[politics] meh. facebook. also, guns.
EDIT: Because someone else linked it, I'm making this entry public. Also, understand that I'm not attempting to speak with great authority or finality, just pointing out a few things and giving my own take on it.
Once upon a time, people on the Internet figured out that you could have discussions about politics and religion, OR you could have civil conversations that don't descend into flamewars. (Well, there are a great many conversation topics that can devolve into flamewars, but politics and religion are sort of universal accelerants.) There's one forum I spend time on where heavy moderation keeps flamewars from breaking out (as well as the board culture that has evolved over time, shaped by said moderation -- no group attacks, no personal attacks, no threadcrapping, with an escalating series of sanctions against violators; there's also some subforum-specific rules to keep flamewars from getting even an initial spark), but even then it can get pretty heated, and sometimes levelheaded-seeming folk can have flame-outs.
Another thing that people who've been around on the Internet for a bit of time have learned -- especially since the early-mid 1990s, before it had gotten really big outside of enthusiast and academic settings -- is that forwarding every alarming-sounding email you get is actually not a helpful behavior. (When I started getting urban legend emails from one of my sisters, for example, back around '99 - '00 or so, I wound up having to explain how to use search engines and Snopes to check if something was legitimate or not. They stopped not long after that.)
Unfortunately, Facebook has brought back both of the above. In particular, I see people from all over the political spectrum (well, far more from the left from the right, given the composition of my Facebook "friends") reposting image macros and links, with the only response being echoes; whenever it's something I think or know to be factually wrong, the tension around it forces me to forgo commenting.
Take, for instance, the current ... I hate to dignify it with the term "dialogue"; "screaming match" might be a better phrase ... on gun regulation. In particular, I see a lot of canned rhetoric and sound bites, by and large dependent on inflammatory language or factually incorrect statements or being predicated upon a gross misunderstanding (willful or otherwise) of either guns, gun regulation, or both. What makes it doubly frustrating is that it is supremely unlikely anything beyond President Obama's executive orders will come out of this before we move on to the next emergent thing from some disaster or another; the prospect of a renewed (and, possibly, broader) version of the '94 AWB is going to bring Second Amendment supporters out of the woodwork even more than they already have, and it's such a political hot potato I don't see a way it'd even reach a vote in either chamber (neither, from what I'm reading, do many others). So it's a whole bunch of stuff I have to resist the urge to comment on (or snark at), for the sake of not wanting to drum up drama, but even worse it's pissing in the wind.
Oh, and for what it's worth: there's some dialogue that portrays (or attempts to portray) deaths to firearms as a public health crisis. According to the CDC's preliminary numbers for 2011 (PDF warning), 11,101 people died in the US to assault (homicide) with a firearm (4,852 to homicide by any other means -- that comes out 1.6 deaths per 100,000 for non-firearm homicides, which is, incidentally, higher in and of itself than most other developed nations), 19,766 to suicide by firearms (18,519 suicides by other means), 851 accidental deaths by firearms, and 222 deaths by firearms where it was unclear which they were (homicide, suicide, accident). So that's 31,940 deaths by firearms (31,672 in 2010 (PDF warning) -- essentially unchanged). In that approximate neighborhood, we have: 37,275 transport accidents (almost all of them motor vehicle accidents, as opposed to non-land transport or land transports that aren't motor vehicles), 33,554 accidental poisonings, 26,631 falls, 18,289 accidents that are essentially "other"; among diseases and other health-condition causes of death, 43,682 to renal failure, 52,136 to pneumonia, 33,383 to hypertensive heart disease... most of the other categories are much higher or much lower than the 31,940 above. The age tables for 2011 aren't ready yet, but diabetes mellitus killed 34,567 people under the age of 74, and cardiovascular diseases killed 45,149 people between the ages of 45 and 54 alone (cardiovascular diseases killed 780,213 across all ages in 2010, the majority of them 75 or older, in case you were wondering).
