For a long time, the Great Man theory dominated a lot of thinkers. Now there's a lot of pushback on the Great Man theory. I think I like both the theory and the pushback both. Reality's complicated.
I long for voice, for playful humor, for that je ne sais quoi of good writing! Robert Anton Wilson wrote a marvelous book called Quantum Psychology, where he uses the insights of quantum physics to upend the prevailing Aristotelian view of is / is not logic in psychology and in scientific thinking generally. It was a genuine pleasure to read, as I sensed the intelligent, interested, living being doing the writing all throughout. It felt intimate despite its serious nature. I just don't understand why writing about a scientific subject, even in an obscure and rarified field, gives you a pass on crafting a piece of writing someone might actually want to read, might actually connect with on an emotional level.
Well, yes. It was unmitigated praise for men like Jefferson for a lot of years, which sent the message that those flaws you mentioned were nonexistent or unimportant. Now our society is attempting to demonstrate to people of color that those flaws as you say, which constitute extremely egregious crimes against humanity no matter how commonplace they were amongst the aristocracy of the time, were in fact real and were in fact important. The country remains rather divided on the subject but it sounds like these city officials are trying to say that black lives do, in fact, matter.
The country fought a bloody war 160 years ago to settle that dispute and it was pretty resoundly settled.
Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past. But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won. And their philosophy won. There's nothing inevitable about the destruction of monarchy. We might have been ruled by Kings and lords for another 2000 years. Who the hell knows?
The people aggravating other people for celebrating American heritage have sick aims. No amount of time or human sacrifice will be enough until all pride in U.S. is snuffed out. And then, what are we left with?
Yes and yet Americans helped save the Jews from extinction and yet they defeated Nazism and imperialism and held off communism and prevented South Korea from being dominated and won two world wars that could have ended in all of the Western hemisphere being conquered.
Of course, there's nothing black and white about history, it's all shades of grey. That goes without saying.
If it's "all shades of grey", I feel like that leaves a lot of room for the feelings and discussion for how and what light they want to view their historical figures. I think "Never meet your heroes" is a popular saying for reasons like that.
I'm not American, albeit, so I might be missing something on a deeper level though. My opinion here probably deserves some grain of salt.
Yeah I know Stalin and the Russians had a lot to do with it too. But the U.S. fought on two fronts. As if the imperial Japanese and their slaughter of Chinese people was any better than the Nazis.
And suppose the U.S. stayed out of that war, what would have Stalin done with Europe, supposing they won outright?
Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades. Republicans enacted the anti-slavery and equality amendments. Republicans integrated the federal civil service and military. Democrats created the KKK, Jim Crow, and resegregated the federal government first chance they got (Woodrow Wilson).
There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that, and one of the reasons is the aspirational words in the Declaration, which has inspired generation after generation to live up to what it says, and make a more perfect union.
> Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades
Large parts of the Democratic Party did so for about a full century, until the parties flipped positions on race with Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the subsequent Republican Southern Strategy to exploit the disaffection of (mostly Southern, hence the name) racists that resulted from Johnson's move. The same group still resists the results of the Civil War, but now they are key part of the Republican base rather than the Democratic base, which is why the South is now a Republican stronghold rather than a Democratic one, why the Democrats that continued in Congress from that time over the next several decades were often either repudiating past positions or switching to the Republican Party, why the KKK has voiced it's support for Trump, etc.
> There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that
No, they realigned and switched sides (or the factions active in the fight switched parties, to look at it a different way.) They didn't move past it at all: the same fight is still happening.
The KKK is a footnote in history at this time. The last KKK member of congress was a Democrat. Obama said the eulogy at his funeral, and Hilary Clinton said he was "a friend and mentor".
The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats. In fact, the modern Senate is based on cloture, which was finally used to break the decades long delay.
