Those are simple questions, but they deserve complete answers that aren’t so simple. For instance, your first question assumes some things about the nature of the particular data available that aren’t in evidence, and also assumes I was among those predicting dire consequences, which I was not.
If analysis of the data (because data by itself doesn’t “show” anything) tells us that the rate of gun violence in Virginia bars did not change subsequent to enactment of the law, I won’t be surprised, because I suspect there are stronger societal factors involved than the mere fact that the state “shall issue” permits for and establishments may not prohibit concealed carry inside public businesses serving alcohol. Still won’t make me change my assessment of risk without further data beyond the sheer number of reported gun crimes before and after enactment.
If data analysis indicates that gun violence rates in Virginia bars decreased subsequent to enactment of the law, I’ll suspect some other factor(s) changed beyond the legality of concealed carry, and I’ll be pleased to see the drop in gun violence. But it’ll take more than a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument to make me believe that the law caused such a decrease. Because of that pesky intuitive assessment of mine that says the risk of gun violence becomes elevated whenever the self control of the actors around those guns is reduced.
In either case, I’ll still think more guns in bars increases risk, but I’ll be more confident that concealed carry laws, absent other societal changes, don’t have much effect on that equation.
You’re missing the fact that your proof is for something different than the proposition you asked me to prove. You’re analyzing the realized affect of an action (enactment of the law) and attempting to use that analysis to prove or disprove an assessment of the risk associated with a possible consequence of that action (more guns in bars). Just because I didn’t get injured the afternoon I jumped my bike over piles of broken cinderblocks and newly dug house foundations when I was 12 doesn’t mean it wasn’t risky.
You’re both right that Virginia data can now be added to the historical data that should be a standard factor of any quantitative risk analysis of concealed carry laws. (I’m assuming we all agree qualitatively that ‘gun violence’ is a risk with high societal cost and impact.) But my caution and my concern here is twofold:[ol]
[li]We shouldn’t accept the results of the analysis of reported gun crimes as meaningful regarding the larger question (does increased carry of guns have an effect on public safety?) without additional data and analysis, and[/li][li]It’s not terrific policy to make a change to the legal structure with the intent of performing the risk analysis after the fact.[/li][/ol]
Both of those things hold true whether gun violence goes up or down in Virginia bars over the next few years.
I don’t offer any of this in order to turn the thread into a gun debate; this is in answer to Bricker’s pissing and moaning about the horror of liberal intransigence regarding the simple fact of the latest gun crime figures from Virginia.
One difference I think is important is the degree of burden on the people whose rights are being restricted. Being prevented from marrying the person you’re spending your life with has a pretty huge impact, not just in and of itself but because of the status we give marriage in our society, where a whole bunch of rights and privileges accrue to being someone’s spouse.
I’m open to being shown otherwise, but ISTM that the burden of being prevented from bringing your gun into a bar or restaurant is pretty trivial.
What ultimately puts me on the 'sure, let ‘em carry their guns into restaurants if they damned well feel like it’ are two things:
Looking at the gun death statistics for the past few decades, it doesn’t seem that anything in the way of changes to the laws moves the needle more than trivially.
Right now, gun deaths are running around 10 per 100,000 per year (roughly 40% homicide, 60% suicide; gun deaths due to accident, law enforcement action, etc. are maybe just a couple of percent IIRC) and have been for the past decade or so. They had been running a bit higher (maybe 30-50% more, I’m too lazy to look it up again right now) through the 1980s and early 1990s, but between about 1993 and 1998, gun deaths for both homicide and suicide dropped noticeably - and stayed down since, even as earlier gun control laws were repealed and states removed restrictions on getting concealed carry permits. So while the gun control folks were actually winning more battles than they were losing in the mid-1990s, it’s hard to see a connection there.
Restaurants and bars are almost universally private property; the owners can choose to bar guns from their premises. The only places affected by the law are bars and restaurants whose owners are OK with the idea of people carrying guns in their restaurants. And if they’re OK with it, then as long as either the places that choose to allow guns, or the places that don’t, are required to have clearly visible signage to that effect at the door, then I can stay out of the places that allow guns if I am concerned about the possibility of drunks with guns.
It is a totally separate issue. We can debate DDT another time, but the validity of my opinion on that says nothing about the content of a post on global warming.
