if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.
Who is "we", white man? ;)
Here in France there seems to be very little public debate around firearm legislation - there probably is some, somewhere, but it gets very little media attention.
The existence of public debate around an issue doesn't seem to be very strong evidence on whether the question can be answered conclusively given the available evidence, since public debate around issues varies from country to country, and in some places there are public debates around issues where anybody with half a brain should be able to tell which side is right. Heck, sometimes there's a lack of public debate because everybody agrees on the wrong conclusion.
(my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements)
Let's assume that your suggested policy would bring school shootings from about the rate they're at now to 0. I can't imagine the benefit would be much better than that, and it would probably be a lot worse. Wikipedia says that there have been 38 school shooting deaths this year (not including the suicides, and including the recent attack, making it much higher than other recent years). According to this, there are about 3 million public school teachers in the US and they make about $50,000 per year each, so their value of time is probably somewhere around $30/hour, so it would cost about $100 million per year to require all of them to spend an hour per year on the shooting range. If that saves about 40 lives per year, that works out to $25 million per life (Edit: oops, no it doesn't). None of the estimates on wikipedia suggest that lives should be valued at more than $10 million per life. And I haven't even mentioned the costs of equipping the teachers with guns, so the actual cost of the policy is probably much higher. So mandatory firing range time for al...
Your numbers don't add. $100 million/year divided by 40 deaths/year is $2.5 million per life, which is well below the accepted value of a life.
We can also look at comparative advantage. If we are dedicating this length of time would ti eb better spent on something else, say teaching them all first aid? I suspect there are significantly more deaths from accidents than shootings.
(Alex scooped me on the obvious "do a back-of-the-envelope calculation" point; below is the calculation I was going to include in the comment I was drafting)
There are about 7.2 million teachers in the United States. Suppose firearms training takes ten hours per teacher per year, and suppose we value that time at 15 $/hr; that's already more than a billion dollars. How many people die in school shootings in a typical year? Glancing at Wikipedia's list of U.S. school shootings in the decade 2000-2009, I count 67 fatalities, or about 7 per year. But it doesn't seem reasonable to spend $140,000,000 to save a life [...]
If gun control arguments make me want to shoot myself, does that just prove their point? by Yvain
...I have tried to be good.
I have tried not to talk about politics on Facebook, because that's not the place for it, and it only annoys people, and it's not what people want to hear about right after a terrible disaster.
No one else has tried this. I don't think people who post about politics on Facebook all the time realize that everyone else who agrees with them is also posting about politics on Facebook all the time, and so every day I have to scroll through half a dozen image macros making fun of how stupid anyone who doesn't want immediate gun control is, or catchy anti-NRA slogans. The day after the tragedy, there was almost nothing else in my entire newsfeed.
The posts are never "I think we need more gun control". It's always "Anyone who doesn't want gun control has been brainwashed by the NRA and thinks school shootings are great." I am constantly amazed by how small a buffer the average person has between "I don't believe X" and "Believing X is irredeemably evil and we must mock and shame it until the very possibility of expressing it is beyond t
With this kind of question that borders on political/identity issues, they very first thing you do is build your lines of retreat: If guns cause death, what should you do? If guns don't cause death, what should you do? If guns reduce death, what should you do? You need satisfactory non-straw answers for all of those cases before you are qualified to look at the facts. After you have those answers, you will find it much easier to be neutral.
I think you'd have to notice the (anti)correllation between gun control and violent death across countries/states/areas, if it exists, then look at the three hypotheses: guns cause death, death causes guns, something causes both. Try to eliminate hypotheses.
You could note that Canada has more guns per capita and less murder. You could control for the effect of legislation by finding different groups of people who kill each other with guns or don't who live in the same legislative areas. You could find a culturally homogenous group who are split by arbitrary political lines (i.e. toronto/detroit/buffalo/etc, that country that is split in two in the carribean). etc.
Haiti and the Dominican have remarkably different political histories - Haiti has a lot more awful dictators in its past. They're poor comparisons. Toronto and Detroit are probably even worse - Detroit is an industrial centre whose industry rotted out around the same time as it was levelled(metaphorically) by race riots and people fleeing from them. Toronto is a financial and cultural centre whose primary challenge is that they're short a freeway or two and the commute times are bad. If you want to compare Toronto to anything, NYC or maybe Chicago are the obvious candidates.
As for a close cross-border comparison, I propose Seattle and Vancouver. They're close, similarly sized, and culturally close. You can also look at smaller examples(Sault Ste Marie ON/MI, Niagara Falls ON/NY, etc.), but it's harder to get good data from those due to scale, even though they are even closer in geographic and cultural terms.
No. Allowing yourself a line of retreat helps disincentivize the less-rational parts of your brain from stubbornly insisting on continuing to defend a proposition after it is no longer viable.
