an instance where lawful self-defense would deliver a likely-superior outcome
Is it? Maybe I'm just too soy but if an armed mugger demanded my wallet etc. I'd rather give in than take my chances trying to defend myself, a lot of tail risk involved there, not to say that people shouldn't defend themselves though.
If self-defense rates are really this low, why aren't we trying to improve them?
Well I guess we can but the point is that increasing gun usage doesn't seem like it would actually achieve that goal.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
From this one sees the impulse to curtail liberty, using events which on average only minutely influence crime statistics, let alone lives of the average person, as an excuse is universal.
People say this a lot but it's hardly unique to guns and not necessarily a bad thing. When events like mass shootings get used as rationale for policy decisions I don't think it's so much a direct response to only that kind of event but something targeted more broadly but for which a particular mass shooting might stand out as a particularly worrisome manifestation of the broader problem that captures the public imagination. See George Floyd, James Bulger, Sarah Everard etc. Indeed, one can see from your summary of the various responses from politicians that each to an extent sees the shootings as the consequences of wider social ills, whatever they might be.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights
Why are they mutually exclusive? I don't have strong views on your proposed explanation, but we have plenty of disaffected people in Britain yet manage to keep our mass shootings down to single figures per decade.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Is it? Would it be too much to ask for some substantiation of what is quite an outlandish and uncharitable characterisation?
And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.
There is almost no-one anywhere is the West who would agree that this at all resembles their view.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
This is definitely true, and Hemenway has actually also done some good work on this front, but in fairness high-end DGU estimates go way higher than 'several hundred thousand'. The one I see a lot is 2.5 million which originates from a rubbish Kleck and Gertz study from the 90s.
And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.
That wasn't my comment.
Chicago is such a useful example of the people who claim to want to solve the nations' problems absolutely failing to achieve any of their stated goals, though!
No isn't because one data point cannot prove that. For all we know, Chicago may well have even more violence than it does already if gun control was relaxed. It may not of course, but simply pointing to one city proves nothing. Numbers are your friend.
Also, I will reiterate that it's very difficult for cities to control guns on their own, national or at least state level action is much more effective.
If you want to save lives, THAT is where you need to start.
I agree that gun suicides are very important to tackle! That why I support ERPOs and waiting periods which have been shown to effectively prevent suicides.
And there are multiple countries that have strict gun laws and much higher suicide rates. Japan and South Korea as glaring examples here.
Again, this proves nothing.
This suggests that, again, guns are not the driving or decisive factor here, and it would probably be better to investigate root causes rather than going after firearms directly.
Are they mutually exclusive? Governments aren't limited to one policy response per issue.
Would you support a ban on matches, lighter fluid, and fireworks, or other implements that can be used for arson
Probably not because the social cost of the arson facilitated by those items probably doesn't outweigh the value we get from their benign applications.
There's little evidence that a person who is legally carrying a firearm on their person imposes a 'wider social cost' in this respect, incidentally
Well they do, in part a) firearms are not tied to a person and more firearms in general circulation is bad for public safety, and more importantly b) even if they were SDGUs aren't that great compared to the average, and in consequence the expected utility for even a legal owner is negative given the facilitation of an easier suicide, accidents etc.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
There is generally a sense among gun owners that there have always been more concessions to be made. Any "compromise" with gun owners needs to be an actual compromise, not just a "you lose one more inch" style compromise.
This is just sort of politics though, and it happens on every other issue. Gun owners like to use phrases like 'one more inch' quite a lot but the reality is that these things do go back and forth. Sometimes they lose inches, sometimes they gain them back (see Heller, Assault Weapons Ban, NYSRPA v. Bruen etc. etc.).
but they can't keep making up all their own restrictions and bullshit.
I mean this sort of thing really does seem like an unequal compromise because it amounts to putting a hard cap on gun control but still allowing very lax states. Why would Democrats agree to that, especially when all polling indicates that gun control is a winning issue for them?
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Canada in particular is very "iron fist in velvet glove" about it.
And then they do shit like shut off your bank account if you protest.
