Gun Control i.e. The Illusion of Safety

In a post Connecticut tragedy America, the left has decided the best thing to do to prevent another tragedy is to begin debating new gun control laws. As I stated in a previous post, this seems like a no brainer, right until you actually think about it. In my previous post I viewed gun control generally, but now that some time has passed we can evaluate more closely what has actually come up for debate. Sen. Feinstein has pledged to introduce legislation in January that essentially revives the old assault weapons ban.

Specificly, Sen. Feinstein has decided to:


"Following is a summary of the 2013 legislation:

• Bans the sale, transfer, importation, or manufacturing of:
• 120 specifically-named firearms
• Certain other semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns that can accept a detachable magazine and have one military characteristic
• Semiautomatic rifles and handguns with a fixed magazine that can accept more than 10 rounds
• Strengthens the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and various state bans by:
• Moving from a 2-characteristic test to a 1-characteristic test
• Eliminating the easy-to-remove bayonet mounts and flash suppressors from the characteristics test
• Banning firearms with “thumbhole stocks” and “bullet buttons” to address attempts to “work around” prior bans
• Bans large-capacity ammunition feeding devices capable of accepting more than 10 rounds. 
• Protects legitimate hunters and the rights of existing gun owners by:
• Grandfathering weapons legally possessed on the date of enactment
• Exempting over 900 specifically-named weapons used for hunting or sporting purposes and
• Exempting antique, manually-operated, and permanently disabled weapons
• Requires that grandfathered weapons be registered under the National Firearms Act, to include:
• Background check of owner and any transferee;
• Type and serial number of the firearm;
• Positive identification, including photograph and fingerprint;
• Certification from local law enforcement of identity and that possession would not violate State or local law; and
• Dedicated funding for ATF to implement registration"

Source: http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/assault-weapons

First, and most obviously, even if this is effective, it will not prevent the next tragedy. As many have pointed out, the Connecticut shooter procured his guns from his mother, a legal gun owner, after killing her. So, assuming this was in effect before the Connecticut killing, and was effective, all that would have happened is that the killer would have used different guns. Maybe (see more below). Not one life would have been spared as a result.

Secondly, how does addressing bayonet mounts, bullet buttons and thumbhole stocks make us safer as a nation? In no mass shooting that I am aware of has anyone ever been bayoneted to death. Gunman use the most deadly feature of a gun to kill people, namely the GUN part. Since this does not address the access to the gun part, this seems just plain stupid (i.e. because bans an assault weapons are just bans on cosmetic features and specific makes, not on access to rifles in general). But then I am no gun expert, so maybe someone can chime in and tell me how thumbhole stocks make guns more deadly?

Thirdly, grandfathering in old weapons just means that there is a huge supply of these supposedly extra deadly weapons available for psychopaths to procure. If the purpose of this is to make these specially deadly guns harder for psychos to get, how does grandfathering in all the currently held ones accomplish this goal? Similarly, adding a background check before transfer sounds good, until you realizes this gives people a way to sell assault weapons legally. How does enshrining a means of circumventing the law make it more effective? Again, the Connecticut shooter did not procure his guns legally, he killed his mother to get them and she was a legal owner. I have no doubt that she would have passed a background check.

So what can we conclude from this? That it will be completely ineffective. It's only purpose is so that law makers can tell their constituencies that they "did something", even if that something is stupid. Has there been any mention of strengthening our public mental health system? Nope. That would take money, effort, careful planning and intelligence, things in terribly short supply in Washington. I wish I could say I was surprised.

Connecticut Tragedy and Mental Illness

Today the second worst mass school killing in American history occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 27 people where killed, 20 of them children. Before I continue with my discussion of mental illness and this tragedy, I want to extend my heartfelt condolences to the victims and their families. Mere words will never be enough for those who have experienced first hand such loss, and I fear nothing that occurs in the aftermath will make the grieving any easier.

For those unaware, a 20 year old entered the school, armed with two pistols and committed mass murder. No motive is as yet found for his actions. What is known is that this man was the child of one of the teachers at the school. He killed this person, his mother, and himself during his rampage. Whether his mother was the target or not is unknown.