Or is it your opinion that I have so debased myself with past bad argumentation that I should no longer be allowed to post here? That any time I post you have every right to jump in and drag up a years-old thread in which you felt I ‘lost’ the debate, and use that against me and convince people I should not be listened to?
If not, what exactly are you trying to accomplish? Oh, and by the way, thanks for providing an example of exactly what I said earlier - that one of the things that makes it hard for me to post here now is that people like you insist on hijacking threads I take part in for the sole purpose of ‘warning’ other people that I should not be listened to. This forces me to respond, which further hijacks the thread.
But no matter. If I start posting in great debates again, this kind of boorish behavior will be ignored, except that I will report every single instance of it to the mods, because it’s against the rules.
Oh, I wasn’t aware that a political statement constituted good science. Scientists are not qualified to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. They can give us the parameters of the issue, and give us numbers for what we can expect with or without action, but the feasibility of doing so involves economics, politics, and a host of other things that are outside the realm of science.
So let me get this straight: You continually accuse of of getting my information from ‘right wing blogs’, and you see this as a great failing of mine - that I only go to partisan sources I already agree with. But then when I claim I haven’t heard of a specific right-wing blogger or that I’m not generally familiar with the arguments these bloggers are making, then I’m at fault for not paying enough attention to them? Your arguments are simply bizarre and contradictory.
Please. Questioning the more extreme claims of AGW activists is hardly the same as being a moon hoaxer. Of course, we both know that you included truthers and moon hoaxers as yet another lame attempt at guilt by association. Or maybe you really think questioning 100 year forecasts for a complex system that is poorly understood is the same as ignoring actual events witnessed by millions of people. In which case, it’s you who needs to recalibrate his grip on reality.
Is this some form of weird reverse-ad hominem? I didn’t call you an extremist, but I’m guilty of calling you one anyway because you tend to take the lead on combating misinformation about climate warming coming from people other than me? Man, you’re really reaching now.
That statement is categorical, but the actual science does not agree. Again, I’ll refer you to the IPCC V4 report, which admits that warming under 2.5 degrees, while having bad localized effects in some areas, could result in a net economic benefit to the planet - primarily due to lower heating costs for the populous northern regions, lengthened growing seasons, the opening up of sea lanes like the Northwest passage, and the reclamation for agriculture of large swaths of land that are currently unusable, such as the southern sparsely settled areas of Canada and Russia.
The IPCC also admits that the range of possible warming includes values below 2.5 degrees C by 2100, so it’s still to be determined whether or not global warming will absolutely lead to overall economic harm.
This is a perfect example of the kinds of exaggeration we see when activists start ‘summarizing’ the science and adding their own conclusions.
I did - and their ‘cites’ are various bills introduced by senators, the Stern report, which has come under widespread criticism (and which also had to assume a discount rate of zero in order to justify taking any action at all - which is a political stance, not a scientific fact), and an analysis done by ‘google.org’. Many of the claims in that link are unsourced, and they talk about theoretical economics under a heading, “What the science says”. They state as a scientific fact that CO2 is a pollutant, when in fact it has merely been classified as one by a regulatory body that has been pushing for CO2 taxes for years.
One of the ‘cites’ is edf.org. Interesting that they wouldn’t name the actual organization in the cite like they do with all the other cites. That’s because their ‘cite’ is the Environmental Defense Fund. That would be roughly equivalent to me citing a ‘study’ on the negative effects of abortion from the Catholic church.
If the right presented arguments like this and sourced them by pointing to studies from oil companies and bills introduced by Republican politicians, you’d howl in outrage.
And even so, they admit that every single study except the google ‘study’ shows that GDP would be lower by 2050 after enacting the various bills as compared to doing nothing at all.
To give you an example of the bias on that page, they describe the estimates in the Lieberman-Warner bill as an ‘outlier’ because it has the highest cost estimates (because they dare make the assumption that higher energy taxes might actually cost jobs), but then they take the REAL outlier - a study by renowned scientific body Google.org which ‘estimates’ that investing in green energy will produce a profit of 2.3 to 3.2 TRILLION dollars over merely delaying investments by five years. And yet they delve into that study deeply, treat it as solid science, and don’t say the word ‘outlier’ even once. I wonder why?
