10 ms·

> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spe

by umvi 5y ago

> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties. The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives. For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are virtually nil. Yet, every time one happens there's a big frenzy to enact anti-gun policies. So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides.

th0ma5 5y ago
Yes police shoot and kill more people that mass shootings. But also covid has killed more police than people have.
seph-reed 5y ago
What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided? For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats. "While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."
- Sevii 5y ago
  Sure but then politics becomes about controlling what's on those tests.
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    That's a good thing. Having a giant political flamewar about how critical thinking should work has good potential to result in mutual destruction. If you really play it out in your head, critical thinking is pretty hard to abuse because it tends to lean away from blind trust. Every trick that could be taught to get people not to trust your enemy, is one less way you can take advantage of them yourself.
    - abnipl 5y ago
      I have my doubts. People can learn “critical thinking skills” all they want, it’s the failure to apply them fairly that breaks political discourse at all levels of education. People don’t investigate statements that conform to their biases. And if the statement is something they don’t want to believe, people will deploy the full force of their “critical thinking” toolkit to fight it, while allowing themselves to become vulnerable to all sorts of fallacies and cognitive blinders as long as it only obscures the inconvenient facts.
      - seph-reed 5y ago
        But compare that to someone who has no critical thinking skills at all. Further, at least some people will be clever enough to use critical thinking on their own beliefs. Maybe some will only use it to further entrench, but not all. And it only takes a few amazing people to push society forwards; that's all we've ever really had.
- silverscania 5y ago
  That would be great, but it would be gamed so badly. Like those lists of "over 500 scientists have signed a document saying 5G is harmful to health so it must be true". When actually half of the people on the list aren't real people and the rest of them are political scientologists, dentists and people who know absolutely nothing about radio waves.
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    Hopefully, anyone who had taken even introductory critical-thinking would recognize what was going on there and throw the article out. If the worry is, "this is one more way to convince non-critical people of things," I'm pretty sure that's a lost cause to begin with.
vowelless 5y ago
> For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Adjusted for how armed Americans are, gun violence in this country is tiny. And seeing what an armed citizenry can do against the full American force (Afghanistan), an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  The ongoing and ramped up tyrannies don't affect the people with guns, so it's not doing much good so far. When the oppressed arm themselves, people who claim opposition to gun control suddenly become very pro-gun control.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    It was all guns rights until the black panthers started arming up, and all the sudden it was "perhaps some sensible limits might be wise" Pretty hard to miss the intent. Arm the homeless is what I say when I'm feeling spicy.
    - lostapathy 5y ago
      This shouldn't be downvoted - the roots of control in the US are absolutely rooted in this kind of racism, whether it be "modern" gun control as mentioned by parent, or the Sullivan Act over a hundred years ago.
      - splitstud 5y ago
        Why shouldn't it? It's a complete and total fabrication used to smear a segment of the population.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Clubber 5y ago
      Yup, California was an open carry state until the GOP assemblyman Mulford and GOP Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act into law banning the legal carry of loaded firearms. History is indeed stranger than fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[1][2] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.
babyshake 5y ago
Your chances of dying in a mass shooting may be very small, but it doesn't take a large number of shootings to start affecting our lives. For example, events like First Friday in Oakland have been essentially cancelled indefinitely and most public events have large numbers of heavily armed police standing around and getting paid for overtime.
- ksdale 5y ago
  But is this essentially like arguing that terrorism justifies all of the security theater at the airport?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  But then the thing causing the damage isn't actually the shootings, it's the reaction to them. It's the same thing as the War on Terror. The enemy in the War on Terror is Terror, i.e. Fear. The only way to win the War on Terror is to overcome your fear and not sacrifice your principles because you're afraid. The British had it in the 20th Century. Stiff upper lip. Or you'll do more damage to yourself than the enemy can.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
myohmy 5y ago
Be careful with that reasoning. Its illegal for the CDC to study gun violence as a public health measure. If that happened it might rank on child mortality rates.
- flyingfences 5y ago
  It is not, and never has been, illegal for the CDC to study gun violence. One specific part of their budget that had been earmarked for those studies was reallocated once. That's the extent of the so-called "ban" that the politicians keep harping on about.
  - nitwit005 5y ago
