OK, I’m not going to go on and on about this as I agree it’s futile, but you’re fundamentally mischaracterizing my position. Tobacco and alcohol are both, at their core, substances that cause self-harm, but I am not ignorant of the effects on others, and those are all handled with appropriate regulatory policy. The fact remains that they are fundamentally different from instruments designed to cause lethal harm to others, a fact that, as I said, is the foundational basis for law and order in civilized democratic societies.
Just to elaborate for moment, for clarity, on the aforementioned regulatory policies with respect to tobacco and alcohol. Second-hand smoke does indeed pose a risk, though nowhere near the risk it poses to the smoker, and this has been dealt with in modern society simply by banning smoking in public places, and even in some private places – IIRC, around here it is illegal to smoke in your car when there are children present. Alcohol is more complicated because it does have more evident effects on others, but it’s also a long-established social tradition dating back thousands of years with some actual positive benefits when used in moderation. So banning it is pointless and counterproductive (cite: the disastrous experiment of Prohibition). Instead, the appropriate recourse is to institute both medical programs to treat problem drinking and severe legal penalties for abuses that endanger the public, such as impaired driving.
So my position is not only consistent, it’s the basis for most of western civilization. The real question is why the US alone, in the name of some kind of mysterious “exceptionalism”, has such a fixation on lethal weaponry, even when faced with the obvious tragic daily consequences of that policy.
The way you are presenting your points, as if the lack of cigarette bannng is an argument against knife banning, is stupid. So no, we’re not saying the same thing.
That just shows you don’t actually get what I’m saying. Or I’m saying it so badly that no one gets it, and it’s me that’s the issue. I concede that might be the case, as clarity isn’t my strong suit. But what you said there is pretty much what I have been trying to say, while I haven’t been saying that banning cigarettes is or isn’t an argument against or for banning knives. My argument has been about how society chooses risk verse perceived need or want. I’m not in favor of banning cigarettes, I’m pointing out that if lives were the REAL issue, then that would pretty obviously be what society SHOULD focus on. Same goes for alcohol. But it’s really not about lives.
FTR, I don’t think that we should ban tobacco, alcohol or pointy knives, that those risks are understood and acceptable. If, on the other hand, society chooses, collectively to ban or heavily regulate any or all of those, well, that’s a collective decision and I’d accept the majority view. Basically, life is full of risks, and we should keep that in mind. Anything we do, collectively, is going to have a cost in lives.
“Rational” is a school of philosophy that aspires to use hard and well defined math and processes to generate optimal decisions. Very little human decisionmaking is “rational” because actually applying the math and developing an algorithm that tells you what the genuinely optimal decision is very difficult. (and also, technically such an algorithm would in most cases be NP complete so the best you can do is a suboptimal solution)
Just wanted to set that straight. However, there is a major cop out. “rational philophy” explicitly requires a set of value functions that are from irrational sources.
That is, given you care about human lives <by some quantifiable amount>, and given that you care about enjoying leisure <by some quantifiable amount>, and given more quantities for everything you care about, a rational agent is one who uses an algorithm to determine which course of action has the highest total future predicted reward and then they do whatever that action is.
Note that rational agents cannot agree to disagree. If they share the same priors (same value functions and same data about the world) it is quantifiable which proposed strategy is best, and anyone choosing anything but the optimal strategy is not rational.
Anyways it’s a school of philosophy, but the above general idea is also heavily cribbing from algorithms used in artificial intelligence. And it is a very interesting bit of philosophy because of the fact that unlike all the rest, it is quantifiable and the only (mathematically) “correct” one.
Unlike obeying a religious rule or law, doing the rational thing maximizes your chance of success. (but does not guarantee success and of course in our uncertain world it is not possible to accurately determine the exactly optimal thing. But you can absolutely estimate it)
If governments were rational they would be making the maximum effort possible to meet the desires of their stakeholders. By definition. Also by definition an irrational government agent is a crook, in the same way that a financial adviser who isn’t a fiduciary is essentially just a criminal.
Note that this is related to this knife thread because while you or I might agree in our limited, kneejerk gut feel human *opinion *that knives are safe and this is a nanny state idea, if the data says it’s a good idea, and there is enough data of sufficient quality to be certain that over the range of values the true expected value of banning knives might be, most of that range is a positive expected value, then “we” (if we were government agents) must ban knives or we are failing to serve our constituents.
More violent than Western Europe, yes. About average for the world as a whole.
