Guns and You

Seriously?

• It's actually impossible to learn anything about the effectiveness of gun control in the US. Everybody is so full of hyperbole and whatever that logic error where you jump from one easily proved conclusion to some other, much more squirrely, conclusion is just maddening. It's a world of confirmation bias out there and it makes it hard for this INTJ to think.

• Here's Warren Ellis on gun control. The essay starts out somewhat reasonably but then devolves into hyperbole without really any reasoning. The fact is that it is exceedingly unlikely that any individual person will be killed by any guns anywhere in the United States. But, like being killed in an airplane, or eaten by sharks, we over-focus on "massacres" when in fact your kid is much more likely to be killed (if it's by a gun) on their way to school during a single homicide. Or, as they say, a Colombine happens every day in America. It just, er, happens as "gang-related" violence. (Go ahead, read that the way it's intended. "Gang-related" = what now? You go ahead and think about what that might be code for.)

• On the opposite side of the nutter spectrum  is this bit of link-bait from the Atlantic.

• Do you like fun facts? Nobody is allowed to use government money to study gun violence.  This generally helps explain the levels of malarky in the gun control debate. Nobody has any real facts. See point number one.

So here are some fun things. Did you know* that most people think that fully automatic weapons are used in most shootings? Yes. It's because the press and media do such a crap job of explaining anything and love to refer to "automatic weapons" all the time.** This confuses people into thinking of them as fully automatic weapons.
For all practical purposes fully automatic weapons are illegal in the US. Nobody has them. And they're not used in crimes. They just aren't.
And there's no practical difference between an "assault weapon" and a "hunting rifle". In military terms an assault weapon has selectable rates of fire. But none of the guns used in any of the recent murders were fully-automatic. As far as I can tell, an "assault weapon" is one with a pistol grip and maybe painted black rather than having a walnut stock.

So what is my conclusion with all this? That we cannot use emotions or whatever the most recent tragedy was to inform our decisions. If we want to cut down the murder rate we can't retreat into our own confirmation bias (whether that's the "give every schoolchild a gun!" or "take away all the black guns!")

Unfortunately, and this is the gun lobby's fault, we cannot get any real information in order to make rational decisions.

Sigh.

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*This is the result of an incredibly scientific survey I did of my dad.
**Do not get the impression that this is the "liberal media's" bias. They don't explain anything well. Just think of something you know quite a bit about or are an expert in. Now think of how the media bungles it every time they mention it. See? It's just them being stupid, not them being ideological.