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

To: JohnM who wrote (211734)	12/15/2012 10:29:03 PM
From: cosmicforce	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543988

For years I got paid to do risk management. If we are to rationally use the bully pulpit of the media, talking about guns is a hundred times less important than what actually kills us. It is as though we have a tumor that weighs ten pounds (our health risk) but we are focused on a pimple (gun risk). In terms of the number of deaths per gun it is lower than many things you can point to - 17k homicides from 200MM guns is a margin of safety that is actually pretty high for a device that suddenly projects a mass at the speed of sound for a thousand yards. And the deaths that occur are largely criminal acts when one removes the suicides from the intentional misuse. I think that nearly without exception, these high profile shootings have involved people that have previously intimated some intent and were known to be mentally ill or criminal. It is cheaper to ignore the mental and physical health problem. The ability to get these people help would go far further to improve society than trying to put the gun genie back in its bottle while we remove yet another constitutional right from people who pose relatively little risk. The ACLU did a major disservice to the mentally ill by giving them the right to live under bridges and alleys- and ironically 95% of the time I'm in favor for what the ACLU does. But when it comes to mental history there is no central check to say - OBTW, this person is crazy: handle with care. Nope - that violates their constitutional rights. I have to get a background check to get a job - why not one for when I get a gun? Social security number to buy a car, but not required to possess a gun: now THAT is insane.

To: JohnM who wrote (211734)	12/15/2012 10:56:27 PM
From: Sam	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543988

That's hardly an argument to refuse to address gun violence. Much can't be prevented; risk is a part of life. But gun control legislation, work on the weird gun culture in which we live, all can let some folk live longer. I agree with cosmicforce and Ed. These dramatic events capture our imagination, but if we look at reality, they are rare. I worked in an emergency room one summer a long time ago in a city known for homocides. But the number of kids coming in to have their stomach pumped for ingesting something that poisoned them far outnumbered the number of people wounded by a bullet. In fact, I don't recall anyone coming in due to a shooting. But of course, that is anecdotal, worth nothing--cosmicforce's numbers are far more important. So are Ed's on the number of guns out there. Legislation that doesn't take into account culture is useless. It is equivalent to prohibition--there were good reasons in the abstract for prohibition, alcohol isn't good for people, they often do nasty or negligent things when drunk and it destroys their liver and brains, but legislation to prohibit it was bound to fail because the US had a culture of drinking, and where there is a will to do something like that, a way will be found, law or no law. We have a culture of guns, and if you try to come down hard on it without taking that into account, all you will actually accomplish is provoke a backlash that may well make the problem worse. At the end of the day, a public information campaign like the one that has made smoking decidedly unglamorous would be more helpful, but even that will be difficult to accomplish, as gun lovers will take offense and object to their tax dollars being used in that manner. There was a public information campaign done in the last 10 years or so by the Ad Council about breast feeding that was excellent, but the "good folks" at places like Abbot Labs and Nestles (the makers of formula) managed to drastically limit its effectiveness. Which isn't the same as saying nothing at all should be done. LB said liberals would like to take every gun away. He is very close to right, at least as far as I am concerned. Japan's regulations that I posted earlier seem pretty rational to me, but they would never fly in this country, and in any case even if something like that somehow is done, it wouldn't have prevented what just happened or many such occurrences that I can think of. Focusing on identifying mentally disturbed people may be better, but the fact is, people almost always say after these things, "We never dreamt that [xxx] would do that." People even said that about John Wayne Gacy! If there were a million psychiatrist "Gregory House"s out there who could infallibly diagnose which disturbed individuals were a threat to others, that would be lovely, but in fact there isn't even one such person outside of television or some other fiction (although I'm sure that there are people who believe themselves to be that). Some sort of sophisticated public information campaign should be possible, but it will have to be very carefully done, focusing on real statistics and avoiding exaggeration, which would be self-defeating.