Since this tragedy happened, there has been a lot of focus on renewing the debate over gun control. In many ways this makes sense. So many senseless tragedies have occurred thanks to a madman armed with guns. Arguably, if these people did not have access to such weapons, they could not have killed so many people. Or so that line of reasoning goes.

Unfortunately, I believe this misses the most important aspect of gun violence, namely the person behind the murders. What I mean is that gun violence requires two things, a gun and a mad person to wield it. We focus on the guns because they are an easy target and obvious. Many believe that if we get rid of guns, the violence ends, or at least becomes less severe. This conclusion however, does not follow. If guns were the only means of committing mass murder, this might well follow. But they are not. One need think only of the middle east, where improvised explosives, often made from common household items, are used frequently to kill large numbers of people. Or, in China, where guns are less common, there have been a rash of school killings. They were committed by madmen wielding knives, cleavers and hatchets. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/asia/13china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& . Another such tragedy occurred in Wyoming, where a son killed his father in the middle of a school with a compound bow. http://news.yahoo.com/man-killed-father-wyoming-bow-arrow-attack-185326288.html . The point here is that violence can take many forms, and mass murders have occurred throughout history without the aid of guns. Guns may make things easier, but they are hardly the only means

So that leaves us to focus on the other half of the equation, the madman wielding the weapons intent on killing. Worth noting here, I use the term mad traditionally, meaning not sane. For can we truly doubt that a person capable of killing innocents and children is insane? Regardless, it is the person who wields the gun, blade, explosive, compound bow, or what have you, that we should focus on. For in learning about the people behind these tragedies, by finding what connects them, seeing the patterns of behavior that occur, can we find a way to truly prevent another mass killing from happening. What sort of ailments of the mind, twists of thought or other motivations lead to deciding to kill? And what can we do to nip them in the bud, before they flower into a terrible tragedy?

The first thing we need to do as a society is refocus on mental health and therapy. Mental illness is too often demonized and swept under the carpet. People with problems are viewed as inconvenient and ignored, allowed to slip through the cracks, until they pick a terrible means of bringing attention to themselves. Buddhist monks in Tibet immolate themselves as a means of protest against their oppressors. Madmen, it seems, choose to take quite a few more people with them. How much tragedy could we avert if these people had therapists who listened to them, helped them through the hard times, and had the freedom to restrain them should the need present itself. Unfortunately, too few people have access to a therapist; hell, many do not even have a familial safety net to go to for help with mental illness. More over, when people do go to see therapists, they are fed a melange of uppers, downers and antipsychotics. Rarely do they get actual therapy.

The reason why therapy has gone by the wayside is, surprisingly, insurance. It is much cheaper to meet with a therapist once or twice a year to adjust brain meds than it is to meet a therapist with a sympathetic ear once or twice a week to talk through your problems. Insurance, as a means of cost savings, have dictated this change. It is not a change for the better. While there is clinical evidence to suggest that monkeying around with people's brain chemistry can help alleviate the symptoms of mental illness, we know surprisingly little about the long term effects of using such medications. We know even less about how lifelong usage affects brain development. While I do not doubt that such medications can be helpful, I think focusing solely on them is a mistake. More over, I believe that their use should be a last resort, not a first. Our focus on cost is leading to, what I consider, substandard care, and the people who suffer are the mentally ill and their families.

Secondly, we as a society need to recognize that mental illness is far more prevalent than we have been led to believe. Most of these illnesses are benign. The alcoholic who is actually self medicating for depression, the kid who acts up in class due to ADD/ADHD, the social misfit with autism spectrum disorder, or the former honor role student who gets weird, is ostracized and then drops out of school (i.e. schizophrenia). Most of these people never do anything more drastic than engage in self destruction; though self destruction, like the Buddhist monks who self immolate, is often a call to action should anyone be listening. It is the rare person who follows their illness down the road to mass murder. But this does not change the prevalence of the underlying disorders.