Ban guns in a randomly chosen* selection of 25 states and see if fewer people get shot in those states.
*"randomly chosen" is important to avoid effects from regression to the mean etc.
(my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements)
Even assuming that this eliminates all school shootings and doesn't result in even a single child getting their hands on a teacher's gun which isn't properly attended, or a teacher lacking in self control using one irresponsibly, I think this would probably still be a poor use of time and money with respect to lives saved relative to other equipment and training (emergency medical, for instance,) that teachers could receive. It sounds like much more a response to Bad Guy Bias than lives-saved maximizing.
A impressive essay. It's not exactly on topic, but I think it will appeal to LessWrongers as a clean presentation on a mind-killing topic. It's by a pro-gun leftist, and it's the first explanation of the definition of assault weapons that I've been able to focus on. The author is remarkably clear about the fact that other people don't start out by sharing his knowledge. There are no insults, and there are explanatory pictures.
There are two obvious effects (guns are more deadly than other weapons, but guns are also a deterrent) and it is not clear which is stronger. It's one of those issues where natural experiments or instrumental variables are our best bet for gaining knowledge, and of course anyone with a stat background will know the troubles with those techniques.
That said, there are studies using those techniques and they are better than a cursory glance at gun laws and homicide rates by country (or by state). And, to my understanding, the results of those studies are resoundly mixed. Some of these are quite controversial, but we're talking about tricky statistical techniques surrounding an emotional political issue, so controversy will abound even if the results are sound.
My takeaway is that this is not an issue worth getting very passionate about one way or the other. Your knowledge should drive your emotions, and if you don't know what effect is strongest, then you should save your emotional energy for more clear-cut or important causes.
If anyone knows of any very elegant studies, please correct me. Obviously I haven't read the whole literature.
While it's almost certainly impossible to answer this question to anywhere near the level of "smoking causes cancer", it's surely possible to get much closer than just comparing those two statistics you cited. One of the best attempts I've seen (and not just because it happens to support my position, I swear) is this study from the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
It attempts to find a statistically rigourous correlation between gun ownership rates and murder/suicide rates - importantly, not JUST gun-related deaths, but murder/suicide r...
My strategy in these cases is usually "look for lots of facts relevant to this issue and see what stands out". The things that jump out at me from just that page:
In 2008, there were 14,137 homicides in the US (source), of which 9,484 involved a firearm (source). If we assume (very generously) that none of these would have happened if there were no civilian firearms, we'd save 9,484 lives.
In 2008 the value of a life was £6.9 million (source), so those deaths cost $65,400 million.
Banning guns wouldn't (supposedly) just save those though; it'd also save lives in future years. As this functions like an investment, we'll discount it by 10% (long run stock market return), and get a present value of $654,000 million.
Ther...
What would have to be true in order for increased gun control to mean fewer killings?
Why do mass murders happen? They do not happen by accident. Humans are optimizers, albeit flawed ones; we seek means to accomplish our goals. Once a human decides that killing people is a goal (terminal or instrumental), if they don't change their mind, some folks are likely to get killed. Mass murders such as those at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, or Columbine are premeditated — goal-directed activity, not undirected acts of chaos. The killers decided they wanted to kill, ch...
my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements
If you want to know about this specific belief, I'd suggest researching what portion of gunshot deaths occur at schools. It won't tell you whether giving teachers guns will hurt or help, but it will given you an upper limit on how much it could help. If it's only a tiny portion of the problem, don't worry about it.
(my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements)
It might be interesting to reverse the question? What benefits do you think there are from gun availability?
The ones I hear often are:
Self defence. People with guns can stop themselves being hurt. One could theoretically add up the number of times people have successfully defended themselves and compare it to gun homicides.
Pleasure gun enthusiasts get from their hobby. Seems relatively minor benefit, as they could likely get equal enjoyment from other hobbies, and most forms of regulation wouldn't affect them significantly.
Protection from government
My own view on gun control is that it's a kind of prisoner's dilemma equilibrium, with the "high gun" equilibrium (US) being the defect situation, and the "low gun" equilibrium (France) being the cooperate situation. And that like many cases of real life prisoner’s dilemma, an "external power" (in that case the state) enforcing the cooperation by adding an additional penalty to defection can work, but doesn't always work.
I definitely think the French situation is much saner than the US one, but I just don't know if it's realistically possible to apply it in the US.
The first step is to isolate. As I believe culture is the most likely culprit, I'd suggest isolating by culture. Compare murder rates in the US by Japanese first and second generation immigrants to murder rates in Japan. If similar, culture is likely a substantial culprit.
Here's a report by the National Research Council of the National Academies (specifically, the Committee to Improve Research Information and Data on Firearms). It is a rigorous report that extensively discusses the issues with demonstrating a causal connection (or lack thereof)--between level of gun control and innocents killed--and generally refrains from making particular policy prescriptions.