You sneer at studies from Heritage or Cato, but ignore the fact that the ‘studies’ on that page come from places like the "Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’ - a consortium of states looking for justification to raise energy taxes to pay for their over-stretched budgets.
The RGGI then supports its claims through another study by a supposedly non-partisan ‘analysis group’. This is the technical advisory board:
Technical Advisory Group
David Conover Senior Vice President, Bipartisan Policy Center
Richard Corey Chief, Stationary Source Division, California Air Resources Board
Nathan Hultman Director, Environmental Policy Program, School of Public Policy,
University of Maryland
Brian Jones Senior Vice President, M. J. Bradley & Associates, LLC
John (“Skip”) Laitner Director, Economic and Social Analysis, American Council for and
Energy-Efficient Economy
Michelle Manion Climate & Energy Team Leader, Northeast States for Coordinated Air
Use Management
Brian Murray Direct for Economic Analysis, Nicholas Institute for Environmental
Policy Solutions, Duke University
Karen Palmer Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future
Eric Svenson Vice President, Policy and Environment, Health & Safety, PSEG
Services Corporation
Alexander (“Sandy”) Taft Director, U.S. Climate Change Policy, National Grid
Every single one of those people is either an environmental activist or someone whose career would be enhanced by a greater focus on climate change. Most of them are not scientists, but lawyers, activists, and politicians.
Seriously? That’s your argument? That if you tax yourself unilaterally, other countries will be forced to conform to the new regulations? There’s no doubt that if California creates a market for new tools and machinery, someone will come in and supply it. You know, like GE. Which is why GE supports this stuff. But to think that that confers an economic benefit is madness. And to use that as a counter to my question about enforcing carbon taxes in other countries suggests that you just did what you accuse me of constantly - of barely skimming your ‘cite’ before linking to it. The passage you quoted has nothing at all to do with getting other countries to impose taxes on their own carbon emissions.
This is a glorious example of the problem with this board: You treat any partisan piece of crap as wisdom from the Gods when it supports your position, then you declare the argument closed, and anyone who doesn’t fall into lock-step is guilty of being stupid - unless they present arguments you don’t know how to refute, in which case they must be lying or tricky or something, because you just know you’re right, so anyone who presents an argument you can’t refute by definition is a liar or a trickster.
So you present cites like the one above - filled with ‘studies’ from questionable sources. But if I put up a cite, you go over it with a fine-tooth comb looking for anything you can possibly discredit it with, and if you find something even remotely plausible, you declare that I’m dishonest and unfit to debate on this board.
Ah, I see. So suddenly statements I made on unrelated issues years ago become relevant to any debate, because your assertion is that if I presented a poor cite years ago, that means you can treat everything I say as being a lie or misleading without even having to check, huh? In other words, you have decided to disqualify me from debate on this board. Is that it?
No, I don’t CARE what others argue. I make my own case. It’s no more important for me to know what some Republican kook is saying than for you to be intimately familiar with what the left-wing loons over at WorkersWorld.org have to say about, well, anything. You are not responsible for the inane utterances of the the extremists on your side, and neither am I. Your generally reasonable claims about global warming are not diminished because Al Gore says the seas are going to boil and all the coastal cities of the world will be underwater, or whatever alarming scenario he’s peddling this week.
I’m aware of some of their claims, and I generally argue against them. You may find it amusing to know that when I do make a rare post on a ‘right-wing’ board, it’s usually to point out that their arguments are stupid and they need to be more educated because they’re not helping.
I do occasionally read the more high-level ‘skeptic’ cites like WattsUpWithThat, just to keep up with the debate on both sides. Sometimes they make reasonable arguments, and sometimes they don’t. Just like your side.
I have seen specific criticisms of some paleo-climate studies. The Yamal series comes under frequent attack for being cherry-picked. That’s not an argument against paleo-climate research in general, it’s an argument about a specific study. I have no real opinion on that, btw.
I don’t actually think this is the right way to think about it at all.
Largely because the “burden” is hard to quantify, given it’s subjective. For example, it’s no burden on the majority of Americans whatsoever to prevent gay citizens from being married. Similarly, it’s no burden on the majority of Americans to be prevented from carrying a gun into a specific class of establishments.
