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...

[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.