    That re-allocation did happen, but it also came with wording that effectively barred from doing any research until a recent change to the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment
908B64B197 5y ago
What's interesting is how all these policies focus on banning legal guns. Now, try asking in a debate the proportion of crimes committed with legal weapons vs illegal weapons and watch your opponent start dancing around the question! Good luck getting a straight answer.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004. I bet the data is available, but you'd have to comb through court records yourself. Even at that point, "legally obtained" still included borrowing one from a friend or family member.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004 That's interesting! Why would they hide such stats?
    - devilbunny 5y ago
      Because it runs counter to the narrative of gun control advocates. Almost no gun crime is committed with legally obtained guns by previously law-abiding people. The pro-2A response to gun control requests based on crime is often to say "don't ban my guns - just make 'felon in possession of a gun' a life-without-parole offense".
- dmwallin 5y ago
  All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. It's a very leaky pipeline, one in which the industry and industry funded lobby groups have at least a bit of a mixed incentive to solve. The vast majority of the proposed gun-control laws focus on tightening up the leakiest parts of the supply chain, or on reducing the overall demand for various firearms.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides. It's also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem, well, like two thirds of US firearms fatalities are suicides. So a real solution is going to look like "improve mental health" and not "restrict who can buy a gun" or else you're only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide, or keeping people "alive" but still in such a precarious mental state that the only thing preventing them from taking their own life is access to an effective means. Neither of which is actually acceptable. But from a political perspective, proposing useless gun restrictions makes the other team have to spend political capital to oppose them, because even if they're completely ineffective at their stated purpose, they upset or inconvenience the other team's constituents. Which seems to be the goal of modern US politics.
- baix777 5y ago
  It is interesting to compare US vs Canadian suicide rates to see what impact gun ownership could have. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0232252 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
  - falcrist 5y ago
    While I agree with the idea that removing a quick and accessible means of suicide can reduce suicide rates, there's a huge caveat on that article. > we did not have the ability to control for differences between the two countries including poverty, unemployment, health systems, cultural, or other differences The authors go on to suggest that they may in fact be underestimating the amount of suicides that could be averted with reduced gun ownership, but there are an awful lot of confounding factors that are simply not addressed in this paper.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  > improve mental health I think that this is a poor target. How do you set out directly targeting mental health? What are the biggest causes of mental health issues? https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm CDC lists causes such as childhood trauma, trauma from medical issues, biological factors, alcohol or drugs, and loneliness or isolation. How do you set out to tackle loneliness or isolation? How do you help prevent alcohol or drug addiction? What are the reasons that people become addicted to drugs or alcohol? > Use and misuse of alcohol, nicotine, and illicit drugs, and misuse of prescription drugs cost Americans more than $700 billion a year in increased health care costs, crime, and lost productivity. https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/introduction https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior... > Some must cope with the early loss of a parent, violence, or sexual abuse. While not everyone who faces these stresses develops a mood disorder — in fact, most do not — stress plays an important role in depression. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-depression https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-dep... This is a big interconnected problem. My point is that just giving directly to mental health resources rings hollow. A tougher holistic approach needs to examine why American society just plain sucks for so many people. Why do people want to kill themselves or others? Why does life suck so much for so many? We have a rotten system and drug addiction/gun violence/suicide are symptoms and not causes. My 2 rambling cents.
clairity 5y ago
guns have a tendency to escalate violence and harm (vs. say, fists), which is a real problem, but yes, the focus on terrorism and mass shootings is entirely unjustified vis-à-vis guns and gun policy. suicide by gun (20-30K/yr) happens twice as often as homicide (10-15K/yr), and non-fatal injury rates are ~3 times the fatality rate (80-100K/yr). almost none of those involve terrorism or mass shooting (combined, on the order of 100/yr).
andrewfong 5y ago
It's not entirely unreasonable to regulate on the basis of psychic impact over straight up mortality. Not saying our focus on mass shootings over suicide necessarily makes sense, but the collective trauma of 20 kids dying in a school shooting is arguably higher than the equivalent number of deaths by suicides.

by umvi 5y ago

th0ma5 5y ago

Yes police shoot and kill more people that mass shootings. But also covid has killed more police than people have.

seph-reed 5y ago

What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided? For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats. "While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."