So, knowing that these disorders are prevalent, we need to take greater steps as a society to safeguard ourselves from violence. After Columbine, most school districts enacted policies or legislation to make access to schools much more difficult for outsiders. Some schools going even so far as to install permanent security details and metal detectors. While I am not so sure that putting schools on lock down is necessarily the best solution, I think we need to study ways to make things safer. So the next time a madman walks into a school wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying multiple fire arms, that there is someone there to respond quickly and end the threat before the innocent suffer.

In Sandy Hook a 20 year old walked into the school, killed 27 people, 20 of them children, one of the adults was his mother. He was a former honor role student in his high school who dropped out and disappeared from society until he committed this heinous act. This mirrors what happened in Virginia Tech and many other mass killings. Read through a list of historical school shootings and you will notice that some patterns emerge. We should learn from this and do more as a society, not just in making weapons harder for madmen to get, but also in helping these troubled people before they choose to do something so heinous. For further reading, here is an ABC News story listing such tragedies: http://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-school-shootings-history/story?id=17975571#.UMwI1azhd8E . And once again, my condolences to the victims of today's tragedy, their families, and the victims of the many other historical mass killings.

Wrong Opinions

One of my pet peeves is the belief that there are no wrong opinions. This usually comes up when someone has said something stupid, been argued into a corner, and responds "Well, this is just my opinion... opinions can't be wrong". What the person is saying (and let's call this person Stator) is that they are expressing their own world view about a subject, and matters of taste are subjective. Thus, just because you don't agree, and hold a different subjective opinion, doesn't change the fact that this person holds a different subjective opinion.

Here's an example: My favorite color is yellow. Just because someone else likes blue doesn't change the fact that I prefer yellow. You can argue all you want about the cool aspects of the color blue, but I will continue to like the happy, warm glow of a bright yellow.

Strictly speaking, this is an opinion, and it can't be wrong unless I am lying to you about my love of yellow (which is entirely possible). But this is not really what annoys me. What annoys me is when people take it a step further. When someone says (pick a pop music singer, I will call this person Pop Princess): "Pop Princess is the greatest musician in the whole world!" What they mean is that they like this musician the most of any musician they have heard up till that point. What they are actually saying is that in the set of all people who can be referred to as musicians, this person is the best. This is an entirely different statement, and you can make many valid arguments that this is not in fact the case. This is when the person usually says that it is just their opinion and therefor can't be wrong.

Why is the latter statement different you ask? Because instead of being about the person making the statement (i.e. that THEY like Pop Princess) they are saying that she is the best musician. This statement can be evaluated. First we must figure out what the stator meant when he/she said "best" and what that person meant by "musician". If we can know these two facts we can start to evaluate a set of likely candidates for being better.

Why establish a definition of "best"? Because otherwise you will be talking past each other. If Stator is using the term to mean most prolific and you are using the term to mean most talented, then you could both be right, and still be arguing with each other because you don't know the other person means something else. But once this is established, it narrows the set of musicians down to a set property or properties that can be discussed productively.

This is also why defining the word "musician" is so important. You could both agree on what is meant by best, and still each come up with different people depending on what you mean by musician. For example, you could both agree that by best you mean most talented, and one person argue for a singer/songwriter, and another pick a composer. They both make music, it's just one does it with song and instrument, the other by writing large complicated chamber pieces on classical instruments.

But now that you have those two defined, i.e. the set of people who qualify as "musicians" and what qualifies as "best", you can now analyze the statement made at the top and see if it is in fact the case. And you can do it without one person being able to fall back on it being "just their opinion". The reason is that it is not in fact just their opinion, but a statement about the world that may or may not be reasonable. By such means we can do away with people relying on the statement "that's my opinion" and "opinions can't be wrong" in most cases (i.e. because most people who say that have wrongly used it on something which is not in fact merely an opinion).

Threats to Democracy

In this day and age, where heightened political partisanship and social and economic divisions have become common subjects of discussion in newspaper opinion pages, it has become common to refer to these divisions as threats to Democracy. First, and most obviously, this is an attempt by the author to demonize opposing political/social/economic views. But secondly, and most perniciously, it seems like the person stating these things really believes this to be the case, that there really is a threat to democracy. More specifically, the left has been targeting the US Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee and the right has been hitting on the growth of the welfare state and socialism as a threat to Democracy. Neither of these positions has any merit.

