Knowledgeable about what?
As I said above, being an expert about using a thing does not make you an expert on that thing’s role in society.
Being African American doesn’t mean you know best on how to combat racism.
Being a woman doesn’t mean you know best how to end sexism.
Being a victim of gun violence doesn’t make you an expert on gun violence and how to reduce it, and neither does being a gun enthusiast.
Yes, at least she didn’t understand what she was proposing we make illegal.
She made a fool of herself and her bill got defeated.
Do you think your odds of succeeding in passing your otoscope ban in a democratic form of government like ours are improved or worsened if it’s found out that you don’t know what an otoscope is? Do you think your position might be better-informed if you went beyond two papers and learned why doctors use otoscopes, given the risks and alternatives you read about? In doing so, you might learn that there are advantages to them that might temper your zeal for banning them.
(paragraph omitted for brevity)
If you’re saying that a legislator doesn’t need to be an expert on a subject to legislate on it, I don’t necessarily disagree. If he comes out and says: look, I talked to some people who know what they’re talking about and they’ve written this law and I think we should enact it because I believe them. Then, okay. I also believe that he should be able to speak intelligently on why this law makes sense (other than “those smart people told me”), but I agree that that’s a communication issue. I certainly don’t expect anyone to be an expert on everything. Legislators are inherently generalists.
But in that scenario, we wouldn’t consider the legislator an expert on the legislation or the effects thereof. The experts would be the smart people who knew what they were talking about, wrote the law, and told him to vote for it.
Now, if the idea is that we need to ban some guns and those things over there are almost certainly guns, so let’s ban them, fine. I agree, you don’t really need to know much about guns to take that position. And if the point of legislation that targets particular firearms is just an incremental approach towards mass prohibition and confiscation of firearms generally, then that’s fine.
But if you’re* going to argue that there is a principled reason to ban otoscope A and not otoscope B–or that the ban of otoscope A is going to help with whatever problem we’re trying to address other than simply limiting the total number of otoscopes in circulation–then it seems reasonable to expect you to have some idea what the difference is and I (for one) find the argument less persuasive if you don’t.
*hypothetical you
Just curious - do you apply the same criteria for other subjects? Scott Pruitt’s opinion on climate science is like someone who is convinced that any gunshot wound is fatal. Ben Carson knows about the same on housing policy.
The real question is which weapons, if any, we should ban based on their functionality, not on their name or category. If we do that, we can avoid these details and concentrate on the important part.
Sure. What’s the most embarrassing thing Scott Pruitt or Ben Carson have ever said they don’t understand about legislation they themselves proposed?
If there were something on par with Carolyn McCarthy’s, I’d certainly encourage them to learn more about the topic, and their own damn bill, before purporting to legislate on the matter; and I’m sure people on the other side of the aisle would take glee in pointing out their ignorance and make the case that we shouldn’t take their proposed legislation seriously.
Worsened, absolutely. Which is in part what this thread is about, and I think I’ve made my position on that clear so far. I do not in any way question that, when it comes to issues, it seems to matter a lot to people, with varying degrees of consistency, whether or not the people debating an issue have ‘hands on’ knowledge and experience that they can relate.
My question is, is that a useful metric for deciding who to listen to. Does the guy who teaches at my local range have an inherently more valuable opinion on gun legislation than I do because I don’t have specific knowledge about guns themselves? If so, why?
Sure, and one would hope that people who position themselves as experts have done more than read one study or two. I concede that my hypothetical was pretty narrow, but the basic point there is that there is a level of specific knowledge that is ultimately not relevant one way or another about making good decisions about a thing.
If I say “I think X about this subject”, “But you don’t even know Y about the subject,” is not an inherently meaningful rebuttal.
I’m sorry, but again I disagree. There are large numbers of enthusiasts on pretty much every popular subject - and many unpopular ones.