Only six Senate Republicans voted against the bill in 1964, while 21 Senate Democrats opposed it. It passed by an overall vote of 73-27. In the House, 96 Democrats and 34 Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act, passing with an overall 290-130 vote
> The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats
Yes, and it was support by the Democratic President, the resulting alienation of Southern racists from the Democratic Party, and the exploitation of that alienation by the Republican Party that were key factors in the political realignment that moved the US from the post-New Deal Fifth Party System to the modern Sixth Party System.
This is a myth and lie. The civil rights act was passed in the 60s. Bill Clinton (D) was from Arkansas in the 90s.
Johnson was from Texas. Reagan was from California. This made up myth about the parties switching because of the CRA is completely bogus. Senator Byrd, of West Virginia, former klansman, died a Democrat.
Nope, Johnson's not support for the CRA and the Republican Southern Strategy in response are actual things that actually happened.
> Bill Clinton (D) was from Arkansas in the 90s.
And your point is...what?
> Senator Byrd, of West Virginia, former klansman, died a Democrat.
Senator Byrd left the Klan a year after joining in 1946, and spent a lot of time repudiating both his long-past Klan membership and his actions up to and during the civil rights fight in the post-CRA Democratic Party specifically because the center of mass in that Party had shifted radically after the CRA.
No, check your history. The southern states didn't become distinctly "red", or republican, until the 90's or 00s in most cases. Can you name a single candidate that had any kind of national appeal that ran on repealing the civil rights act? No.
You might have an argument with regards to abortion. But the civil rights act? Nope.
My point with regards to Bill Clinton should be obvious, he was a Democrat from Arkansas (the deep South). He was governor in the 80s and early 90s. Al Gore was a Senator from Tennessee. Stop with this myth about CRA causing the South to go Republican.
>The southern states didn't become distinctly "red", or republican, until the 90's or 00s in most cases.
Yes, the realignment driven by Johnson's CRA position and the Republican Southern Strategy took about 3 decades to complete, with the last notable bit occurring just after the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Partisan realignments do tend to take time.
> Can you name a single candidate that had any kind of national appeal that ran on repealing the civil rights act?
The proponents of a new Jim Crow didn't mostly run on repealing the 1964 CRA (or the 1957 or 1960 acts) in the same way that the proponents of the original Jim Crow didn't mostly run on repealing the Civil War Amendments or the CRAs of 1866, 1871, and 1875, but on subverting their intent and effect by other means.
> Stop with this myth about CRA causing the South to go Republican.
The 1960s-1990s realignment driven by the Johnson's shift on Civil Rights and the Republican response is not a myth. It's a real thing which really happened. It's why the people flying the Confederate battle flag today are almost excludively Republicans (if they are in one of the major parties), not Democrats, despite having the same ideology as the people that rallied under the same banner almost exclusively (insofar as they were in a major party) in the Democratic Party in the 1920s through the 1960s.
Just because (like other political realignments) it didn't happen overnight doesn't make it a myth.
Presidential elections lead the transition in the parties, and you can see this as early as 1948, and clearly by 1964, directly traceable to the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater fought against the CRA, and he won Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina that year.
In the 1968 election you can see the transitional effects strongly, as George Wallace won 4 of those 5 states, and the Nixon Southern Strategy succeeds by 1972 with all the southern states voting Republican. And that was the end of the Southern Democrats. 1976 is an outliar, and it's 1992 before there's a crack in the armor and Clinton wins a few southern states. And the strategy as told by Lee Atwater is hardly a myth.
https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...
That there are additional reasons why southerners flipped to the Republican party, including opposition to increasingly social liberalism of Democrats, does not mean the Southern strategy is a myth. An example of myth is the "lost cause" of the confederacy, revisionist history.
Barry Goldwater had significant reservations about the CRA's constitutionality, that's the only reason he voted against it. And he freely let people use that vote against him, without ever trying in the slightest to make it sound like a good thing to some fraction of voters. He was sort of like the Rand Paul of his day.
"This made up myth about the parties switching because of the CRA is completely bogus."
The USA's two major parties had previously flipped alignment every 70 years. We're overdue.