Sevii 5y ago
Sure but then politics becomes about controlling what's on those tests.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  That's a good thing. Having a giant political flamewar about how critical thinking should work has good potential to result in mutual destruction. If you really play it out in your head, critical thinking is pretty hard to abuse because it tends to lean away from blind trust. Every trick that could be taught to get people not to trust your enemy, is one less way you can take advantage of them yourself.
  - abnipl 5y ago
    I have my doubts. People can learn “critical thinking skills” all they want, it’s the failure to apply them fairly that breaks political discourse at all levels of education. People don’t investigate statements that conform to their biases. And if the statement is something they don’t want to believe, people will deploy the full force of their “critical thinking” toolkit to fight it, while allowing themselves to become vulnerable to all sorts of fallacies and cognitive blinders as long as it only obscures the inconvenient facts.
    - seph-reed 5y ago
      But compare that to someone who has no critical thinking skills at all. Further, at least some people will be clever enough to use critical thinking on their own beliefs. Maybe some will only use it to further entrench, but not all. And it only takes a few amazing people to push society forwards; that's all we've ever really had.
silverscania 5y ago
That would be great, but it would be gamed so badly. Like those lists of "over 500 scientists have signed a document saying 5G is harmful to health so it must be true". When actually half of the people on the list aren't real people and the rest of them are political scientologists, dentists and people who know absolutely nothing about radio waves.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  Hopefully, anyone who had taken even introductory critical-thinking would recognize what was going on there and throw the article out. If the worry is, "this is one more way to convince non-critical people of things," I'm pretty sure that's a lost cause to begin with.

vowelless 5y ago

> For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Adjusted for how armed Americans are, gun violence in this country is tiny. And seeing what an armed citizenry can do against the full American force (Afghanistan), an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.

mkr-hn 5y ago
The ongoing and ramped up tyrannies don't affect the people with guns, so it's not doing much good so far. When the oppressed arm themselves, people who claim opposition to gun control suddenly become very pro-gun control.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  It was all guns rights until the black panthers started arming up, and all the sudden it was "perhaps some sensible limits might be wise" Pretty hard to miss the intent. Arm the homeless is what I say when I'm feeling spicy.
  - lostapathy 5y ago
    This shouldn't be downvoted - the roots of control in the US are absolutely rooted in this kind of racism, whether it be "modern" gun control as mentioned by parent, or the Sullivan Act over a hundred years ago.
    - splitstud 5y ago
      Why shouldn't it? It's a complete and total fabrication used to smear a segment of the population.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Clubber 5y ago
    Yup, California was an open carry state until the GOP assemblyman Mulford and GOP Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act into law banning the legal carry of loaded firearms. History is indeed stranger than fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[1][2] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.

babyshake 5y ago

Your chances of dying in a mass shooting may be very small, but it doesn't take a large number of shootings to start affecting our lives. For example, events like First Friday in Oakland have been essentially cancelled indefinitely and most public events have large numbers of heavily armed police standing around and getting paid for overtime.

ksdale 5y ago
But is this essentially like arguing that terrorism justifies all of the security theater at the airport?
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
But then the thing causing the damage isn't actually the shootings, it's the reaction to them. It's the same thing as the War on Terror. The enemy in the War on Terror is Terror, i.e. Fear. The only way to win the War on Terror is to overcome your fear and not sacrifice your principles because you're afraid. The British had it in the 20th Century. Stiff upper lip. Or you'll do more damage to yourself than the enemy can.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

myohmy 5y ago

Be careful with that reasoning. Its illegal for the CDC to study gun violence as a public health measure. If that happened it might rank on child mortality rates.

flyingfences 5y ago
It is not, and never has been, illegal for the CDC to study gun violence. One specific part of their budget that had been earmarked for those studies was reallocated once. That's the extent of the so-called "ban" that the politicians keep harping on about.
- nitwit005 5y ago
  That re-allocation did happen, but it also came with wording that effectively barred from doing any research until a recent change to the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

908B64B197 5y ago

What's interesting is how all these policies focus on banning legal guns. Now, try asking in a debate the proportion of crimes committed with legal weapons vs illegal weapons and watch your opponent start dancing around the question! Good luck getting a straight answer.

