I have no idea who wrote the following; it isn’t credited. If he happens to be reading this, he should let me know. I very much doubt he (or she) will object to my reproducing it here:
People will recall that, not so long ago, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in order to conclusively demonstrate that claims of man-made climate change were false, made a snowball after a February storm and threw it on the Senate floor. I demonstrate it thus! If I see frozen water, how can the planet be warming? What was so beautiful about this demonstration was that it did not even depend on a snowball made out of season, one packed and tossed, say, in September or April—this was a mid-wintersnowball, and it still refuted global warming, for once and all.
Anyone who follows the debate on any public issue discovers that the snowball-in-the-Senate style of argumentation persists, with the same note of smugness—that’ll show them! It most often comes from the same political direction, or party, and with the same disconnection from all familiar standards of evidence and argument. In the debate about the necessity of bringing America into agreement with the rest of the civilized world on the issue of guns and gun killings, there are some persistent snowballs-in-the-Senate that keep getting thrown, which need to be mopped up as they melt.
Snowball No. 1: There is doubt or mystery or uncertainty about whether national gun control can actually limit gun violence.No, there isn’t. The real social science on this, published in professional and, usually, peer-reviewed journals, is robust and reliable, while fake or ersatz social science that proposes to show the opposite has been debunked many, many times. Of course, to say that the social science is settled is exactly not to say that one or two authority figures are in dogmatic possession of the truth—that’s not what makes it science—but that a broad community of people who have taken the trouble to study the evidence and open their data to each other have come to something close to a consensus. More guns mean more homicides. More guns mean more gun massacres. More guns mean more death. Common sense confirms what social science demonstrates: there really have been no gun massacres in Australia since Australia decided to act to stop gun massacres from happening.
Snowball No. 2: Levels of violent crime have been receding in America in recent years, so guns can’t really be a problem. This decline is real—but it is real everywhere in the Western world. The remarkable point is that American gun violence persists at its astonishingly high levels in spite of the general decline in the rich world of violent crime. You have to accept a uniquely narrow view not of human nature but of American character—that Americans are so uniquely violent, so paranoid and hate-filled, so incurably homicidal, that they will keep killing each other no matter what laws exist—to believe that the same simple social restraints that have ended epidemic gun violence elsewhere won’t work here. It would be more American to be more optimistic about Americans.
Snowball No. 3: Gun laws solve nothing because terrorists, whether in Paris or San Bernardino, aren’t the sort of people who care about or obey them. This snowball might properly be restated as follows: if a pickpocket steals your wallet on the bus, repeal the laws against pickpockets. If terrorists and criminals do still get guns, despite existing gun laws, there is no reason to have gun laws at all. But the goal of good social legislation is not to create impermeable dams that will stop every possible bad behavior; it is to put obstacles in their way. The imperfection of a system of restraints is an argument about the imperfection of all human systems. It is not an argument against restraints. What’s more, the special insight of recent criminology is to show that low walls work nearly as well as high ones, and are obviously much easier to build. Making any crime harder usually makes it much harder. If the terrorists in San Bernardino had had to work as hard at building guns as they did at building bombs, perhaps the guns would have worked as badly as the bombs did. (And, surely, it is a good thing that they were not able to go to a bomb store, or a bomb-owing middleman, for pre-made bombs.)
Snowball No. 4: There are already so many guns in circulation in the United States, and their owners are so determined to keep them, that introducing limits would have no practical effect. Determined social movements against what seemed to be fixed features of social life often work—to a first approximation, they always work, which is why the modern history of liberal societies has the generally happy arc it does. Piecemeal social reform tends to be slow, but it tends to be successful. (Many manageable middle-range changes, from ammunition control to “smarter” and more secure guns, have been suggested as passable paths to gun sanity.) One need look only at the history of smoking or of car safety to see that this is so. Cancer caused by cigarettes and deaths caused by traffic fatalities, which were once fixed and ubiquitous features of American life, have been vastly reduced by gradual reform. A full-court press against gun massacres, at local and state and federal levels, has already begun; the more it goes on, the safer we will become.
