Oh, fine, let's take break to get disgusted at conservatives.

[prog]

The meme that the victims were a bunch of mincing cowards too sissified by their liberal environment to attack the gunman bare-handed seems to be rapidly spreading through the other camp. See comments by John Derbyshire, Nathaniel Blake, and Rush Limbaugh (as paraphrased by derspatchel).

Of tangential interest is a striking thought-experiment by bradhicks of what would have happened had any of the students been armed. I have no personal experience with guns or their use, so I don't know how accurate or relevant this is, but it made me think. (Gun control is an issue I stand absolutely neutrally on, and no recent events have changed this.)

Comments

Re: Why perform a thought experiment...

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the real life example doesn't tell us anything about what would have happened here either. Neither of the students was carrying their guns on them, and they couldn't do anything about the situation until the gunman had exited the building. We have no idea if the gunman intented to continue shooting people, had accomplished his goals and was running or was looking for a nice place to off himself. I mean, kudos for them in their situation, but they were not "carrying" in the way that people are claiming would have helped here, and it is only speculation that they stopped him from killing more people, unless he stated further goals in his confession.

My problem with these thought expereiments is that they take this tiny moment of time, see what might happen then and declare a judgement on a long term major change. What would have happened if the students at that university were armed? Well, a lot of people would not work, teach or attend there, or send their children there, based on comments on a fairly conservative board the hubby reads. You would have guns as an everyday part of a 'culture' that includes alcohol abuse, hazing, competing mascismo and generally very poor judgement. (Note that in the real world example it was a law school, not undergrad and at least one of the students was a trained police officer who also grabbed his bullet proof vest.)

I mean, hell, I went to school with people who when they couldn't bring alcohol into a day long concert, would duck out between sets and try to chug enough alcohol to keep their buzz through the band they liked. The local emergency room told our EMS crew one year that they would not take any more alcohol poisoning cases that day because they were unable to treat non-university cases in a timely fashion. How often would a tradgedy like this have to occur and how certain would we have to be that armed students would help to make introducing guns into this little microcosm a good long term strategy?

Re: Why perform a thought experiment...

[radtea.livejournal.com]

My problem with these thought expereiments is that they take this tiny moment of time, see what might happen then and declare a judgement on a long term major change.

With a real experiment you at least have all the details of what actually happened, rather than people simply making stuff up. In contrast, a thought experiment is rhetorical or psychological device, not a means of investigating reality. With a real experiment the obvious problems of generalizing from an isolated incident become clear to everyone, so it at least starts the ball rolling in the right direction, toward reality.

That said, the only rational policy guidance is based on statistics, not on exceptional cases. And the statistics show that gun control and crime rates are pretty much uncorrelated over a broad range of policies and crime rates, pretty much the same way capital punishment and crime rates are uncorrelated.

It shouldn't really surprise me, because I used to be full of moral certainty myself back in the day before I had to make any really hard life-or-death moral choices. But I am still surprised that so many people--not just young people, either--are so full of certainty that what they believe is the One True and Correct Solution to All Our Problems, when even the most cursory review of the data simply does not justify anything like that belief.

Human beings are probability-blind, which is the logical equivalent of colour-blindness. Yet we live in an uncertain world where an understanding of the nature of probability can make all the difference between good and bad policy. It is as if we are a colour-blind species living in a world where the only thing that distinguishes between food and poison is a single shade of green. And while scientists have developed some imperfect spectrophotometer that could go some ways toward solving our problem, people prefer to ignore it for ancient myths and hallucinations.