While figuring out actual attributable mortality is actually really fucking hard (and I can say this with authority, because it's one of the ongoing things in my profession -- i.e. deaths linked to various environmental factors, or to conditions, such as obesity, that may drive the actual listed cause of death but aren't the proximate cause), a best guess is that 300,000 people die from tobacco-related causes every year in the US. Obesity rates among Americans are ridiculously high, and obesity is strongly correlated with a host of the things that are regularly killing us: cardiovascular diseases, primarily, but also diabetes (which increases the risk of a bunch of other things), and there's also reduced quality of life for the years you do live. (Quality-adjusted life years are an important measure in public health -- the idea is that, for example, you might consider a year of life having to deal with emphysema only about half as good as a year of life in perfect health.)
The point is that, for example, obesity or tobacco use are, in my mind, far more urgent a public health concern than firearm ownership. Even the act of distinguishing firearm deaths from other kinds of deaths in the same class (suicides and homicides, in particular), while it might have some justification in that there's research suggesting higher rates of firearm ownership are correlated with higher rates of homicide by firearms (holding constant a number of demographic factors, and even other types of homicides), it still seems to throw policy off in that meaningfully reducing either firearm homicides or firearm suicides should focus on the second word in the phrase, but the dialogue is always about the first word. That's not to say that there's not some merit to having that conversation, but the problem is that the kinds of policies put forward as a way to address these problems don't seem to have any logical way to impact these trends, or they're retreading ground already covered by existing law. Or, sometimes, they're laws proposed in response to specific spree shootings, which are horrifying, and tragic, and pants-shittingly terrifying, but also extremely rare, in terms of all the things that can happen to you; Mother Jones counted up a bit over 1,000 victims to mass murderers and spree shooters between 1982 and 2012, which works out to a bit over 30 per year, as compared to the roughly 50 deaths per year to lightning strikes from 1998 - 2008. A better option would be more consistent and rigorous enforcement of existing law; it'd get more political support, and likely more traction in addressing violence. The other part of it would be to assign automatic maximum penalties when a given violent crime is committed with a gun (this is a common idea put forward by gun-rights advocates, in fact); whether that would have a meaningful deterrent effect is more debatable, and, given the demographics of gun violence, might have some unfortunate consequences.
On the enforcement angle, the primary agency for enforcing federal firearms laws is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or the ATF (no, they don't generally add the extra letters in the short form). The ATF is currently underfunded, hilariously understaffed, and hasn't had a named director since Carl Truscott left the office in 2006, and he was apparently a slimeball. The ATF, over the past couple of decades, has had a track record of spectacular, lethal fuck-ups, a reputation of being more interested in racking up convictions (regardless of actual guilt) than in meaningfully reducing crime, and generally being power-tripping assholes in their dealings with firearms dealers and civilian gun owners (even those that have never shown the slightest hint of criminal inclinations). It's true that the ATF has been substantially de-fanged over the past decade or so, but that hasn't stopped agents from abusing or misusing the power they do have, and many of the laws that have stripped it of power came in response to abuses. So better enforcement, and a better-funded and staffed ATF, would have to come hand-in-hand with rooting out corruption and broken internal agency culture at the ATF, if for no other reason than to build up better trust and rapport with the communities of gun owners and gun dealers.
The problems we do have with regards to firearms aren't intractable, and I do think there's room for productive discussion. But I think that there are also bigger problems we need to deal with, as a society and a nation, and in dealing with many of them, I'm sure that we'd also see a lot of those numbers associated with firearm violence decline (poverty, inequality, mental health, to name a few).
EDIT: Some notes, starting with the New York Times: More Guns = More Killing. I don't know if the title is a deliberate reference to John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime, but given whom Ms. Rosenthal spoke with, I'm not sure she's aware of the existence of such a book. Lott's conclusion in that book is a matter of debate -- one of the reasons I link to the Wikipedia article, in particular, is because it lists the academic papers it spawned, both in support of his findings and contradicting them. Either way, it's worth noting that, with a few exceptions like the Violent Crime Act of 1994, gun laws in the past couple of decades have been getting more liberal and favoring gun owners (e.g. the spread of legal concealed carry, the "assault weapons ban" sunsetting without much noise or opposition), and yet violent crime has, by and large, been trending downward.
