The only people besides police or security guards I’ve seen openly carry are:
Farmers and ranchers and that was usually just a rifle in a pickup truck to shoot nuisance animals.
Store clerks. Especially those working in gun stores. Anyplace known for robberies like liquor stores or convenience stores or gas stations I can see them wanting protection.
Hikers who in a area where dangerous animals are like snakes.
Now the people I know who have concealed carry do it because their jobs require them to work in dangerous areas.
I’m just pointing out the foolishness of comparing US crime rates to that of “other industrialized countries” and attributing the difference to gun control. You can cherry-pick, I can cherry pick. (But, overall, I’ve got a bigger tree.)
No, Lew Rockwell, one of the founders of that “institution,” has a well known record of racism. He is believed to be the author of Ron Paul’s racist newsletters that called 95% of blacks in Washington DC criminals, insinuated blacks were animals, and all sorts of anti-Semitic remarks.
I also note that the central theme of the article quoted is that one can’t compare the US to Europe in terms of crime because we are more racially diverse. One can infer from that argument that there’s a connection between crime and racial minorities, which could be taken in the same tone as Rockwell’s earlier ghostwriting for Ron Paul. Whether that it is the intent or not surely isn’t conclusive, but as a general rule I don’t tend to spend a whole lot of time taking neo-Confederates’ arguments on society as seriously as others do.
“Once we understand these facts, and do not cling to bizarre xenophobic views about how everyone outside the “developed” world is too dysfunctional and/or subhuman (although few gun control advocates would ever admit to the thought) to bear comparison to the US, we immediately see that the mantra “worst in the developed world” offers an immensely skewed, unrealistic, and even bigoted view of the world and how countries compare to each other.”
The author argues the exact opposite of what you suggest. Your reading comprehension is poor. As is your attempt to discredit data you clearly don’t wish to accept.
Oh, I see. You take the Von Mises Institute at their word that they aren’t intolerant of minorities. Sure, they support neo-Confederate causes. But that has nothing to do with race, since they say so. Just like how the Civil War was not about slavery, but free market principles. Because they say so.
But even if one doesn’t think race has anything to do with this issue, the article is one very long argument of the beard. “If we compare the US to every highly developed country, why can’t we compare it to counties that are only highly developed? And if we can compare the US to highly developed countries, why not moderately developed? And Syria is a moderately developed country, and we have much less violence than the US, therefore there’s no violence problem in the US.”
No. The summary of the article is the same as the point I’ve been making repeatedly in this thread: gun controllers cherry-pick the data that supports their cause, and ignore data that they don’t like. You’ve helped to make this point for me. Thanks.
All the article does is say we should not compare the US to the most developed countries because it leads to the conclusion that the US has a violence problem. If more countries that aren’t as highly developed are included, then violence doesn’t seem like a problem.
It’s much like saying that if you compare health care systems among the most developed countries, the US has terrible health outcomes. But if you compare the US to less developed countries, our health outcomes are not so bad.
If you want to compare the US rates of violence to all OECD countries, and conclude that the US ranks number two in the highest murder rate of the richest 33 countries, that’s fine with me. Nothing cherry picked about that stat.
But they are NOT the most developed countries. They are the nations which belong to a certain org.
*But if you’re familiar with the OECD, you’ll immediately notice a problem with the list Fisher uses. Mexico is an OECD country. So why is Mexico not in this graph? Well, it’s pretty apparent that Mexico was left off the list because to do so would interfere with the point Fisher is trying to make. After all, Mexico — in spite of much more restrictive gun laws — has a murder rate many times larger than the US.
But Fisher has what he thinks is a good excuse for his manipulation here. According to Fisher, the omission is because Mexico “has about triple the U.S. rate due in large part to the ongoing drug war.”
Oh, so every country that has drug war deaths is exempt? Well, then I guess we have to remove the US from the list.
But, of course, the US for some mysterious reason must remain on the list, so, by “developed” country, Fisher really means “ a country that’s on the OECD list minus any country with a higher murder rate than the US.”
*
Cherry picked.
There’s also no reason to pick OECD nations, there’s nothing magical about the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
I can’t find any allegations about him. But he’s NOT the author of that piece. So what you saying is that if you claim someone is a cryto-racist, and he is one of the founders of a libertarian think tank, everything that comes out of that think tank is then racist. Wow, what a stretch. :dubious:
No that’s not what it says. Your "because it leads to the conclusion " is your own concoction. Regardless of the provenance of the article, the substance of it says that the comparisons to so called developed nations is arbitrary. It’s a false comparison and can be used to mislead.
In any event I expect open carry in Texas to go similarly to how it goes in other states. Largely uneventful save for the fringes.
Yes, talking about OECD countries, which is by definition the club of most developed nations, but then leaving one OECD country out, for pretty arbitrary reasons, is cherry picking. But comparing the US to the other richest countries isn’t cherry picking. It’s a perfectly fine comparison within a well established group. It’s like saying that someone is the fastest runner in the NFL - that’s a fine set of data to work with. It isn’t cherry picking because the NBA is excluded. It could be cherry picking if one claimed that he was the fastest player in the NFL (except for those four guys who are faster).
And, for crying out loud, the OECD gathers this type of data (and much more) on its members. Are they cherry picking?
If you’d like a full debate on the merits of Rockwell and his racist friends, let’s start another thread. But I think that Mises is a totally untrustworthy and thoroughly disreputable organization. If they said it was daytime, I’d check my watch.
You acknowledge the first example is cherry picking, but haven’t applied the concept to the larger group. It’s not just excluding a member of OECD countries that is cherry picking, but it the decision to use “richest countries” itself is a choice. Why is that choice superior to OECD countries, all countries, or as the cite uses for the sake of example, the UN’s Human Development Index? The act of choosing a comparison set itself is a choice.
If your comparison is to people in the NFL, sure. But if your comparison is designed to provide insight into the fastest runners in the world, then using the NFL as your data set isn’t terrible, but it does raise the question of why that’s better than say, winners of the olympics in specific events, or some other subset of folks.
This was the point raised by ChickenLegs in post #43. Why is your choice of OECD countries, or richest countries, a superior choice to the UNs HDI? If the UNs HDI is used, your claim that there are “much lower rates of violent deaths” no longer holds up.
I think acknowledging the validity of the claim of cherry picking with OECD countries hardly qualifies as a rebuttal. I wouldn’t consider anything in your previous post #95 a rebuttal.
So apparently it’s fine to make bigoted assumptions about foreigners if they are already in the country, but not when they live overseas. I will leave aside for the moment the ridiculous claim that other OECD states are “ethnically non-diverse.” Also from the article:
Really? Gun crime is dependent on country size and level of representation in government? It’s an editorial. It’s an acceptable starting point for discussion. It’s a ridiculous choice as a citation, though.