As soon as you start writing laws based on burdens, you get bizarre results. As I said to someone who was trying to tell me that exempting all Catholic organizations from providing insurance coverage of birth control made sense–as soon as you start down the road of looking at who’s burdened and what individuals believe instead of what makes sense for everyone, then what’s to stop a Jehovah’s Witness organization from buying insurance that doesn’t cover blood transfusions?
If you are going to restrict rights, the only possible justification is that the public good involved in restricting those rights is provably and rationally very high, regardless of the public good of granting those rights.
And you are imagining things, the context was clear, you wanted to disparage environmentalists, and yep, many of the ones today are involved on informing others about climate change.
Funny thing that many politicians on the right are relying on yahoos to look for “solutions”
Anyone claiming that it has the evidence on his side should have no trouble finding it. Also, once again you are resorting to defend your ignorance on the matter, not a very good idea when you continue to claim competency on this issue. And we are actually dealing with right wingers claiming that on the SDMB we get to take you down for no good reason, there are very good reasons. Resorting to a defense by ignorance is a dumb thing to do in this place.
Good thing I did not mention creationists, but then again others already see the connections that climate change deniers have with them in the USA.
Well, then it should not be hard to point at the leftists that did drive the discussion away with no evidence but just because they had it against a right winger.
So it is just a long winded way to reach once again for attacks to environmentalists, not surprising.
I only expect other nations like China to suffer the consequences of civilian unrest if they do not do anything, we will have to act just to face the costs of adaptation, but then again as the Republicans assume that there is no problem…
Nope, it has been pointed out that several supporters of 911 conspiracies, opponents to nuclear power and genetic engineering are coming from the left, I do take them to task as they are not using science or good evidence for what they claim. What you say here is demonstrated nonsense.
I’m also on the record of not supporting several plans on what to do about global warming, but it is on the basics of the science that you will have to have no easy pickings, once again, this is based on past experience, and your once again demonstrated ignorance on this.
Nope, once again I will let others decide that, but clearly, as you have not still acknowledged the deception many right wingers have put over the environmentalists regarding DDT it is not me the one that has to show others to consider your sources.
Of course as Al Gore did not said that, I have to say that still you are grossly unaware of what you are defending.
Good, because over here most of the right wing posters in this very thread are indeed full of hot air like you said before regarding climate change.
That in itself does sink you down, the reality is that WUWT very rarely makes corrections and even the main reason for the site to exist was debunked by the recent BEST survey scientists did made excellent adjustments to negate the heat island effect, Anthony Watts just did the predictable thing, he is attempting to discredit now the researchers that worked at BEST.
And one has to insist the on the point here. The research you claimed that leftists had no good reply to; once again, it is by accepting the evidence of paleoclimatology that the researchers reported that the warming will be limited to 2.5 degrees and if we do something about the emissions. What I have seen published is that it is not likely that the warming will stop there at the end of the century, time marches on and so do the lag effects of CO2, doing nothing just means that “optimist” reports like the one you pointed out will not come to pass and even the scientist in the report said so.
One has to remark also on the fact that this is showing an inconsistency that can not be ignored: The more it is pointed that paleoclimate is seen as reliable as the scientists in the report do (otherwise the estimations of the future warming are more in doubt) one has to realize this is inconsistent with what the usual posters at WUWT do by disparaging paleoclimatologists like Mann. It is impossible that both are correct, but this contradictory nature of the typical denier sources is common.
Well, I was specifically discussing the burden to those directly affected. So I’d regard that as out of bounds.
I disagree. I think it’s necessary to think about burdens, at least to the extent of being able to say, “even for those most directly affected by this, it’s down in the freakin’ white noise, and some issues are just too damned small to make a Federal case out of. So buzz off.”
The burdens on both sides in these two examples are plainly nontrivial.
Because under the former law he could still enter the establishment openly carrying. And in the situation you describe he seems just as likely to do that.
Now where’s my answer: how many years have to go by with no rise in gun crime before you concede the point?
Sam Stone is not Bricker. I don’t even think they’re particularly ideological allies (any more than, say, Obama and Kucinich, or any other two people who sit in wildly different places within their particular half of the spectrum). So why is this relevant?