Also, Harvard School of Public Health: summaries of findings on homicide and firearms. They find a positive correlation between rates of firearm ownership and homicide rates, which is robust to various controls for poverty, other types of crime (e.g. aggravated assault), and some other factors that may drive violence, and that non-firearm homicide was not correlated (i.e. there didn't seem to be a "substitution" into homicide with other means). That should be taken with a big note that correlation is not causation -- these findings do not eliminate the possibility of a third factor or even reverse causality (e.g., there's a rise in the use of firearms by criminals, so otherwise law-abiding people obtain guns specifically because of that).
Another part of the question is how prevalent defensive use of a gun actually is. Justifiable homicides by non-police officers generally run about 200 - 300/yr or so, but far more common are non-lethal uses, especially ones where shots are not fired. A CDC-run random-digit dial survey conducted in 1994 found that there are about a million incidents a year where someone grabs a gun in response to a home intruder whose presence was confirmed visually; of those, about half reported believing they'd scared the intruder off with the gun. Confidence intervals are pretty wide on that number, as one might expect, and funding to try to get a larger N would probably be helpful. Another survey, from 1993, estimated (conservatively) north of a million defensive uses of a gun. Kleck and Gertz from an issue of The Journal of Crime and Criminology, which also has at least one article from the Harvard researchers above. I note that the numbers come from a third-party review of the article, and should be taken with appropriate salt.)
I still think that casting firearm homicide as a public health issue -- as a disease, so to speak -- is inherently political, in a way that these kinds of questions probably shouldn't be, because it treats crime committed with a firearm as being in some way inherently different than the same crimes committed using other means. If you're going to go there, then it seems necessary to also include the benefits of public ownership of firearms, i.e., estimating defensive use, and also looking at things like the probability of people with concealed carry permits to be charged or convicted with violent crimes.
This entry was originally posted at http://laudre.dreamwidth.org/719273.html. Comments either here or there. Go ahead and add me there so I can add you back if need be.
Once upon a time, people on the Internet figured out that you could have discussions about politics and religion, OR you could have civil conversations that don't descend into flamewars. (Well, there are a great many conversation topics that can devolve into flamewars, but politics and religion are sort of universal accelerants.) There's one forum I spend time on where heavy moderation keeps flamewars from breaking out (as well as the board culture that has evolved over time, shaped by said moderation -- no group attacks, no personal attacks, no threadcrapping, with an escalating series of sanctions against violators; there's also some subforum-specific rules to keep flamewars from getting even an initial spark), but even then it can get pretty heated, and sometimes levelheaded-seeming folk can have flame-outs.
Another thing that people who've been around on the Internet for a bit of time have learned -- especially since the early-mid 1990s, before it had gotten really big outside of enthusiast and academic settings -- is that forwarding every alarming-sounding email you get is actually not a helpful behavior. (When I started getting urban legend emails from one of my sisters, for example, back around '99 - '00 or so, I wound up having to explain how to use search engines and Snopes to check if something was legitimate or not. They stopped not long after that.)
Unfortunately, Facebook has brought back both of the above. In particular, I see people from all over the political spectrum (well, far more from the left from the right, given the composition of my Facebook "friends") reposting image macros and links, with the only response being echoes; whenever it's something I think or know to be factually wrong, the tension around it forces me to forgo commenting.
Take, for instance, the current ... I hate to dignify it with the term "dialogue"; "screaming match" might be a better phrase ... on gun regulation. In particular, I see a lot of canned rhetoric and sound bites, by and large dependent on inflammatory language or factually incorrect statements or being predicated upon a gross misunderstanding (willful or otherwise) of either guns, gun regulation, or both. What makes it doubly frustrating is that it is supremely unlikely anything beyond President Obama's executive orders will come out of this before we move on to the next emergent thing from some disaster or another; the prospect of a renewed (and, possibly, broader) version of the '94 AWB is going to bring Second Amendment supporters out of the woodwork even more than they already have, and it's such a political hot potato I don't see a way it'd even reach a vote in either chamber (neither, from what I'm reading, do many others). So it's a whole bunch of stuff I have to resist the urge to comment on (or snark at), for the sake of not wanting to drum up drama, but even worse it's pissing in the wind.