Yep, it’s not really risk based it’s how much pushback and how much will we lose in campaign contributions. In the USA, Big Tobacco is one of the biggest contributors, way, *way *more than the NRA or Gun industry. Healthcare and Pharma are the biggest, which may explain why the USA doesnt have UHC.
Of course it’s not. But since we were talking** Risk Based**, then of course, you’d pick the things with the highest risk first. Which is smoking, far and away.
Not ban swiss army knives. Or Boy Scout knives.
Of the 15 listed “Official” Boy scout knives, 7 would be banned in the UK, sending that scout to prison for four years. Is that necessary?
Sure there’s been a few hundred knife killings and there are some knives which certainly look like they are designed to kill people, but Boy Scout and swiss Army knives? :dubious:
The question before us is whether a pointy knife ban is a reasonable and useful response to knife violence. The question is not what’s the most life savingest ban we could do right now.
Only from a Manichaean viewpoint where the choices are “ban everything” or “ban nothing”. Here in reality, there are other options.
Also, the UK haven’t “banned all guns” either.
Well, if we’re taking a strictly risk-based approach, then the US should ban all guns. End of, right?
If, on the other hand, we’re focusing on achievable risk reduction, then incremental and rigidly-defined restrictions on some risk factors achieve better results. We’ve already seen what a blanket restriction on alcohol results in (hint: a booming black market); the same would be likely for tobacco. Conversely, a slow and incremental approach of public information and restrictions on accessibility to tobacco and locations where smoking is permitted has brought the smoking rate down fairly steadily(caveat: again, vaping has disrupted this trend somewhat). That’s a win, even if it’s taking longer than expected (to borrow a phrase).
I mean, sure, you’re right - the UK could just say “Cigarettes are too dangerous and we’re going to ban them all”. But in practice that would be fucking stupid because it would be counterproductive, disruptive and ineffective on a number of levels. Which is one of the arguments you’ve made regarding guns in the US.
Exercise for readers: spot the spectular logical flaw in that argument.
Indeed. The argument that there must be an either/or approach to risk reduction rather than different risk/benefit/best outcome assessments for each risk factor, which can be considered concurrently and regularly revisited, is just silly.
Fear of knife violence isn’t “irrational”. It’s a legitimate concern. The question is whether the response addressed the risk in a proportionate and effective manner.
Putting GPS trackers in knife handles is grossly disproportionate. Making fewer sharp knives “pointy” - I dunno. Haven’t seen the full data.
About 11k per year. I’m surprised if anyone is surprised by this. I don’t have data from before 1974 but back then 46% of age 16+ smoked.
Caveat 1: published in 2005; I expect a lower number today.
Caveat 2: even if you magic away all tobacco today, the deaths are based on yesterday’s smoking and yesterday’s tobacco policy, which others have correctly noted had changed over the years. The current rate is down to 17%
If you are trying to mitigate every risk then yes…along with just about everything else. On the scale of risk, this would be something we’d take care of probably in the middle of the pack of all the other things we want to fix so that no one has die needlessly.
Kind of what I was getting at. It’s not about the number of deaths, it’s about societies desire/want for something balanced against the cost (in lives or whatever). Basically, if society as a whole endorses something like alcohol use, then the only course, aside from trying to shift that public opinion is one of mitigation, to the extent possible within the system. We see both of these aspects in tobacco use over time…both an attempt to shift public thinking on the subject AND to mitigate the number of deaths.
My point in all of this is that the deaths are secondary in every society. Maybe even tertiary. It’s about what is achievable juxtaposed with what society wants/desires. How much mitigation is possible? Can society be swayed away from it’s want/desire in sufficient numbers to eventually make greater mitigation or even banning possible? Is it worth it to push the public on this, or will there be a backlash? Also, what are the probabilities of anything substantial changing for the cost of pushing the public or trying more radical measures?
In the case of this OP, we are talking about a few hundred lives weighed against 60 or so million citizens. There would be substantial costs involved in attempting an outright ban, hits to the economy, and probably some level of backlash from at least a segment of the public. So, is the cost to benefit worth it? I’d say no…even if you saved every one of those 282 lives, which, frankly is highly doubtful, it’s not worth the cost…to me. But as I’ve repeatedly said, I don’t live there.