Apologies, I believe I misunderstood the point you were trying to make. As for the questions above, being knowledgeable on the topic makes an opinion more valuable if the legislation is sufficiently-specific, but not in all cases. To provide another example (that I’m sure will also prove imperfect): bicycles. If I were a legislator that wanted to propose a ban on bicycles on the roadway because I felt they were dangerous and I had made myself aware of the number of fatal auto-bicycle crashes each year, it wouldn’t matter much if I knew the difference between a mountain bike and a road bike, or could name all the parts of the bicycle or describe their function, or whether I’d ever ridden a bike or not. If, however, I wanted to ban mountain bikes but not road bikes, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what distinguishes the two, my ignorance would seem to be a more significant issue. If I proposed legislation that banned bicycles with more than 4 gears, but couldn’t give a coherent explanation for why 5+ gears are ban-worthy (or couldn’t comprehend why anyone might need more than 4 gears), my ignorance would be a significant factor.
As the interview showed, almost all of what Pruit advanced then was false, I will still think that when someone gets one detail wrong on some guns that that is not as bad as what Pruit and many Republicans in government are currently doing.
The same is true of drugs, and yet we’ve got an attorney-general making drug policy who doesn’t know the difference between marijuana and meth.
Going a bit meta, one should never forget that many Republicans in congress, starting specially with Newt Gingrich, knew that congressional offices with experts that helped explain things properly to congresscritters needed to be removed. For the simple reason that on many occasions they reported facts that got in the way of their plans.
I still remember that later Newt reported how glad he was when he noticed that he and many Republicans afterwards could find many experts that did agree with their harebrained ideas; of course, experts brought forward by special interests or conservative lobbies.
Umm - they don’t propose legislation. But I think saying climate change is a hoax is twice - no a hundred - times as clueless as getting anything about guns wrong.
I was wondering if your were as strict with people like Pruitt about things that matter a lot more than guns as you are with random legislators who offer erroneous bills.
BTW, if the NRA suddenly decided that we need to do something to limit what many people call assault weapons, I’d be happy of those writing the legislation use their expertise to get it right.
I’m not holding my breath.
Gun enthusiasts are nit-picking over details that aren’t relevant to the issue.
If somebody proposes regulating AR-15 to reduce the number of people who get shot, then you’re got a valid point if you offer evidence that an AR-15 isn’t capable of shooting a person. But if your argument is that the person who’s calling for the regulation doesn’t know how much an AR-15 weighs, your point is irrelevant.
The issue with guns specifically is that journalists and politicians very often sound like complete dumbasses because they obviously don’t know the first thing about what they are talking about and people don’t listen to obvious dumbasses.
An analogy is that some people are really into cars. It isn’t a problem if you don’t know the difference between tire marks from a 60’s era Buick Skylark and a Pontiac Tempest but it is a huge problem if you call a 1965 Ford Mustang a high-powered, automatic pickup truck when proposing legislation. It simply makes no sense and makes you sound like an idiot so people that actually know anything about the subject discredit everything you said.
There may be some solutions to the gun issue but they won’t sell if the people talking don’t stop making really blatantly false statements. Going to the gun range won’t hurt anyone. I would love it if the people talking about such things would actually try it as an educational exercise before they pretend to be knowledgeable on the subject.
Scientists are experts, no? Here’s a good mini-documentary outlining strong similarities between the NRA and sciencetology.
More than that, our friend HD has exhibited such a profound lack of understanding of the difference between a cabinet secretary and a legislator, that his position on all further matters regarding American government and politics should be disregarded.
After all, this is the standard that gun rights activists seek to apply to newspapers when they make a typo about a particular caliber of bullet.
That’s a pretty disingenuous characterization of my position. I didn’t particularly mind the original mistake so much as the erroneous “correction”.
Another factor is that bills introduced get looked at by committees and usually revised, so typos are easy to correct. (Except of course bills pushed through by Republicans on minor things like health care and taxes which are kept hidden until the last minute.) Actions by Cabinet secretaries may or may not get reviewed.
Speaking of experts, in the Times last week there was testimony from surgeons, many of whom had experience in war zones, on what high velocity weapons does to you, versus what a pistol does.
Link. This is expert information maybe slightly more important than what the guns are called.