Firstly, Democracy is, as we all remember from elementary school social studies, a system of government where the citizens of a state get a say in how that state is run by voting for representatives in the governing body, if not always in directly voting for or against particular pieces of legislation. Historically, democracies have not been the most stable form of government. Neither the democratic states of ancient Greece or Rome survived in perpetuity. The Greek states fell apart and gave way to the Roman empire; and the Roman senate was dominated by virtual dictators called Caesars. In more modern times, democracies have been subject to military coups who instill the military as virtual dictators or single party rule where the citizenry gets little actual say in how their countries are run (think Russia under Putin and China's Communist Party). These are real ways Democracies fail and give way to dictatorships or oligarchies. These are examples of how Democracies fail.

Secondly, attempting to influence the Democratic process by presenting a view point to the public, whether that be the view of a corporation, a labor union or a politician, is not an attempt to usurp Democracy. Rather, it is participation in a dialogue designed to influence voters. Influencing voters is a time honored tradition as old as the worlds first Democracy in ancient Greece. It is up to the person listening to the argument, add, newspaper article or what have you, to think about the message contained there in and form an opinion about it. After thinking about the argument, the person can choose to be swayed or not by its arguments and vote accordingly. But it is still the person's choice and that person is still voting and participating in the Democratic process. Democracy remains healthy.

Now lets look at Citizens United. It is a decision by the US Supreme Court that says that the First Amendment right of freedom of speech extends not only to individuals, but to corporations as well. This allows corporations to buy advertising space on political issues, make political donations and generally participate in the campaign process where before campaign finance laws restricted them. It is assaulted by the left because they believe it gives corporate interests a larger role in politics which they see as corrupting the democratic process. Why it is they believe that business money is corrupting, but union contributions and individual contributions are not (aside from the fact that Corporations typically support Republican candidates while unions and individual donations tend to favor Democrats) has never been clear to me (not to say that I have not read anything on the subject, I have, but I have yet to be convinced by any of these arguments). The end result of the decision is that more money flows into political adds. The problem with claiming this is dangerous to Democracy is that it assumes people are easily lead automatons incapable of coming up with their own opinions or thinking about their own choices. It incorrectly assumes that influencing elections is the same as stealing people's right to choose how they vote. As long as people have the right to form their own opinions and vote how they choose, Democracy will remain healthy.

Similarly, lets look at the Republicans' arguments that socialist welfare states are ruinous to Democracy. The argument is that as more of the populace becomes dependent on big government, they are less likely to be able to vote against big government, even if that is in the best interests of the nation. They point to Europe as an example of how the welfare state can capture an entire society and bankrupt a nation. The problem here is very similar to that in the Democrats' argument against Citizens United, namely it conflates influence with removing people's ability to choose how they vote. It may well be true that people receiving government benefits are unlikely to vote against the people who promise these benefits to them, and that when these benefits get too large and too pervasive they can bankrupt a nation, but that does not mean that the populace lacks a real choice in how they vote. It just means that peoples' self interest can overpower their ability to rationally evaluate the long term impact of the programs they benefit from. But this doesn't mean that Democracy is unhealthy, just that politicians do a better job selling welfare than they do free enterprise. While people still have a meaningful say in the running of a nation, and the freedom to choose who they vote for, then Democracy is alive and well. Greece is still a Democracy, even now when it is bankrupt living hand to mouth from German and IMF loans.

So the rumors of Democracy's demise are greatly exaggerated. They are exaggerated by people who are trying to influence your reasoning in up coming elections and are part of a greater political debate in the world between big government and free enterprise. But these arguments should not be feared, they should be embraced. Because it is in argument, rhetoric, logic and communication that we work through our disparate view points and form consensus on how to run our various nations. This is part of a HEALTHY political debate. Saying that any particular means of argument or viewpoint is dangerous to Democracy as a whole is ludicrous. Such arguments only exist in a nation with freedom of speech and a healthy political dialogue.