Just trying to set up the parameters of what a reasonable amount of time is. If **Bricker **will agree that one year of data is inadequate and (what? seven? nine?) years of dithering is too long, then we can get started. Actually I guess the opposed numbers are one year and an infinite number of years, because **Sam **shows no signs of ever giving up on those WMDs being located. Or maybe he’s given up as soon as Obama got inaugurated? Or maybe Bush gets the credit, a la Bin Ladin, for the WMDs as long as Obama’s in office? So many questions to be answered here becofre we can come up with a mutually agreed upon number.
But while we’re waiting, could I see some numbers BEFORE the Virginia law was changed? There might have been a trend there regardless of the change, and we need to make that this law isn’t irrelevant. **Bricker **is providing very selective evidence to support his argument, so far.
Uh oh. Looks like there’s already been more fatal shootings in bars and restaurants this year than last (given the report of 2 fatal shootings last year, as per your favored article):
My google search is obviously different from a review of official records. Nevertheless, 3 is more than 2. What does that mean for your interpretation of the situation?
Additionally, the previous data were not clear on occasions of shootings at bars or restaurants, stating only that there were 18 aggravated assaults. Anecdotally, here’s just two non-fatal shootings -
They do share something absolutely relevant - an absolute devotion to the Republican Party and its partisan interests, whether short or long term, even over the interests of the nation and the world. **Sam **has even admitted it in the past, although he does not share Bricker’s other absolute institutional devotion, to the Roman Catholic Church.
Let’s revisit the WMD debate for a second, to clear up a misconception. You guys are framing the debate now as one in which I said there were WMDs, and you said there weren’t, and therefore you were right and I was wrong.
The truth is more nuanced than that. What you actually claimed was that Bush was lying about WMDs to come up with an excuse for war. What I argued was that it wasn’t just Bush, but the intelligence agencies of all major countries, including countries like France and Russia who opposed the war, who believed Saddam had WMDs. So Bush wasn’t ‘lying’ - he was relying on the best estimates of the experts who were supposed to be in a position to know. And I felt that on that issue, it was best to defer to the experts, and if they said there were WMDs, that was good enough for me. The head of the CIA himself said that the case for WMDs was a ‘slam dunk’.
I’m perfectly willing to admit that there were no WMDs, but I’d make the same decision again if the same evidence was put before me, vouchsafed by the people who were supposed to be the ones with the best handle on the issue.
So how did all those intelligence agencies get it wrong? Because Saddam wanted people to believe he had WMDs. He thought the threat of chemical or biological attack would be a good deterrent against the U.S., and that it would enhance his stature and power in the region. Hell, his own generals thought Iraq had WMDs. When the U.S. military was capturing Iraqi military, they kept asking, “where are the weapons of mass destruction?” and the answer they’d get was “well, our unit doesn’t have any - but I’ve heard that the unit in the next region has them.” Saddam played that game even internally, so that the threat of their use would keep the population in line.
Before that information came out, the lack of WMD was puzzling to me because so many experts said they were there, so I considered options such as their having been buried, or being shipped into Syria before the invasion. Otherwise, it was hard to explain how so many intelligence professionals could get it wrong. Once we found out it was an intentional deception, I knew that Saddam didn’t have WMDs and hadn’t had them for a long time.
What a load of crap. First of all, I don’t even like the Republican party. It is far too focused on social issues and ignorant economics. Kind of like the Democrats, actually. I do see them as a lesser of two evils in a two party system and so I’ll come to their defense when I think they’re being subject to silly attacks.
For example, you think that Republican opinion boils down to ‘partisan interests’, and that I would defend them ‘even over the interests of the nation and the world.’ But in fact, when I agree with the Republicans it’s precisely because I think that it’s YOUR plans that would be detrimental to the interests of the nation and the world. But you’re incapable of seeing that, because you’re such an unblinking ideologue that you’re incapable of envisioning a situation where your political opponent might have a differing opinion because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, and that he came to his decision using logic and education just like you think you do, only starting from a different world view.
Which intelligence agency found evidence of WMDs again?
Which experts? The organization charged by the government with investigating claims of Saddam manufacturing and stockpiling WMDs found no evidence of such, and reported as much. Wouldn’t that mean the Bush admin was specifically ignoring the experts?
He’s perfectly willing to admit there were no WMDs, but he’s not willing to admit that he was wrong when he argued incessantly, for months prior to the invasion, that there were.
