I have tried not to talk about politics on Facebook, because that’s not the place for it, and it only annoys people, and it’s not what people want to hear about right after a terrible disaster.
No one else has tried this. I don’t think people who post about politics on Facebook all the time realize that everyone else who agrees with them is also posting about politics on Facebook all the time, and so every day I have to scroll through half a dozen image macros making fun of how stupid anyone who doesn’t want immediate gun control is, or catchy anti-NRA slogans. The day after the tragedy, there was almost nothing else in my entire newsfeed.
The posts are never “I think we need more gun control”. It’s always “Anyone who doesn’t want gun control has been brainwashed by the NRA and thinks school shootings are great.” I am constantly amazed by how small a buffer the average person has between “I don’t believe X” and “Believing X is irredeemably evil and we must mock and shame it until the very possibility of expressing it is beyond the pale”.
So this blog entry is for everyone who is posting angry calls to action on Facebook. It’s not intended to convince you that the pro-gunners are correct. I’m not even sure I believe that myself, although I will take that as a devil’s advocate position through most of the rest of this essay. It’s intended to convince you that being pro-gun is a sufficiently credible position that you should start to engage with it instead of just trying to mock and shame it.
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Compare Would Baning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence, published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and written by a liberal and conservative working together. Not only do I find their science much better controlled than the average Facebook variety, but they cite other research as well, some of which I’ve followed up on. And the overwhelming conclusion from people who do the math, whether they are liberal or conservative, is that gun control doesn’t work.
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I now think of myself as politically moderate, but the evidence against gun control is so strong I accepted it even back in college when I was super-liberal. Even researchers who previously reported correlations between gun control laws and homicide rates have later corrected themselves after getting new data. I won’t say the field is settled, because nothing ever is in population research, but it seems a heck of a lot more obviously-leaning-to-one-side than any of the health-related issues I usually research. I don’t want to have to turn this into posting twenty studies and then dissecting each one, but if anyone disagrees with my analysis of the consensus, I invite them to investigate the data themselves (“investigate” does not mean to Google “study that supports gun control” and then leap on the first one that you find).
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Okay, you remember the last terrorist attack? And how people wanted to do everything right now to make sure that it would never happen again? And you, as a reasonable sane liberal, pointed out that terrorist attacks killed fewer people than lightning bolts or meteor strikes or whatever, and you laughed at the naivete of people who were demanding a War On Terror rather than a War On Lightning just because they were gullible and the media had whipped them into a panic?
Right. School shootings kill fewer people each year than terrorist attacks. In fact, all large gun massacres that make the national news combined kill fewer people per year than terrorist attacks (the average year has more massacre deaths, but terrorist attacks, though rarer, are also bigger). Obviously the optimal number of either is zero. But if you think it’s outrageous that the government might be monitoring your Hotmail account in order to prevent something as ridiculous and low-death-toll as a terrorist attack, have some sympathy for conservatives and gun owners right now.
And the explicit point in relation to rlpowell’s post? Are you objecting to discussing gun control se early after a rare event associated with guns which could skew people’s thoughts via availability heuristics, or are you attempting to counter these biases in the conversation, or something else?
I don’t know why Konkvistador posted so much of Yvain’s article, or highlighted the particular parts of it that ey did, but the article itself goes into the research on this topic in some detail, which certainly hepls.
Yvain’s article is great (which is usual for his articles), but its topic is political debate about gun control rather than gun control per se.
The reason why I am asking is that I recall Konkvistador asking people not to post about politics around the time of the last US elections, so in my model of Konkvistador it would make sense if he asked people not to post about gun control around the time of the last US school shooting. On the other hand, his comment isn’t exactly what would be expected if that was really his intention, so I am a bit confused.
If gun control arguments make me want to shoot myself, does that just prove their point? by Yvain
“No one else has tried this.”—I have, actually, which is why this post is here. :D
Thanks for the great link, that’s the sort of thing I was wanting to see.
-Robin
And the explicit point in relation to rlpowell’s post? Are you objecting to discussing gun control se early after a rare event associated with guns which could skew people’s thoughts via availability heuristics, or are you attempting to counter these biases in the conversation, or something else?
I don’t know why Konkvistador posted so much of Yvain’s article, or highlighted the particular parts of it that ey did, but the article itself goes into the research on this topic in some detail, which certainly hepls.
-Robin
Yvain’s article is great (which is usual for his articles), but its topic is political debate about gun control rather than gun control per se.
The reason why I am asking is that I recall Konkvistador asking people not to post about politics around the time of the last US elections, so in my model of Konkvistador it would make sense if he asked people not to post about gun control around the time of the last US school shooting. On the other hand, his comment isn’t exactly what would be expected if that was really his intention, so I am a bit confused.