Why does it have to be “splashy”? I thought you were pushing for a more dispassionate analysis of the matter, but now you are arguing that these things have to be sensational to matter? Be consistent.
I do think that the relevant issue is the incident, not whether injured people’s lives happened to be saved or not.
None. You are free to follow the link and determine more specifically who was included or excluded, but gang violence and armed robbery incidents were excluded.
Yes. The fact that we are also adept at shooting people in other circumstances does not change the number of people who are killed in these incidents. It’s like saying that we needn’t do something about the number of people who die from contaminated foods because the number of people who die from poisonings is really high.
Yes. Gabby Giffords survived, for example. Have you seen her? Given the change in her quality of life, would you like to trade places with her? I know that I wouldn’t, and we should not dismiss meaningful incidents just because a fluke of circumstance dictates that one person survives where another dies.
Gun advocates are reacting strongly. Gun advocates almost always react with dramatic emotion. “Come and take it”, “my cold dead hands” etc. By and large, they are scared, panicky individuals, and in terms of people manipulating the emotions of others, just take a look at any NRA material. You’ll find more dire warnings, threats of harmful outcomes, and pictures of scary black people there than you will find panels of individuals speaking about being harmed by gun violence.
Again, you are confusing the matter because we have so much gun violence. You see a level of death and injury that you deem tolerable. Other people do not find this level of death and injury tolerable.
A sentiment completely unlike that expressed by Paul.
Not “dismiss”, place in proper context.
The media does that because we (well, enough of us) want them to. They provide a service people want. From a functionalist perspective, it makes sense: people with a keen sense for danger, who were always on edge, were more likely to survive than people who relaxed and enjoyed what they had. The problem is that now, when the dangers are very minor, the comforts bountiful, and the average American lives to 78, people are still unable to let go of a sense of impending doom and being surrounded by danger.
With you I never know if it’s an issue of intellectual honesty or reading comprehension.
I am being consistent. I’m talking about what the public cares about. They would not react to 4 gangbangers shoot each other up in the same way they’d react to a school being shot up.
My whole point is that these things have to be sensational to matter to the public.
You’re right, more run of the mill crime was excluded from that list. I was thinking of an argument we were having in another thread about how the FBI classifies mass shootings, and they included stuff like gang violence, but those numbers still only came out to like two dozen a year.
This isn’t a good analogy. The gun control advocates have a limited amount of political capital - they truly can’t attack the problem from all sorts of directions at once and hope to be successful.
So do they focus on the stuff that may actually have some agreement on the other side, that might actually meaningfully improve public safety?
No, they focus on shit like the assault weapons ban which they know won’t actually do shit to improve public safety. And it costs them the opportunity to actually propose something that may actually do some good because it hardens the opposition by showing they’re not negotiating in good faith and burns political capital on useless shit.
You, and anyone else, willing to defend any and all gun control proposals, no matter how stupid, like the assault weapons ban, are the core of the problem on this. You are the boogey men that the NRA gets to rally against - the people who will push for any restriction on guns or punishment on gun owners that they think can pass regardless of the merit or effect on public safety.
I wouldn’t like to be shot in the head. No shit. This argument has been enlightening.
I’m not saying injuries aren’t damaging, but they’re generally less damaging than being killed. I was counting your number as the number of fatalities and comparing them to the overall number of fatalities to come up with a rate. But because I didn’t realize at first that your number includes both injuries and fatalities, then comparing them to the overall fatalities inflates the apparent number. The proper comparison would actually be to look at how they compare to the overall injury and fatality rate for gun violence, at which point they go from an already miniscule one fifth of one percent to much lower.
I won’t deny that people get emotional about both sides of the issue, but specifically in regards to this thread, I don’t see what Paul said or what anyone said in this thread as being hysterical emotional overreactions. Of course those people are being used as props - a totally dispassionate analysis would see that.
I’m saying people do not properly keep it in perspective. Their sense of how much violence there is and how unsafe they are is dramatically overblown. They also do not weigh the relative factors rationally. Their goal isn’t to improve public safety or do the most good with the least harm - those goals would be admirable. Their goals are to Do Something when some sensational story happens as an emotional reaction. This generally does not lead to good public policy.
I will reiterate a point I’ve made in another thread. Gun violence has been on the decline for decades, but the sensationalism of the media keeps raising. And correspondingly, people’s sense of how safe the world is does not follow the actual safety of the world, but the perception that the media feeds them. So if we had two scenarios - one in which gun violence increases every year and the total of number of people die climbs, but there are no big sensational public shootings - and the real world scenario in which gun violence is getting lower every year but sensationalism is up - the public would actually feel safer in the former scenario. They’d prefer the scenario with more deaths and less safety. It would make the world feel safer to them. Because they are not rational.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 266,560 people experienced some kind of criminal victimization (at least a simple assault) during a home burglary in an average year between 2003 and 2007. (Since home invasion is not a defined criminal act in most jurisdictions, figuring out how often robberies occur when someone is home is the closest one can get.*)
There were about 114,800,000 households in the US in 2010.