Contemporaries conflate liberal / conservative, left / right, Democrat / Republican (nee Whig). A less wrong mental model is that parties are coalitions.
LBJ understood this and correctly predicted that CRA would result in the white supremacists switching from Democrat to Republican.
The big political science mystery now is why each party's coalition has become more homogeneous. Where a voter's position on one issue (abortion) is a very strong predictor for many other issues (climate crisis). Stated another way, the need for an explanation for why so many policy issues have become partisan issues.
This comment is "historically accurate" but misleading. Even though the comment they are replying to tried to clarify the situation this commenter continues to push for their agenda without heeding the facts stated.
Political Parties are not set in stone, their goals and morals can change just as easily as your own personal affiliation can change.
I'm addressing the original point, which was claiming that America (implication - in whole, or uniformly) supported Jim Crow. It did not. One party supported that, but the other did not.
I don't belong to any political party, mostly because of the point you are making, but I don't think it is fair to tar all Americans with what only some of us did. Many fought for years against it and credit is due to those who did, and shame is due to those who resisted the change.
Both main parties have moved past this, more or less, and it's great to see slavery, Jim Crow and KKK in the rear view mirror.
I do not agree that the Republican Party is somehow a racist party or that it has somehow "swapped" with the Democrat party on this.
The person who was most recently a KKK member who served in Congress during or after the time of their KKK membership was a Republican at the time he served in Congress. The same is true of the most recent member of the American Nazi Party to serve in Congress. And these are the same individual, David Duke.
The most recent person to serve on Congress who had ever been a KKK member was a Democrat (Robert Byrd), but he left the Klan about 3 years before Duke was born, 5 years before Byrd first ran for Congress, 20 years before Duke joined the Klan, and 30 years before Duke was elected to Congress as a Republican.
A convenient myth. The reality is that once the Southern vote became contestable as the result of Democrat party dominance breaking down, the Republican party managed to mostly grab it without appealing to racism. It's of course fair to criticize Richard "I'm not a crook!" Nixon for his Southern Strategy, but it's not something that describes the Republican party as a whole.
Of course the post-Trump Republican party is indeed very different, so perhaps the parties will have ended up switching after all; and on their overall, broad attitude to 'modernity' in a social sense, encompassing far more than just "race"! Who knows, it all depends on how much sticking power these things have.
> Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past.
And in many of these countries, the role of prominent figures in that history is, for that reason, controversial.
That's why even in the USSR (Which nobody could ever honestly consider to have been blessed with an overabundance of introspection), there's been both a parade with a tank column rolling down the Red Square every 9th of May and official defacement of monuments commemorating one of the 'chief' architects of that victory.
> But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won.
No, it's not.
It's not like slavery isn't viewed as a horrific phase of history in the parts of world that were ruled by Britain and are still under either the British monarchy or a now-separate monarchy that happens to share both the same monarch and the same rules of succession, having never revolted against the Crown and either still being British or having peacefully separated while retaining ties to the monarch.
Nothing says thoughtful engagement like burying controversial subject matter.
It won't be long before right-wingers succeed in building a sustained narrative around MLK's infidelity and communist flirtations that permits them to taint public sentiment. That's par for the course for the vast majority of American Black activists. All the accusations of wrongful equivocation, etc, won't matter, because it's always more convenient to vilify and bury.
I guess it's technically some kind of social progress that traditional American icons are now being vilified and buried.
There's the argument that white guilt is black empowerment. But it seems more like a lateral move and definitely not substantive empowerment of the disenfranchised. What the evolution of victim mentality over the past 20+ years has shown us is that whites and even the rich are able to play the role of victim at least as well as minorities. I suspect there were many more Americans reciting "blue lives matter or "all lives matter" than "black lives matter".
Hey thanks for this! There are a ton of sub-genres I'm not well acquainted with so this super helps. One request I would make is to be able pause the game, so that I can see the artist and track name for longer. Thanks this is great!