If lives were truly what mattered, then yes, that IS what they should do. And alcohol as well. Of course, they can’t and won’t, nor do I think they should…but then, that’s why I don’t think that banning guns is particularly sensible either. Certainly not pointy knives. At some level, as a society you have to accept risk and accept that decisions you collectively make WILL cause loss of life. You also have to weigh the cost to benefit in any sort of action you take, especially by fiat. I don’t know how much, if any (aside from a few prominent folks) support there is from the citizens in the UK for a further knife ban. I mean, they seem good with the bans they have, so maybe there is a lot. At some point, however, there is bound to be some push back on this…especially when you get more and more marginalized results. They are ALREADY at just 282 deaths by knife per year. True, that’s higher than it was a few years ago, but it’s still 282 out of 10’s of millions. There are a lot of things in the UK that are much, MUCH more likely to kill you than some lad with a knife. Even the crime and robbery angle isn’t that far out of whack. The real indication is that list I posted…it’s years old now of all the different types of knives banned. Has it helped? Has it done anything at all? Is there any data, at all, showing any sort of change? My WAG is…no. They already have a pretty low number of murders in the UK. Unless you try and do a comparison to some northern European country, in which case it looks really high. But you can’t make that comparison…the UK isn’t Sweden or Denmark or whatever. They have a different population dynamic, and also a lot more people.
Can you give me a hint? The argument is often made that guns facilitate suicides. Yet countries with higher rates of suicide than the US invariably have much tighter gun restriction. Japan has almost a ban on the things. Yet the Japanese manage to kill themselves in higher numbers, per capita, than those in the US with ready access to more guns than there are US citizens. Seems a valid point. It’s why in gun debates I always discount the suicide figures when people try and trot out what they think are big scary numbers of people killed by guns. Because if you magically took away the guns, the US suicide rate would almost certainly remain the same. Oh, it might drop initially, but eventually people would just find other ways to kill themselves…just like they do in countries without guns.
This seems plausible, but there’s a lot of epidemiological evidence against it. There’s a useful summary here:
This makes sense as a very basic element of human behaviour - the more accessible and efficient our means of doing a thing, the more of that thing we will do.
Also of interest is this paper which summarises US-specific research on the relationship between levels of firearm ownership and overall suicide rate. It’s long, and quotes a wide range of studies. The majority of studies find a positive correlation between the availability of guns and the rate of suicide by any method. The report concludes that:
.
This is an association, not absolute proof of causation, and the report stresses this. But it looks to me that there’s enough evidence - and a sufficiently plausible mechanism - that you can’t blithely conclude that “people would just find other ways to kill themselves”.
XT should know that. I remember the last conversation I had with him about this, I pointed to a study (I believe the same one) that compared the suicide rates tracked against the availability of guns in the various American states. His response was basically “but what about Japan?”
Except that people DO find other ways to kill themselves in the absence of guns. The US, for all our guns (and crime, and disparity of wealth and a host of other issues) is in the middle of the pack wrt suicides compared to other industrialized nations. It’s hard to imagine that by simply taking away guns we’d move even lower in those numbers. We are ALREADY fairly low wrt suicides per 100,000.
I’ve seen that report and others like it. They are frequently brought out in these debates. I have not found them compelling. Australia is often brought out as an example. When guns were banned, initially the suicide rate DID in fact drop. But by 2015 it was back to historical highs. Now, this definitely has a lot to do with other factors. But the point is, taking away the guns didn’t change the rate long term. It shifted the method, and for a while it did lower the rate until it re balanced later on. In the US it would, IMHO, be pretty much the same thing. If you could magically take the guns away then you’d have a short term drop…followed, eventually, by a re balancing of the numbers as other methods became prevalent. I concede, it’s possible that the new number would be slightly lower than the previous number, but it won’t be radically different. Maybe a few hundred people less, though just year to year statistical variance can account for some of that.
I think there are other things that have a greater impact on suicide rates in a given nation than what methods are available and widely used. After all, there were approximately 47K suicides in the US last year, and only 19k of them (again approximately) were using a gun. Taking away all the guns wouldn’t save 19k people…it would just mean that those 19k people would find other ways, just like the other 28k who DIDN’T use a gun did in the US.
The argument is often made that guns facilitate suicides. Yet countries with higher rates of suicide than the US invariably have much tighter gun restriction. Japan has almost a ban on the things. Yet the Japanese manage to kill themselves in higher numbers, per capita, than those in the US with ready access to more guns than there are US citizens. Seems a valid point. It’s why in gun debates I always discount the suicide figures when people try and trot out what they think are big scary numbers of people killed by guns. Because if you magically took away the guns, the US suicide rate would almost certainly remain the same. Oh, it might drop initially, but eventually people would just find other ways to kill themselves…just like they do in countries without guns.