Snowball No. 5: Even if gun control were a good thing, the Second Amendment renders its achievement impossible. Not so. In 2008, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, decided the case of District of Columbia v. Heller in favor of the view that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to private ownership of weapons. Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed by a Republican President, in a dissent joined by three other justices, rightly found this view astounding and radical, writing that the Constitution speaks only to gun ownership within the context of a militia. But even the Heller majority agreed that the right it had conjured up was far from unlimited: there could still be conditions and licensing requirements and limits on where one could carry a gun. (Just last week, the Court declinedto hear a challenge to a ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines in Highland Park, Illinois.)
And so even, according to the new view espoused by Heller, the rational test of actual experience should still trump the Kabbalah of eighteenth-century-word scrutiny, however exciting it may be to pseudo-scholarly minds. Does anyone believe that Madison and Mason, stumbling into the first-grade classroom where modern assault weaponry had blown apart twenty six-year-olds and six of their terrified caretakers, would then say, “Well, too bad—but, yes, that’s exactly what we meant by the right of the people to keep and bear arms”?
Snowball No. 6: Gun rights are a necessary hedge against tyranny. Ted Cruz has been throwing this snowball around quite a bit, strange as it is to hear a senator praise preparations for acts of terrorist sedition. This was, as it happens, exactly the argument of slave owners of 1861, well answered by Lincoln, and then by Grant.
If there is a risk to democracy it might be, instead, in the way the routine of gun violence and terrorist horrors like San Bernardino brutalize us as a people, and the way the paranoia they provoke changes our sense, to use one of the President’s favored phrases, of who we are. Which risks are worth taking, and which demand a response, is a subject for grownup people to debate on a long winter night, with the snow drifting safely outside, where it belongs.
• 
The article is up on the New Yorker site, direct link here: http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/six-snowballs-thrown-in-the-gun-control-debate-gopnik.
Is debate and/or dissent allowed on this thread? Or is this another mandatory echo chamber?
This is a safe site for people who hate gun lovers. Go away.
PAD
You know this country is lost when the best ‘solution’ gun worshippers can come up with is that we need more guns, *especially* near children.
So, it has bully-proof windows and troll-proof doors? 😉
I think there comes a time in peoples lives where, even though they have tried being diplomatic, they have tried to see the points of their opponents, they have tried to find common ground, they just get tired of the BS from the other side and simply state, “I’m done with you.”
If I remember correctly, Peter pretty much felt this way in August, when he first started getting rid of gun lovers posts. He made his statement of why VERY clear and the fact that people could not understand “I do not want to hear your opinions about this subject, keep them to yourself.” and kept commenting anyway shows more than a lack of courtesy on their part.
It’s his blog and his rules and honestly, I think he’s been more giving than most bloggers with their own site so if there is one subject that he does not want to hear a dissenting opinion on, one subject that he knows his mind will not change about, the lack of disrespect from those that continue to comment shows more about the commentator than Peter
I think there comes a time in peoples lives where, even though they have tried being diplomatic, they have tried to see the points of their opponents, they have tried to find common ground, they just get tired of the BS from the other side and simply state, “I’m done with you.”
If I remember correctly, Peter pretty much felt this way in August, when he first started getting rid of gun lovers posts. He made his statement of why VERY clear and the fact that people could not understand “I do not want to hear your opinions about this subject, keep them to yourself.” and kept commenting anyway shows more than a lack of courtesy on their part.