That gives us a rate of victimization during a home burglary of 0.2%.
Since we can dismiss a rate of 1% of gun violence occurring in the form of mass shootings, we can certainly dismiss a rate of 0.2% of criminal victimization during a home burglary.
Right? I mean that is the dispassionate take on it. All these people spending money on all these weapons, fantasizing about “3 or 4 or 5” people committing a home invasion are over-reacting, given a rate of 0.2%.
I mean, if you’re dispassionate about the matter. Right?
You can’t be serious. I appreciate you clarifying that intellectual honesty dilemma I was having in the last post.
We’re talking about mass shootings as a percentage of gun violence and its effect on how to prioritize public policy decisions to curb gun violence, and you’re talking about number of homes burglarized compared to the total number of homes. Those things are not remotely analogous.
The proper analogy here would be something like “people who break into your house with a big purple dildo and rape you with it account for .0002 of break ins, but they really upset people, so let’s tailor our public policy about burglaries to address big purple dildo break ins”
Or going the other way, the comparison would be the number of people who were shot in mass shootings in a given year compared to the number of people. That number is close to 12/310,000,000, or roughly .000000003 percent of the population.
Edit: You are also overstating the number of mass shootings as a fraction of gun violence by an order of magnitude, which is hard to do accidentally considering we’ve been discussing the number just now.
I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss this issue dispassionately, so I ask that you refrain from further personal attacks or take them to the pit.
I’ve been trying to tell you that the ratio of mass shootings to gun violence really doesn’t have anything to do with it. If we did what gun advocates like to claim is their goal, and reduced the overall level of gun violence (while the number of mass shootings stayed the same), would you then conclude that the problem of mass shootings went up? It would be stupid to do so, if you were to in fact do so.
Not at all. People respond to fears of being victimized in home invasions because they are in homes. Whether they overestimate the risk or not depends on how often people in households are victimized, right?
I was just recalling your use of “1%” as some kind of a standard. Did you or did you not say:
If you did not, you ought to contact a moderator, because someone is putting words in your mouth. If you did, please explain why you employ a different standard for characterizing the proportion of one thing and not another?
No need - your arguments clearly present your intentions and integrity on their own.
It really does. Do you think you can produce infinite amounts of political capital for gun control? If not, then you should focus what capital you have on issues that may actually improve public safety and issues on which you may actually reach some sort of compromise because both sides can see they’re good for public safety.
If you instead focus on stupid shit that does not improve public safety and simply inflames one side and harden them against your future attempts at legislation, then if your goal is public safety, you are acting against your own interest.
Furthermore, people would be justified in not taking you seriously as someone who was genuinely interested in improving public safety or negotiating in good faith. Every time I see you grasp at straws to desperately defend bullshit like the AWB, I think “there’s someone who has no interest whatsoever in public safety or arguing in good faith, there’s someone who will advocate any gun control measure no matter how irrational” - this does you harm because it gives me legitimate reason never to trust your intentions in the future and not to negotiate with you.
I’m evaluating what would be the way to go if you were interested in public safety rather than trying to push any gun ban you think you could lie and sell to the public. If you had pollutant A and pollutant B, and pollutant B killed 1000 times as many people and caused 1000 times as much damage, but you only had a limited ability to get congress to pass laws on pollution, you’d better spend your time trying to regulate pollutant B. You don’t have infinite resources in this fight.
I already addressed this - if you feel that it’s an appropriate comparison, then the proper comparison to evaluate your risk of being killed in a spree shooting incident is roughly 12/310,000,000. What part of that do you disagree with? So yes, if you only have a 0.2% chance of being burglarized in a given year, you only have a .000000003 chance of being killed in a spree shooting. The relative difference between those numbers may not be apparent because people are bad at intuiting things on that scale, but it’s the same relative difference between 3 and 2,000,000. Unless I misplaced a zero somewhere. That’s the difference between the chances of being a victim of burglary vs the victim of a spree shooting, the two things you’re trying to suggest are equivalent.
In fact, I was clearly not using 1% as a standard, and it is unreasonable for you to infer that. I said that I came up with the 0.2% number when I thought that you were referring to fatalities. But since you were referring to fatalities and injuries combined, the rate becomes even lower. But to figure out how much lower, I’d have to figure out how many firearms injuries came along with those fatalities and then estimate from there. The number is probably in the range of 0.05-0.1%, but since I didn’t feel like the specific number was important enough to justify research, I instead merely said “well under 1%”
Oh, you’re putting words in my mouth, but you’re going to continue to do it in a way that doesn’t run afoul of the moderators.
I haven’t employed different standards. You compared dissimilar things and declared them equivalent. The actual equivalent numbers are in this post.
This really seems like an emotional subject for you, SenorBeef. I think it might be better if we didn’t pursue discussing it further until you’ve had some time to calm down.