Oh, and for what it's worth: there's some dialogue that portrays (or attempts to portray) deaths to firearms as a public health crisis. According to the CDC's preliminary numbers for 2011 (PDF warning), 11,101 people died in the US to assault (homicide) with a firearm (4,852 to homicide by any other means -- that comes out 1.6 deaths per 100,000 for non-firearm homicides, which is, incidentally, higher in and of itself than most other developed nations), 19,766 to suicide by firearms (18,519 suicides by other means), 851 accidental deaths by firearms, and 222 deaths by firearms where it was unclear which they were (homicide, suicide, accident). So that's 31,940 deaths by firearms (31,672 in 2010 (PDF warning) -- essentially unchanged). In that approximate neighborhood, we have: 37,275 transport accidents (almost all of them motor vehicle accidents, as opposed to non-land transport or land transports that aren't motor vehicles), 33,554 accidental poisonings, 26,631 falls, 18,289 accidents that are essentially "other"; among diseases and other health-condition causes of death, 43,682 to renal failure, 52,136 to pneumonia, 33,383 to hypertensive heart disease... most of the other categories are much higher or much lower than the 31,940 above. The age tables for 2011 aren't ready yet, but diabetes mellitus killed 34,567 people under the age of 74, and cardiovascular diseases killed 45,149 people between the ages of 45 and 54 alone (cardiovascular diseases killed 780,213 across all ages in 2010, the majority of them 75 or older, in case you were wondering).
While figuring out actual attributable mortality is actually really fucking hard (and I can say this with authority, because it's one of the ongoing things in my profession -- i.e. deaths linked to various environmental factors, or to conditions, such as obesity, that may drive the actual listed cause of death but aren't the proximate cause), a best guess is that 300,000 people die from tobacco-related causes every year in the US. Obesity rates among Americans are ridiculously high, and obesity is strongly correlated with a host of the things that are regularly killing us: cardiovascular diseases, primarily, but also diabetes (which increases the risk of a bunch of other things), and there's also reduced quality of life for the years you do live. (Quality-adjusted life years are an important measure in public health -- the idea is that, for example, you might consider a year of life having to deal with emphysema only about half as good as a year of life in perfect health.)
The point is that, for example, obesity or tobacco use are, in my mind, far more urgent a public health concern than firearm ownership. Even the act of distinguishing firearm deaths from other kinds of deaths in the same class (suicides and homicides, in particular), while it might have some justification in that there's research suggesting higher rates of firearm ownership are correlated with higher rates of homicide by firearms (holding constant a number of demographic factors, and even other types of homicides), it still seems to throw policy off in that meaningfully reducing either firearm homicides or firearm suicides should focus on the second word in the phrase, but the dialogue is always about the first word. That's not to say that there's not some merit to having that conversation, but the problem is that the kinds of policies put forward as a way to address these problems don't seem to have any logical way to impact these trends, or they're retreading ground already covered by existing law. Or, sometimes, they're laws proposed in response to specific spree shootings, which are horrifying, and tragic, and pants-shittingly terrifying, but also extremely rare, in terms of all the things that can happen to you; Mother Jones counted up a bit over 1,000 victims to mass murderers and spree shooters between 1982 and 2012, which works out to a bit over 30 per year, as compared to the roughly 50 deaths per year to lightning strikes from 1998 - 2008. A better option would be more consistent and rigorous enforcement of existing law; it'd get more political support, and likely more traction in addressing violence. The other part of it would be to assign automatic maximum penalties when a given violent crime is committed with a gun (this is a common idea put forward by gun-rights advocates, in fact); whether that would have a meaningful deterrent effect is more debatable, and, given the demographics of gun violence, might have some unfortunate consequences.
