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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (36289)	4/16/2007 9:45:11 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541780

>>This incident will bring up all the pro/anti gun control arguments again. The pattern of "the higher the amount of gun control, the more the killings," just doesn't resonate on the left, no matter how many studies are done. They don't want to hear.<< Bill - Au contraire. I do want to hear. I'd be very interested in reading about such studies. - Allen

To: LindyBill who wrote (36289)	4/16/2007 9:54:48 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541780

"A common counter-argument [to gun control] is Robert Heinlein's: "An armed society is a polite society." This is hardly true, as the statistics below demonstrate; you could not get a more polite and murder-free society than Japan, which bans virtually all guns, or a more violent society than America, which owns the most guns in the world. But let's treat this counter-argument on a philosophical level. If we were to arm everyone in society, then the ability to commit murder would become universal. This is a serious step in the wrong direction; to rescue their point, gun advocates must rely even more heavily on arguments of defeasibility. The fear of getting shot back, they argue, will deter most murderers. And there is a degree of truth behind this argument -- police, for example, wear sidearms precisely for their deterrence effect and protective benefits. Surveys of criminals show that they tend to avoid targets they feel might be armed. But ultimately this argument fails, even in principle. A central tenet of game theory is that attackers have the advantage over defenders. A defender must defend against all possibilities of attack, and in doing so defends none of them very well. An attacker has to choose only one line of attack, and therefore can do it extremely well. Attackers have the advantage of surprise, planning and initiative. An example is a careful, well-considered plan to shoot someone in the back, even if the person is openly carrying a sidearm. Another example is bank robbery. The fact that banks are extremely well-protected hasn't stopped their robbery even today -- criminals simply arm themselves more heavily and take advantage of the fact that they are the attackers. Or, in the face of heavily armed targets, attackers may simply alter their line of attack, selecting weaker targets: the old, the disabled, or children. A useful analogy here is war. The fact that the entire world out-armed Hitler did not stop him from attacking it. And he nearly succeeded -- because, as the attacker, he had the initiative. Furthermore, even the certain threat of retaliatory force will not stop someone whose senses are impaired by drugs, alcohol, jealousy, anger, insanity, pathology, self-destruction or deception. Although we can identify some groups at risk for these behaviors, we can hardly predict them all -- jealous husbands, for instance. And the "failure to defease" is a tremendously costly one, now that the ability to commit murder is universal." The pattern doesn't resonate because it leads to a creepy society that we don't want to live in.