In the last few years (or longer?) there seems to have been a shift in what it means to be an “expert” when it comes to issues of public policy and social science.
The implication is that if you can’t get your terms right about a specific weapon, then you have no business shaping public policy that impacts guns.
I’ve also heard/read lots of people insist that “unless you’ve used a gun your opinion on gun legislation is meaningless.”
I’ve also heard and read interviews with so-called “gun experts”. Their qualifications are that they know how to use guns, and they can tell you lots of details about different kinds of guns.
But, it seems to me that none of that has anything to do with making policy. Look at data, do studies, evaluate the wants, needs, and safety of the population. Use a clear head to balance short term and long-term goals. Who cares if you’ve ever even seen a gun in your life? Can’t keep a 500 caliber WhozieRifle and a .20mm PistolBlaster straight? Well, it might make you a less effective communicator, but it doesn’t have anything to do with your ability to do your job.
And, if you’re someone who is upset by this example because you think I just hate guns so I must be wrong, I’ll add that I think this is problematic across a wide variety of issues across the political spectrum. We have a tendency to confuse enthusiasts or experts in a small practical field to inherently have wisdom about larger, systemic issues.
It’s like assuming someone must have informed and valuable opinions about making movies because they can quote The Princess Bride.
I don’t know. But it might raise some question about your ability to competently draft legislation to ban the WhozieRifle (and not the PistolBlaster). And I think that it harms your credibility when you are attempting to argue why the WhozeRifle (and not the PistolBlaster) need to be banned.
IMHO an expert in guns need not be an expert on policy, nor an expert in policy an expert on guns. But when one is talking about the other they do need to be at least knowledgeable in that other. A policymaker who cannot distinguish between Model A of a gun and Model B of that gun is not a problem, but one who cannot distinguish between the basic types of gun (e.g. pistol and rifle from your example) has no business making policy. Similarly a gun expert who cannot talk about the wider effects of gun policy - facts, figures, studies, etc - has no business talking about policy beyond, “That’s going to put me out of business.”
This may be a difference in expectation between the UK and the USA. We don’t expect our politicians to be experts on their subjects; we do expect them to master their briefs. For example, we don’t expect Phillip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to be an expert on economics and finance - he has civil servants and advisors for that - but we do expect him to be able to explain and defend any of the governments policies in his purview.
People are free to offer opinions about women’s freedom of choice, gay wedding cakes, legalizing drugs, taxation, war in the Middle East or a myriad of other matters without being obstetrician-gynecologist , baker, pharmacologist, psychologist, economist, military scholar, etc. But guns are different. Guns are very very special, don’t you know?
Unless you can describe all major bullet types, write an essay on the definition of assault rifle, discuss the pros and cons of major brands of rifles and handguns, and assemble a bump fire stock using ordinary household parts, then your opinion on guns is worth Zero, Zilch, Nada. Just go away.
Guns are different in that most people realize that it is impossible to ban all guns so the question is then which ones to ban. If you don’t know the difference between guns and what makes certain ones more deadly than others then it is impossible to have an informed opinion about the subject. Otherwise it is just a waste of time and resources if we ban the AR-15 type of weapon and everyone just switches to the even deadlier AR-16 type of weapon.
I think most people agree that when it comes to the details of policy, experts should be brought in. No one with an opinion on health care policy pretends they’re a doctor or an insurance adjuster, unless they are one. No one with an opinion on drug policy thinks they’re a pharmacologist, unless they are one. That does not make general positions on those matters stupid; matters of policy are valid things to have opinions on, and you leave the details to the experts.
A person who thinks high capacity semi-automatic weapons originally designed for a military purpose might not be things that should be easy for just anyone to get has a perfectly valid opinion, and mistaking the terms “assault rifle” and “assault weapon” (a thing I’ve seen PRO-gun people do) does not invalidate their opinion, anymore than the fact HurricaneDitka isn’t a health economist invalidates his general opinion on universal health insurance.
What would be the problem with banning all guns designed for warfare? ALL of them. How would that be a wrong move? How much extra special knowledge would you need?
I think there are many more options than that. And, it seems likely that what we need is a combination of approaches.
I’d like us starting to study guns like we study cars. The result has been a broad range of solutions involving design, licensing, insurance, training, etc., etc. Car owners/lovers fought this all along the way. Rollover protection, crash worthiness, seat belts, steering wheel design, hooded engine compartment, passive interior design, … The list goes on forever.
Our approach can’t be limited to accepting some percentage of whatever manufacturers create.
I like the thread title. We need to have experts in civilian gun ownership. We do not have that today.
I agree completely. That all falls under “effective communication.”
My argument, though, is that it is only tangentially related to being an expert on understanding, say, the impact of guns on society, or an expert on the effects various laws and policies might have on that impact.
That seems just to be a restatement of the opinion I quoted in the OP. But can you tell me why that is? Why should they have “no business”?
I mean, I do agree with this, and similarly to my response to Falchion I’d say that it becomes difficult to be an effective politician/policy maker if you can’t speak accurately in the vernacular of the people or areas in which you are legislating. But it doesn’t in and of itself mean anything about the quality of your opinion/analysis about the data.
I do think that the “gun debate” as it were is pretty off the rails in many ways. I don’t really want this thread to devolve into another gun debate thread, but I would agree with you that if we’re going to get into the weeds about this gun and that gun, then one needs to have a degree of explicit knowledge about the weapons. However, I think that part of the issue (in a very abbreviated sense) is that the left (at least the mainstream left) has failed to articulate strong and meaningful positions on guns, and so gets drawn into ultimately ineffectual debates about specific gun models.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.