It’s his blog and his rules and honestly, I think he’s been more giving than most bloggers with their own site so if there is one subject that he does not want to hear a dissenting opinion on, one subject that he knows his mind will not change about, the lack of RESPECT from those that continue to comment shows more about the commentator than Peter
Snowball #4 is an especially frustrating one. Yes, there are guns already out there on the black market, but can we at least stop adding to their number? Stop contributing to the problem, and then begin whittling down the existing contraband through confiscations and surrender programs. As for the guns that remain in the wild, even well-maintained weaponry will eventually fall into disrepair and become unreliable or obsolete. In the October 2014 Ottawa attacks (Canada’s most recent high-profile shooting), the attacker was sufficiently prevented from legally obtaining a weapon that he went to war against Parliament Hill with an antique rifle that could only fire 8 times.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-shooting-where-did-michael-zehaf-bibeau-get-his-gun-1.2811249
Here in Canada, we just passed the 26th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, where fourteen engineering students were shot dead in a classroom just for being women. It is memorialized every year, and became the “come to Jesus” moment where our country decided to impose reasonable limits on the type of weapons citizens can own. Gun control is still controversial ( such as our Long Gun Registry), and gun crime still happens, but it occurs on a much smaller scale with fewer casualties.
The number and type of guns is just one factor. American media also needs to look at whether the manner in which they report gun violence contributes to the frequency and severity of mass shootings. Apparently statisticians have used the science of epidemiology to show some relation between the media attention paid to mass shootings and likelihood that similar events will occur around the same time. Correlation isn’t causation, but it is worth reconsidering new rules for responsible reporting.
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-262-truckers-vs-migrants-mass-shootings-planned-parenthood-facebook-philanthropy-and-more-1.3350652/are-mass-shootings-contagious-1.3350700
Dissent may not be allowed, but apparently unrequited sarcasm is. Somebody seems ready to bust if he can’t get his comments in.
Open debate is a good thing. Folks with open minds putting forth an argument while remaining open to having their minds changed by a superior one.
I suspect if Jay Tea had a history of engaging in it, instead of dogmatically arguing from a closed mind, he’d be allowed to comment on this thread.
Incidentally, the ‘global warming’ tag was the worst thing supporters of the movement ever came up with. If they had just used the more accurate ‘climate change’ from the beginning, it would have been fine, but now, whenever they try to change terms, conservatives say, ‘NO, YOU SAID GLOBAL WARMING! KEEPSIES!’ Because God forbid we use different words to express changing conditions.
Hi Joe,
Climate has always changed, and always will change. The question is how much, what effects it will have, and what do we do about it. The problems that I have are all about the politics, but political and academic. I saw in the nineties how academically the dialog was shifted into full political mode, as non-crisis studies and students were ‘persuaded’ to choose other careers. I have watched as study after study has had its flaws revealed, only to be swept aside as the ‘new’ studies have only emphasized the ‘dangers’ of global ‘climate change.’
The reality is that, despite all the ‘consensus’ and ‘studies,’ this is not real science. If they were to publish, today, a study that accurately predicted to within even a single sigma the the temperature profile for the next three years, then we would have science. At present all we have are self fulfilling prophecies, edited after the fact, that ‘prove’ they know what they are talking about.
In truth, it has become just another means for government types to gain additional power and money by manipulating the economy, enacting foolish regulation and otherwise just being piggies. Can we deal with climate change? Sure, but we need to get government out of the way and just get about doing it. Choose the correct crops, prepare the necessary infrastructure, and go about living.
Thank you, Rush Hannity and Sean Limbaugh.
Thank you, Rush Hannity and Sean Limbaugh.
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{I mistyped my e-mail the first time i posted this. You can delete that one with my blessings.}
Mike,
I assume you thought you were making a point?
Also, on the change from Global Warming to Climate Change, that occurred basically when they realized that all of the predicated changes didn’t happen, but actually went the other way! Since SOME change is always bound to happen, they changed the name to confuse the innocent and naive.
Again, not science, just politics. Even today, if I did a computer model and it showed no global warming, I would have to throw it out and retweak the parameters until it did if I wanted to stay in Academia
Also, computer generated fiction is just as false as person generated fiction. It just seems to have more gravitas…
“The reality is that, despite all the ‘consensus’ and ‘studies,’ this is not real science.”