That’s a really pathetic way to try to avoid conceding defeat. I’ve given no indication that I’ve been anything but calm and rational about the subject. My points were all logical and justified. I’m sorry that your attempt to rile me up to attempt to discredit my point failed. Well, no, I’m not. I’m actually pretty happy that you’ve laid out your integrity for all to see.
Yes I asked if Rand Paul’s choice of the word ‘props’ could be interpreted as him saying that political activism by the families of mass shooting victims is inappropriate.
I received several replies including from gun rights advocates that the victim’s parents are indeed acting inappropriate. John Mace has also posted agreement that they are.
But the activists that Rand Paul was focused upon are all voluntary activists who desire the attention from the President.
Because of that voluntary aspect which Rand Paul acknowledged as fact before his mention of the ‘props’ word, I hold a firm belief that it is fair to call Rand Paul’s comment insensitive and cold-hearted.
You are correct that my point about the NRA’s appeal to such emotions as fear of losing the entire right to keep firearms has no connection to Rand Paul other than his sympathy with their cause.
But that point about the NRA is directed to you and others here that have expressed the notion that these Sandy Hook parents are purely emotional and unreasonable but the gun lobby side is fully based upon reason and excellent knowledge of subject.
That the gun lobby side uses only emotionless reason that is brought to Senator Paul’s office is ludicrous.
I’m not saying Rand Paul and Obama are playing tit for tat games with emotion.
Just stating a fact about the NRA’s use of emotion to raise money and lobby against all or imagined threats against gun rights.
Plenty of those imagined threats are based upon emotional malarky.
Oh…no, it can’t reasonably be interpreted that way.
Did you, now? Care to quote a few that say that political activism by the families of mass shooting victims is inappropriate?
That is a huge leap, there. He didn’t say their loss didn’t matter, or that they should shut up about it. In what possible way was he being insensitive or cold-hearted?
Please quote people who said that:
A) the Sandy Hook parents are / are being unreasonable
B) the gun lobby’s tactics are fully based upon reason, as opposed to emotion.
If you think this means Rand Paul thinks 'actions by emotion driven grieving parents of their gun-downed kids is appropriate, it sure is a funny way of saying it.
Is ‘producing outcomes that are irrational’ appropriate?
Eh? First, that was in reference to a different remark of Paul’s; not the one where he refers to the Newtown families.
Second, I wrote that actions in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy can be driven by emotion instead of reason, and produce irrational outcomes. I gave three examples: internment of Japanese-Americans, the PATRIOT Act, and the Iraq War. I was clearly referring to actions by governments. No matter what they do, the Newtown families can’t vote in the Senate or enforce legislation.
“Appropriate” means “suitable or fitting for a particular purpose; proper”. I don’t know what you’re using it to mean, why don’t you share your custom definition?
Is ‘producing outcomes that are irrational’ suitable or fitting for a particular purpose and/or is an irrational outcome proper in your opinion?
According to you, “actions in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy can be driven by emotion instead of reason, and produce outcomes that seem irrational in the light of subsequent cool reflection.”
I believe activist gun violence victims and parents of young victims are acting properly to produce a better outcome for gun regulation in this country.
If you agree, why are you arguing the view opposite mine?
Rand Paul is an inhuman shitstain whose entire life is politicized. He has not only no credibility on this subject, but negative credibility: credible things are less credible by his association with them.
The right wing in this case either purposefully or accidentally morons their way into an illogical clusterfuck by their politicking. Anger at the injustice of Newton, or Boston, by the Democrats are legitimate. The anger spurs action such as background checks or funding our domestic terror agencies that would stop things like this in the future. Anger at the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion calls for more/better federal regulations, actions that would prevent such explosions.
Republican anger at Boston and calls for immigration reform to be delays is bullshit because it would do nothing to prevent these attacks in the future, and has no connection.
So fuck Rand Paul. It is entirely appropriate for Obama to ask families of Newtown to be the face of support for gun control. Gun control would have prevented or mitigated Newtown and others like it. This is proper anger at an injustice, not just random anger at a political issue you personally have a stake in.
Who says the families are acting improperly? Not Rand Paul, and no one here (that I recall).
No one is criticizing the families, NotfooledbyW. You seem to want to make things out like they are, so you can paint your political opponents as being cold, heartless monsters, but the facts don’t support that wish.
Like it or not, this is a political issue, and one in which displays of anger and bluster are hurting your cause and making compromise more difficult. Surely you noticed the, to-date, failure of all this anger at injustice to pass a single gun-control law since Newtown. You can blame it on a “moronic” right wing, or, if you actually want to see things change and not just satisfy a need to demonize others, you can look at the people leading the gun-control argument and their tactics.
I, personally, am not going to affect the debate in Congress one bit so I’m fine with showing anger.
Besides, the alternative is not showing anger and hoping the GOP will stumble onto some common sense. History having shown that will not be the case and they refuse to compromise, I must vent by posting as you see me now. I know it’ll eventually get done, but how many people must die at the hands of a lunatic gunman until then I wouldn’t care to guess