Having studied both pure physics and pure mathematics, my impression is that physicists don't really do mathematics, they use a pidgin form of symbolic expression related to mathematics with the specific goal of studying natural systems. And this is a pretty subtle point to explain to anyone who has not experienced both cultures significantly. But the MO of studying systems that can be measured in physical reality, is a constraining principle. Mathematics is not constrained to so-called reality and as a result can fly higher and see farther; it has a better imagination, if you will.
Burden me not with any reminders about reality, people needing to get up to make the donuts or whatever. I know all that. I'm not knocking reality, reality's great. Nor do I need reminding how beautiful and strange and wild and cool some of the math in physics really can be. Utterly, utterly rad, without a doubt. But working with such high-dimensional spaces, such high-rank/high-variable transformations, and such high-density symbolic representations, as physics seeks to do, requires a much freer and more "artistic" approach than some kind of mental slavery to what can be seen. (By which I mean, what can be measured.) Physicists need more pure math, and when I say pure, I actually prefer the term theoretical math. Because physicists need to design their own math, and that is in one sense what theoretical mathematics means.
Physicists are better at what laypeople think of as mathematics--huge whiteboards, filled with esoteric symbols, furrowed brows and chalk-stained hands jittering through the air in some magnificent, halting dance of frustration & eureka. That's what people think of when they think of "doing mathematics". But physicists don't really do what mathematicians do, not really, not completely. And all those purely esoteric maths that no one except pure mathematicians ever get to see, say, topology, homology, algebraic geometry, abstract algebra, etc, are hiding some real gems of thought.
I'd like to see Physics, finding itself at a halt, go and start to study all the Mathematics it's been putting off.
I'm pretty sure guys like Ed Witten are doing real math. Or at least he fooled the mathematicians thoroughly enough that they gave him a fields medal. I'm neither a physicist nor a mathematician, but your characterization seems a bit unfair.
> I'd like to see Physics, finding itself at a halt, go and start to study all the Mathematics it's been putting off.
And that kind of approach is exactly what Sabine Hossenfelder in the article criticizes, I my opinion significantly unfairly. The critics (she is surely not the only one) exactly complain that, for example, the "string theory" is more math than physics because it can't be "immediately verified" or they complain that the most of the experiments are "not confirming" the most obvious variants of the expected results of the new theory candidates. But the science shouldn't be reduced to the short-term goals and only to the processes which are "guaranteed to work." That's exactly when we won't see further from our noses.
And if the critics say that the "alternative theories" don't get enough funding, I posit that the average "alternative theories" are typically even more conservative than what is widely accepted physics (by the virtue of the accepted physics being already "unintuitive" enough and having the steeper learning curve than practically all "alternatives" are ready to accept).
We should all appreciate that one the most impressive achievements of the 20th century physics, the General Theory of Relativity has its fundamental support in the famous Michelson-Morley experiments which also didn't confirm the expectations of the 19th century physicists.
So we have to achieve enough experimental results against some approaches, and more than that, with enough precision, to even have the chance of finding out the new rules, if the new rules in the form that we're used to find them even could be found. We must be open to the experiments, and be happy even when the "most hoped" results don't happen.
On another side, when Sabine Hossenfelder is more precise and when she addresses some specific aspects, I can surely agree with some of her statements, for example:
"The criticism of heliocentrism based on the argument that the absence of observable
parallax implied the stars had to be “unnaturally” far away was wrong for exactly
this reason: They had no probability distribution but erroneously postulated one by
assuming that the stars should be likely to have similar distances to the planets as the
planets have among each other. We now understand the distribution of stars and their
typical distances comes about dynamically during structure formation and that there
is nothing “unnatural” about the distance of our Sun to the other suns."
Her criticism, however, is that currently physicists are "looking for the lost keys under the street lamp" because "in the dark they can't see them." But even if it sounds funny or misguided, it is true that in the dark not much could be seen, and before we actually check the already properly lit areas we can't expect more from looking into the dark where we really see too little. Investing in the flashlights can be reasonable, but also only once the lit areas are actually checked.
