This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Visualizing the 2021 National Firearms Survey
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/visualizing-the-2021-national-firearms
tags: [guns][self promotion][data visualization]
Summary:
William English of Georgetown collaborated with Centiment to poll 54,244 people about gun ownership, and develop a detailed picture of what ratio of the country owns guns, what kinds, what ratio of the country has used a gun in self defense, and such. It's the largest and most detailed attempt ever made in this research space as far as I'm aware, and I'm aware of many such attempts by academics. This article graphs a lot of his results, but instead of graphing them within the context of the research, graphs them against other known quantities to put them into wider perspective.
Findings:
There are 33% more people in the USA who own AR-15 styled rifles than the entire Asian population.
There are approximately as many people in the USA who own magazines larger than 10 round capacity as there are black people.
"Assault weapons bans" would generally require 12% of the entire population to register their firearms or be in felonious noncompliance, a number of people roughly equal to the entire population of California
By ratio, this is equal to 2012 people required to register for every 1 firearm homicide
There are 19 times more AR-15 owners than the entire active duty rolls of the US military
There are 410 times more AR-15 owners than there were Taliban fighters at the time the US military lost to the Taliban
There are 14,000 AR-15 owners for every ATF field agent
Across all states, between 20% and 44% of gun owners own an AR-15 styled rifle
For every gun murder in the USA in 2020, there were 86 defensive gun uses. Note that the poll took a broad definition of DGU here, including instances where the firearm was not discharged or potentially even brandished
44% of black gun owners have used a gun in self defense
27% of female gun owners have used a gun in self defense
Meta:
Nice site you got here folks! I'm curious whether it can support different forums, so that instead of the CW thread being a thread it could simply be different posts within a separate containment forum.
For comparison with the black and female DGU numbers:
29.7% of white gun owners
44.7% of Native American gun owners
33.8% of male gun owners
I’d imagine a big correlation with SES, obviously, and there’s probably also an effect from ownership rates. The absolute numbers vs. population numbers ought to be interesting. Does the original paper give statistics versus income bracket? I can’t make an account to view it right now.
As for your overall article, I think it comes across as disingenuous. This is despite the fact that I agree with your conclusion, generally oppose gun control, proudly own [REMOVED BY REDDIT] guns, etc.! You editorialize in the captions: “don’t have to add name to registry (yet)”. You flip-flop on the “instant felons” term, qualifying it the first time but not at the end. I don’t know why you added the Taliban as the smallest entry on a graph titled “potential enforcement groups.” And you have some pretty strong (falsifiable) statements—in particular,
This neglects at least two non-trivial groups: the stupid and the newly desperate. Even though that doesn’t change the conclusion, since most people don’t mind inconveniencing the bottom percentile of criminals, you are opening yourself up to cheap gotchas.
If you want to be convincing to everyone, rather than just your side, I think you could benefit from more caution. Make your graphs look studiously neutral; the numbers are ridiculous enough to speak for themselves. Take more care with your hyperbole. Personally, I loved the grocery example, especially the “851 stores” stinger.
Thanks for putting these together.
I found the stinger unconvincing, actually. That's still too many gun deaths.
Sure. I agree that any number of gun homicides is bad. How much should we pay to reduce it?
If I could give up my guns and somehow prevent all gun homicides, I'd do it in an instant. Even if it were "only" bringing us down to Australia levels (33,333 stores), I'd be enthusiastically on board. Registering would be even less onerous for me.
We can't do that. The genie is out of the bottle, and current efforts to stuff it back in are unconvincing. This is especially true for assault-weapons registries--only a fraction of homicides, even gun homicides, are committed with rifles. Few criminals (though I couldn't confirm data for homicides, specifically) used guns obtained from a store. It's easy to view this as an attack on the symbol of the black rifle, which by its very popularity is a promising target. More charitably, targeting AR-15s in the wake of one or another mass shooting is addressing high-profile incidents rather than root causes.
So gun owners are being asked to give something for next to nothing. Those 2,012 registrations aren't going to prevent a gun death. At best they will prevent some fraction of one. En masse, maybe this pushes us from 851 stores to 852 or to 1,000. It still won't be enough to make a difference to you, or to legislators who didn't have to pay any of the cost, and the vise will continue to tighten.
I didn't say anything about banning rifles. But reversing Heller and restricting handguns should help.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link