- Jay Ashworth I have a follow up here, but I can't be bothered to post it until Facebook starts getting my voice right. Of course this worked perfectly. Tomorrow.
- Jay Ashworth Lead/Drum. Abortions/Leavitt&Dubner. Guns/Kennesaw.
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth It's about time. The TV series
- Abadox Pilgrim Interesting Read. My thing is although it is certain we are less violent then people before its the speed and quantity of lives that can be easily taken faster because technically advanced weaponary before in the past a KDR could never be achieved higher then today. That's what I'm thinking about.
- Alan Petrillo KDR?
- Abadox Pilgrim Kill death ratio measurement also depending how teched out your Gat is. Like even that American sniper dude Chris Kyle said he couldn't have killed that many without mods of today lol
- Alan Petrillo I assume your point is about assault style rifles. But here's the thing about that. If you look at the FBI's expanded weapons data then you'll find that "rifles" are the weapons of choice in only 3% of homicides by firearm, and 2% of homicides overall. You can talk all you want about assault style rifles being "modern killing machines", but even if you assume that every single homicide committed with a rifle is committed with an assault style rifle you still can't get past that 2% statistic. If assault style rifles were as dangerous as their detractors claim then they would be used in a MUCH higher fraction of homicides than they actually are. OTOH, depending on how you massage the data, between 68% and 90% of homicides by firearm are committed with handguns.
- Abadox Pilgrim I'm talking every weapon man made up to a atomic bomb. You can't deny the progression of tech.
- Alan Petrillo And for all that, as Steven Pinker wrote about in /The Better Angels Of Our Nature/, we are killing fewer of each other than ever before.
- Geo Rule The science of rockets is dead simple. Now, the engineering. . . .
Both sides of the gun control issue say this.
“Take away the guns,” gun control advocates say, “and society will be safer and less violent. It isn’t rocket science.”
“Let people have guns to defend themselves,” gun rights advocates say, “and criminals will be less tempted to commit crimes, and society will be safer. It isn’t rocket science.”
They’re both right, but not in the way they think. The effects of gun control on society are, in fact, not rocket science.
Rocket science is simpler.
Rockets follow precise laws. Rocket engines follow well understood laws of chemistry and thermodynamics. Launch pad technology is plumbing, electricity, hydraulics, electronics, and communications, all of which are well understood. When they’re launched, rockets follow the laws of Newtonian physics in ways that are well known, well modeled, and precisely predictable.
Society, on the other hand, is made up of people, who are not nearly so orderly. People are subject to things like illusions, biases, groupthink, and any number of factors that influence their behavior. Will more restrictive gun control laws decrease the violence in society? Possibly. Gun control is certainly part of a civilized society. Is it the panacea for violence reduction that gun control advocates seem to think it is? Probably not. You’ll note the ambiguity in those statements. That is intentional, because definite statements cannot be made on this issue with any degree of veracity.
The thing is that violence has already declined, not only in America, but worldwide. Despite what people might think about how violent we are today, we are markedly less violent than in the past, even the recent past. A number of people have written on this subject, most notably, Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels Of Our Nature.
Pinker wrote about the illusions and assumptions that affect people’s perceptions of violence. Among these illusions is the idea that gun control by itself will reduce violence. He noted that while gun control is a factor it is not the panacea that gun control advocates claim. Pinker notes this even though he himself is in favor of stricter gun control.
Dr. Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Julia Bowling, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School Of Law, wrote extensively on this issue in their paper What Caused The Crime Decline.
Roeder, Eisen, and Bowling’s conclusion? Nobody knows with any degree of certainty why violence has declined. Again we see that while gun control is a factor it is not the all important keystone that gun control advocates claim.
The same applies to the “more guns = less crime” crowd. Their logic has been so thoroughly refuted in so many places that I can’t even comment on it because wading into that cesspool of illogic makes me want to scream just as much as the equally illogical extreme gun control does. And again they say “it isn’t rocket science.”
No, gun control isn’t rocket science. If it were rocket science then we could plug policy decisions into a computer model and get precisely predictable results out. But people and societies are more complex even than rockets, and we find that social science is orders of magnitude more complex and nuanced than rocket science, so there are no such models.
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