Thank you for echoing the lie so directly. It makes it clear the rest of your nonsense is just that.
Sean,
And, what is your degree in? I have a masters in electrical and computer engineering, and spent a long time in working in the circuit simulation world. First rule you learned: take all computer simulation results with a grain of salt. At least in the circuit world, you could build the circuit, and compare the results of the simulation with the real circuit. For the climatologists, it is usually the other way around – you build the simulation model, and then massage the database until you get the results you want.
Really, this isn’t science (Ok, maybe Political Science) it is just activism and political action. Wake up! Just because 500 monkeys all yell the same thing doesn’t make it true. But, you can believe the lie if it makes you feel better, just don’t use that as an excuse to oppress me into paying for your fantasies.
Congratulations on your Masters degrees. As someone also trained in computer science, I don’t feel I should have to point out that computer science and ecology or environmental studies are equivalent. We may know how to make a computer sit up and beg, but I don’t recall in any of my classes any units on the environment.
Hi Sean!
So, you understand! There are no ‘units’ on the environment. There are a lot of measurements (of very interesting accuracy) and a lot of predictions, but no verification. If I design a circuit, and it matches my simulation here, and there, but blows up entirely in these three other places, then I can’t declare I have a valid simulation.
Also, I have a nephew with a nice, new meteorology degree. We had very interesting talks about the the true opinion of GCC in the sciences, and they pretty much match mine. You have a lot of influencers and bigwigs shouting doom and gloom, a lot of politicians salivating at increasing taxes and getting control of more sectors of the economy, while the worker bees are all shaking their heads sadly at corrupted science.
Wake up! The sky isn’t falling! and Keep you cotton pickin’ hands out of my pockets!!!!! 😉
Are you sure it’s ok to copy and paste an entire article, without a link to the original source? Even with a link, and even if you attributed the original author, wouldn’t an excerpt be more appropriate?
Well, I credited the original source right in the headline, and someone else put up a link, so I pretty much think we’re covered. I guess if they send me a C&D I’ll take it down.
PAD
“I have no idea who wrote the following; it isn’t credited. If he happens to be reading this, he should let me know.”
On the New Yorker page, the one you get to from that link in the first comment, the article is clearly credited to Adam Gopnik.
My expectation when I put up the link was that you would see it, realize you had pirated a current article unnecessarily, and edited your post to use the link and maybe properly credit the author. I am disappointed to see an established, award-winning author decide to steal someone else’s work, with the barest of attributions, and think it’s okay as long as the publication/author don’t object, especially given the likelihood of even finding the infringement. Are you fine with people stealing your work as long as you never see it?
“strange as it is to hear a senator praise preparations for acts of terrorist sedition.”
Strange? Alas, no. Not these days, sadly.
What I love is the whole “well, if guns are outlawed, then only outlaws would have guns.” I guess we don’t need to have any laws, since the bad guys will just break ’em anyway.
Peter,
No one argues that “climate change” doesn’t occur, but the percentage that human activity influences the climate. For example, wanting to tax carbon dioxide production linking it to global warming, when the science demonstrates that 99% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is produced by the oceans, which increase output as solar activity picks up. Unless climate change apologists are proposing putting out the sun, punishing human activity is a waste of time. Heck, some experts say they see signs of water erosion on the sphinx and that at one point( estimated 5000 years ago) Egypt had a climate significantly different from today and experienced regular rainfall. That was long before the Industrial Age. The last Ice Age was about 10,000 years ago. Maybe the temperature change is just part of Earth’s ever evolving Climate and fighting it is an act of futility?
As far as gun control goes: A. It is settled law, B. The right exists as a last resort to allow citizens to defend themselves against a corrupt government,, & C. Stripping law abiding citizens of the right to defend themselves from people with evil intent, only empowers the criminal. If outlawing guns saved lives, then the Paris Massacre should have been possible.