You're theory being that if the truckers were armed the Canadian government would have been... less harsh? If anything that would surely make them come down like a ton of bricks.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Well not really because gun control is, at least from a policy perspective, relatively tractable, and from a political perspective many good measures are well inside the Overton window. 'Reworking America into a more conservative culture' will never happen, at least not whole cloth and not in a way where the results will be easily predictable and definitely translate into a more stable society.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday
I'm not settling on either side here, but this seems a little uncharitable. For one, in one sense even if no-one ever reads most of the stuff produced, and if (and I accept this may not be the case but nevertheless, if) lawsuits filed are on relatively substantive grounds rather than trivial procedural matters then the work is still important. Because, presumably, if a Title IX coordinator felt that a particular aspect of college administration did not comply the college would be anxious to make the appropriate changes, which if one agrees with the thrust of Title IX is a good thing.
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial. Now this seems very hard to assess given that presumably the ones covered in the media are selected for the most interesting and meaningful ones, but a cursory search does throw up lots of cases that do seem at least somewhat worthwhile. Plenty of cases on the need for a fair shake to be given to accused students prior to expulsion, one about a kid who died from alcohol poising following an initiation (the parents demanding tighter restrictions on such) and yes lots of cases about women's athletics. Not, I appreciate, a life or death issue but a 'real' thing in the sense that Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Why the hell was Haidak kicked out in the first place? Because Title IX has been interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships!
Can't say for certain of course but I am fairly confident that universities would want to punish rape/sexual assault quite harshly even without Title IX.
The key question is whether the benefits of Title IX outweigh the costs
Well sure but that doesn't really address the question of the bullshit-ness of the jobs, that's then just an ordinary policy debate.
Did it hasten an ongoing process? If so, then the regulatory cost was onerous and the fact that we're still paying it is stupid. Did Title IX instead fundamentally re-engineer a piece of American society, forcing a change to which Americans would have otherwise never consented? If so, then the price was even more onerous, paid in liberty instead of dollars. As far as I can tell, Title IX itself can only either have been unnecessary (in which case: it spawned mostly bullshit jobs), or necessary, in which case it is seriously objectionable on other grounds.
I suspect that as you suggest the growth of women's sports was happening anyway but nonetheless Title IX accelerated and shaped those changes (same for the other areas that Title IX impacts).
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
If that's the case I don't think the 'bullshit jobs' framework adds anything useful, because then it really just is a substitute for 'I don't agree with the policy goals the work being done aims toward'.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Insofar as in toto most Western governments control the supply of guns pretty well despite the apparent threat of 3-D printed guns. Some individual instances of them being used hardly disproves that picture.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Well if you think that side of things is tractable, what plausible policy responses do you think would meaningfully move us in that direction that actually have a chance of being implemented?
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
If it's not the most significant factor, then almost by definition you shouldn't be prioritizing it.
My position is that there are at least a couple more significant factors that are studiously ignored when it comes to this issue.
This circles back to our comments above on tractability.
well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?
No but the point is that an armed population, if they are ever able to resist the state, will not always be doing so to benefit of the population. As another commentor has observed, the latter and post-Reconstruction era South would have been a much freer place were the entire population disarmed.
tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces
Maybe true, but I don't think it holds any lessons for modern day America.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
It's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification
Absurd strawman. Whether you find it convincing or not there is plenty of literature on the benefits of various gun control policies, and more generally on the benefits of low firearm ownership rates. Not saying you have to agree with its conclusions, but don't pretend there isn't any such literature.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
So what would you estimate the 'social cost' of those 15 or so million people who use firearms without harming anyone being unable to hunt is?
Hard to say of course, but bear in mind none of the potential restrictions mooted by any mainstream figures in the U.S. would seriously damage hunting or shooting for sport in the U.S. After all we still have both of those in Britain.
This seems obviously confounded by factors that contribute to suicide and accidents independently of gun ownership.
So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.
In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.
We make policy for aggregates, not individuals. Whether for some people owning a gun might be a net positive is irrelevant, society-wide they seem to do more harm than good which is the relevant point.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Almost all the polling you're talking about is vague preference polling
No. AWB, ERPOs, safe storage laws, licensing and raising minimum ages all consistently get comfortable majorities.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
He lost by nine points in an R+5 PVI state in a Democratic presidential mid-term. Shocking.
Republicans won the House elections by 20 points overall.
True, but firearms don't seem to be a uniquely effective self-defence weapon, or at least there is some tentative evidence in that direction.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743515001188?via%3Dihub#s0010
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