To stick with guns, for example, I don’t think that a kid in Florida has any more wisdom than anyone else about what to do or how to go about doing it just because they lost classmates to gun violence, though many think otherwise.
To step away from guns, I don’t think that being an oppressed minority inherently makes one an expert on how to solve racial social problems, though many think otherwise.
To be even more general: specific, experiential knowledge makes you an expert on your own experience, nothing else. But people all over the political spectrum seem to confuse personal interpretation of lived experience for subject mater expertise. The prospects of such confusion are terrifying.
I concur, though, I’d even go a bit farther (or turn it upside-down) and say that the elevation of personal, non-expert opinion to a primary input of decision-making about issues that affect large numbers of people is a big part of the issue. Anyone can have any opinion. Should we listen to it? Using knowledge of the proper names of guns as the benchmark for the value of someone’s opinion on gun issues is not filtering on the right kind of knowledge.
I don’t think you can be an expert on the effect of various laws and policies without knowing what those various laws do. (I suppose you can in the sense that you don’t really need to know much about the laws to look retrospectively at their effect, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about). And I don’t think it’s just an issue of “communication” or “vernacular” (although, obviously, you need to be able to do that too).
Your hypothetical legislator is saying: I am supporting legislation that bans the WhozieRifle and not the PistolBlaster, because banning WhozieRifles will have an meaningful effect on overall (or some subset) of crime. And, I support this legislation, notwithstanding the fact that I don’t really know what a WhozieRifle is; or what a PistolBlaster is; or the difference between them.
Perhaps that legislator is simply parroting what some actual expert told him. And I’m certainly not saying it means he wrong (it might make all the difference). But how can you view that person as an expert on the subject? What credible does his “because” have?
There’s also the fact that if your legislator is simply parroting what some actual expert told him, then it at least behoves the legislator to be able to pick from amongst the various experts and decide which of them to listen to. In practice, I suspect, for most legislators this becomes the expert that tells them what they want to hear, and not the expert who tells them something they don’t want to hear.
Ultimately, though, I submit that the experts aren’t, on the whole, experts on the things that are relevant for making public policy. What is relevant for public policy is whether a proposed piece of legislation would be good for the country or not. Thus, for example, If an expert tells you that a WhozieRifle is used to kill 1000 people a year so should be banned, the factual conclusion (WhozieRifles kill 1000 people a year) is something we should be able to rely on; the public policy conclusion (WhozieRifles should be banned) was probably not reached by an expert on public policy.
It would be nice if we could rely on our legislators to take in the mass of factual considerations, reach a conclusion about the probable effects of proposed legislation, and use that information to make an informed decision for the benefit of the country as a whole. It would also be nice if I had a pony.
I would be totally fine with a legislator enacting legislation about, say, medical safety standards, even if they got tripped up between identifying an otoscope and endoscope, or a CAT scanner and PET scanner. If they wanted to ban otoscopes because you’ll burst an ear drum, but they couldn’t identify an otoscope, I might look askance. But, if they can’t tell between otoscope type A and otoscope type B, it would matter less.
All that is to say, in your example, I’d maybe be fine with it. Because fundamentally, in the real world, there’s not a whole lot of difference between gun type A and gun type B (or in the example cited in the OP, a pistol with name X and a pistol with name Y, that isn’t actually a name for a pistol). Not being able to identify them visually, or know which calibers are used for what kind of targets, or whatever else, is not a lack of knowledge that will have a deep effect on a person’s ability to understand literature on a subject.
If someone said, “this study shows that gun ownership leads to gun death. We should have fewer guns,” a reasonable response is not “let’s hear from the experts on the other side, who are not data scientists, but can describe different guns accurately.” Those people are not experts on the issue at hand.
But you’re right in that any given legislator is not inherently an expert on any particular issue of legislation just by virtue of being a legislator, and if I was walking down that path I retract those statements.
This is a good example. You have to know stuff about guns to know what this would mean. Are you trying to ban revolvers, pistols, rifles, shotguns, machine guns, semi-automatic weapons? They have all been used for war at one time or another. What makes a weapon designed for warfare?
A great example was the original assault weapons ban passed in 1994. It banned:
guns that had telescoping or folding stocks which don’t effect lethality at all but make the guns lighter and easier to carry for long periods of time, guns that have a bayonet mount which are never used, guns that have a flash suppresor or a barrel designed to attach one which are designed to protect the users night vision and make no difference to lethality.
Unsurprisingly banning rifles that have characteristics that do not affect lethality in the slightest had no effecton crime or gun deaths. It was just a waste of everyone’s time and the gun manufacturers money.
If a law is to be effective, the people drafting it have to know enough about the subject to target the correct things. Otherwise it is just theater.
The difference about guns is that is a subject that has a very large group of knowledgeable enthusiasts. Most issues the only actual people who know anything about the issue are the people who are paid to so people can say horribly ignorant things and not be corrected. There are millions of gun enthusiasts but not millions of healthcare economics enthusiasts so dumb opinions about healthcare are less likely to be corrected.
I’m not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that she doesn’t understand even basics about guns? What “happened” as a result?
But it doesn’t mean the conclusion is wrong.
If I read a paper from a reputable study that says “otoscopoes burst ear drums at a dangerous rate,” and another paper that suggests alternatives to otoscopes, and I decide to suggest a ban on otoscopes in favor of less risky tools, does it matter that I’ve never seen one? Right or wrong, is my position more valid if I’ve used one? I would say no.