Since the Kern County shooting, I'm noticing that this topic (and problem) is not going away. John Stewart nailed it: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-january-8-2013-stanley-mcchrystal
-where it's a problem about framing. But it's a comedy program, not a political forum.
[disclaimer: I may be a newbie, but if I'm breaking a rule here, I can usually hear it without freaking out.]
The main problem I'm having, is that gun violence in schools makes me angry, and that makes it harder to think straight. But if gun violence in schools doesn't make som...
Are we trying to be deontologist here (enough! we shouldn't have massacres of children!), or consequentialist (involuntary human deaths are bad).
If the former, this is a standard (note: I didn't say easy) causal inference problem. What you want to do, ideally, is select two reasonably large communities to serve as a test group and a control group. The communities have reasonably similar laws on the books, composition, etc. except we implement a form of gun control in one. We then check back later.
Some reasons gun control might work to stop photogenic t...
I always thought about this: since the dawn of violent first person shooters, our self-appointed guardians of morality have been on a crusade to warn us of the dangers of playing video games with a little edge. According to them, if you play long enough, you’ll become desensitized to graphic scenes of death and torture, emerging from behind the console as a murderous monster ready to kill his fellow humans at a mere whim. Now, as video games are getting more and more sophisticated, there’s a renewed sense of panic. But this time, it’s not from the usual su...
There's a science question here, and there's an engineering question here. They are two different questions.
Science asks, what are the numbers, what are the likelihoods? And there is always going to be more study needed. Consider that people are still arguing over evolution, there may never be numbers so compelling that they convince everyone.
The engineering question asks what we could do to change things. Engineers don't get to wait for better numbers, they have to do the best they can with what they've got. We don't really know why the violent crime rat...
I'm still reeling from http://lesswrong.com/lw/g0y/gun_control_how_would_we_know/84ky?context=1#comments ; I'm noticing how in other contexts "Why are we still talking about this we have better things to do?" is obvious, but it tends not to be for me in mind-killer contexts. Unfortunately, the impact of that point on my mind is such that I'm maybe not giving this thread the attention that all of your very well-thought out answers deserve, because I've suddenly stopped caring very much.
Regardless, though, y'all certainly have lived up to my expectations as polite, reasonable, rational debaters. Well done.
Good lord. I thought I had set LW to tell me when someone replied; having not received any email I assumed this post had been ignored. 0__o
-Robin
You might want to compare US and Canada, which were quite similar in terms of gun control and attitudes some 150 years ago, and then slowly diverged.
You might want to compare US and Canada, which were quite similar in terms of gun control and attitudes some 150 years ago, and then slowly diverged.
US/Canada comparisons are extremely misleading unless you control for demographics.
"[in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?
What's the difference between being randomly shot, and unrandomly shot?
Oh, I like this. I like this a lot. The underlying attitude, I mean. I'm going see if I can't extrapolate a general policy from this, actually. Something like:
"In a world where there still exist children that live (or, more likely, die) on garbage heaps, the fact that we're still arguing about [whatever issue] implies to me that it's not a low hanging fruit, and we should just go work on those instead."
I don't know how to keep this topic away from http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ , so I'm just going to exhort everyone to try to keep this about rationality and not about politics as usual. I myself have strong opinions here, which I'm deliberately squelching.
So I got to thinking about the issue of gun control in the wake of a recent school shooting in the US, specifically from the POV of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot. Please limit discussion to that *specific* issue, or we'll be here all year.
My question is not so much "Is strict gun control or lots of guns better for us [in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?", although I'm certainly interested in knowing the answer to that, but I think if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.
Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?
That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?
As a first pass I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate and I noted that the US, which is famously kind of all about the guns, has significantly higher rates than other first-world countries. I had gone into this with a deliberate desire to win, in the less wrong sense, so I accepted that this strongly speaks against my personal beliefs (my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements), and was about to update (well, utterly obliterate) those beliefs, when I went "Now, hold on. In the context of first world countries, the US has relatively lax gun control, and we seem to rather enjoy killing each other. How do I know those are causally related, though? Is it not just as likely that, for example, we have all the homicidally crazy people, and that that leads to both of those things? It doesn't seem to be the case that, say, in the UK, you have large-scale secret hoarding of guns; if that was the case, they'd be closer to use in gun-related homicides, I would think. But just because it didn't happen in the UK doesn't mean it wouldn't happen here."
At that point I realized that I don't know, even in theory, how to tell what the answer to my question is, or what evidence would be strong evidence for one position or the other. I am not strong enough as a rationalist or a statistician.
So, I thought I'd ask LW, which is full of people better at those things than I am. :)
Have at.
-Robin