On the enforcement angle, the primary agency for enforcing federal firearms laws is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or the ATF (no, they don't generally add the extra letters in the short form). The ATF is currently underfunded, hilariously understaffed, and hasn't had a named director since Carl Truscott left the office in 2006, and he was apparently a slimeball. The ATF, over the past couple of decades, has had a track record of spectacular, lethal fuck-ups, a reputation of being more interested in racking up convictions (regardless of actual guilt) than in meaningfully reducing crime, and generally being power-tripping assholes in their dealings with firearms dealers and civilian gun owners (even those that have never shown the slightest hint of criminal inclinations). It's true that the ATF has been substantially de-fanged over the past decade or so, but that hasn't stopped agents from abusing or misusing the power they do have, and many of the laws that have stripped it of power came in response to abuses. So better enforcement, and a better-funded and staffed ATF, would have to come hand-in-hand with rooting out corruption and broken internal agency culture at the ATF, if for no other reason than to build up better trust and rapport with the communities of gun owners and gun dealers.
The problems we do have with regards to firearms aren't intractable, and I do think there's room for productive discussion. But I think that there are also bigger problems we need to deal with, as a society and a nation, and in dealing with many of them, I'm sure that we'd also see a lot of those numbers associated with firearm violence decline (poverty, inequality, mental health, to name a few).
EDIT: Some notes, starting with the New York Times: More Guns = More Killing. I don't know if the title is a deliberate reference to John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime, but given whom Ms. Rosenthal spoke with, I'm not sure she's aware of the existence of such a book. Lott's conclusion in that book is a matter of debate -- one of the reasons I link to the Wikipedia article, in particular, is because it lists the academic papers it spawned, both in support of his findings and contradicting them. Either way, it's worth noting that, with a few exceptions like the Violent Crime Act of 1994, gun laws in the past couple of decades have been getting more liberal and favoring gun owners (e.g. the spread of legal concealed carry, the "assault weapons ban" sunsetting without much noise or opposition), and yet violent crime has, by and large, been trending downward.
Also, Harvard School of Public Health: summaries of findings on homicide and firearms. They find a positive correlation between rates of firearm ownership and homicide rates, which is robust to various controls for poverty, other types of crime (e.g. aggravated assault), and some other factors that may drive violence, and that non-firearm homicide was not correlated (i.e. there didn't seem to be a "substitution" into homicide with other means). That should be taken with a big note that correlation is not causation -- these findings do not eliminate the possibility of a third factor or even reverse causality (e.g., there's a rise in the use of firearms by criminals, so otherwise law-abiding people obtain guns specifically because of that).
Another part of the question is how prevalent defensive use of a gun actually is. Justifiable homicides by non-police officers generally run about 200 - 300/yr or so, but far more common are non-lethal uses, especially ones where shots are not fired. A CDC-run random-digit dial survey conducted in 1994 found that there are about a million incidents a year where someone grabs a gun in response to a home intruder whose presence was confirmed visually; of those, about half reported believing they'd scared the intruder off with the gun. Confidence intervals are pretty wide on that number, as one might expect, and funding to try to get a larger N would probably be helpful. Another survey, from 1993, estimated (conservatively) north of a million defensive uses of a gun. Kleck and Gertz from an issue of The Journal of Crime and Criminology, which also has at least one article from the Harvard researchers above. I note that the numbers come from a third-party review of the article, and should be taken with appropriate salt.)
I still think that casting firearm homicide as a public health issue -- as a disease, so to speak -- is inherently political, in a way that these kinds of questions probably shouldn't be, because it treats crime committed with a firearm as being in some way inherently different than the same crimes committed using other means. If you're going to go there, then it seems necessary to also include the benefits of public ownership of firearms, i.e., estimating defensive use, and also looking at things like the probability of people with concealed carry permits to be charged or convicted with violent crimes.
This entry was originally posted at http://laudre.dreamwidth.org/719273.html. Comments either here or there. Go ahead and add me there so I can add you back if need be.