Teknoman117 5y ago
Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004. I bet the data is available, but you'd have to comb through court records yourself. Even at that point, "legally obtained" still included borrowing one from a friend or family member.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004 That's interesting! Why would they hide such stats?
  - devilbunny 5y ago
    Because it runs counter to the narrative of gun control advocates. Almost no gun crime is committed with legally obtained guns by previously law-abiding people. The pro-2A response to gun control requests based on crime is often to say "don't ban my guns - just make 'felon in possession of a gun' a life-without-parole offense".
dmwallin 5y ago
All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. It's a very leaky pipeline, one in which the industry and industry funded lobby groups have at least a bit of a mixed incentive to solve. The vast majority of the proposed gun-control laws focus on tightening up the leakiest parts of the supply chain, or on reducing the overall demand for various firearms.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides. It's also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem, well, like two thirds of US firearms fatalities are suicides. So a real solution is going to look like "improve mental health" and not "restrict who can buy a gun" or else you're only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide, or keeping people "alive" but still in such a precarious mental state that the only thing preventing them from taking their own life is access to an effective means. Neither of which is actually acceptable. But from a political perspective, proposing useless gun restrictions makes the other team have to spend political capital to oppose them, because even if they're completely ineffective at their stated purpose, they upset or inconvenience the other team's constituents. Which seems to be the goal of modern US politics.

baix777 5y ago
It is interesting to compare US vs Canadian suicide rates to see what impact gun ownership could have. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0232252 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- falcrist 5y ago
  While I agree with the idea that removing a quick and accessible means of suicide can reduce suicide rates, there's a huge caveat on that article. > we did not have the ability to control for differences between the two countries including poverty, unemployment, health systems, cultural, or other differences The authors go on to suggest that they may in fact be underestimating the amount of suicides that could be averted with reduced gun ownership, but there are an awful lot of confounding factors that are simply not addressed in this paper.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
> improve mental health I think that this is a poor target. How do you set out directly targeting mental health? What are the biggest causes of mental health issues? https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm CDC lists causes such as childhood trauma, trauma from medical issues, biological factors, alcohol or drugs, and loneliness or isolation. How do you set out to tackle loneliness or isolation? How do you help prevent alcohol or drug addiction? What are the reasons that people become addicted to drugs or alcohol? > Use and misuse of alcohol, nicotine, and illicit drugs, and misuse of prescription drugs cost Americans more than $700 billion a year in increased health care costs, crime, and lost productivity. https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/introduction https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior... > Some must cope with the early loss of a parent, violence, or sexual abuse. While not everyone who faces these stresses develops a mood disorder — in fact, most do not — stress plays an important role in depression. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-depression https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-dep... This is a big interconnected problem. My point is that just giving directly to mental health resources rings hollow. A tougher holistic approach needs to examine why American society just plain sucks for so many people. Why do people want to kill themselves or others? Why does life suck so much for so many? We have a rotten system and drug addiction/gun violence/suicide are symptoms and not causes. My 2 rambling cents.

clairity 5y ago

guns have a tendency to escalate violence and harm (vs. say, fists), which is a real problem, but yes, the focus on terrorism and mass shootings is entirely unjustified vis-à-vis guns and gun policy. suicide by gun (20-30K/yr) happens twice as often as homicide (10-15K/yr), and non-fatal injury rates are ~3 times the fatality rate (80-100K/yr). almost none of those involve terrorism or mass shooting (combined, on the order of 100/yr).

andrewfong 5y ago

It's not entirely unreasonable to regulate on the basis of psychic impact over straight up mortality. Not saying our focus on mass shootings over suicide necessarily makes sense, but the collective trauma of 20 kids dying in a school shooting is arguably higher than the equivalent number of deaths by suicides.