And we should also not forget that the current physics already enlightened immense parts of the universe. The "dark areas" were never so amazingly small as they are now.
While I like Petersen's message and analytical competence quite a bit, in this interview he makes the mistake that a lot of highly intelligent people make: he states the truth at his level of intelligence and training and expects the other person to understand perfectly. "If you've correctly listened to my exact construction of words, you should understand." He could do better at connecting with her, on a relational level and not only an intellectual one. (Which, yes, is much more of an abstract concept and is typically a lot harder for intellectual people, and is definitely a lot harder when someone seems hostile.)
He still does a good job of articulating the nuances of his position, but needs perhaps a little more connective tissue to let her know "I'm not against women! Hear me out." And I don't mean to let her off the hook, because she inappropriately framed his arguments a number of times.
It's incredibly difficult to think on your feet in front of an audience/camera, let alone actually learn and genuinely absorb an entirely new level of complexity for something you already think you know. I appreciate what Petersen's saying about how the gender gap as described is a myth, and he articulates his reason for saying so: it's actually an 18-factor gap. But after he explains this and she continues to use the phrase gender gap multiple times to challenge his view, that's where he needed to identify that she has not correctly processed his real view, and stop her: "But ok it shouldn't be called a gender gap: based on the data, it's an 18-factor gap. Do you see what I'm saying?"
Where in the interview does he even use hard concepts. I have no degree in ANY related fields that Peterson is fluent in and there is not a single sentence where I can say that it would be hard to understand.
Multivariate vs univariate analysis of variance is not at all a simple set of ideas. There's a ton of deep abstraction there, both on the side of statistical analysis as well as the theoretical underpinnings of large-dimensional spaces (and for that matter, interrelationships between variables). But moreover, he was dropping the concept casually, and medium provocatively by saying "the gender gap doesn't exist"--she was having to process "is this fool serious??" at the same time as a technical scientific argument.
Put yourself in her shoes. He was appearing to deny a widely reported phenomenon that is but one aspect of the repression women face in our culture. That would be frustrating.
I won't say that you don't have a valid point in general.
But in this situation, IMO Petersen did a fantastic job of being personable, clear, and helpful. Especially considering he was granted one sentence at a time.
If it was any less "intellectual", it'd be a interview with a fifth-grader.
He goes full on clinical psychologist on what he thinks happened, and also where he thinks he could have lead the interview for better. According to him, he was not dealing with Cathy Newman the person, but rather a personification of an ideology. It's very interesting to hear, also for the remainder of the interview.
Less intellectual wasn't exactly what I meant. I also thought his explanations were clear. He did flirt with provocation: "It doesn't exist" is perhaps less clear and helpful than "It doesn't exist as described", especially when gender is one of those 18 factors that contributes to variance.
Given that we cannot provide free or extremely inexpensive mental health care, or somehow get 340mil Americans not to behave like jackals and crass narcissists all the time, to actually treat each other with respect, dignity, and compassion, I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution. Sure, other guns may still be available but at least it's something.
> I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution. Sure, other guns may still be available but at least it's something.
This is exactly parent post's point. Something must be done, even if it is going to have little or no discernible effect on the problem.
Banning assault weapons won't stop the next lunatic from committing a mass shooting because:
A. You can easily kill dozens of people with handguns like the VT shooter did.
B. Millions of assault weapons are already in circulation. Trying to confiscate those weapons would likely cause violence.
Not to say that an assault weapons ban would not prevent some would-be shooters from getting a more powerful firearm, but it won't reduce the incidence of these shootings and you're still going to have a lot of people dead or injured if a shooter is forced to use a handgun.
And that's assuming that mass shootings are the most important problem to be solved in terms of gun violence. Mass shootings still make up something like 1 or 2 percent of all gun homicides in the US. If we really care about people being killed by gun violence, we would focus our efforts on the vast majority of gun crime that is committed by people with prior violent felony convictions with illegal firearms. We would also take serious steps towards ending the drug war and all of the violence associated with the black market for drugs.
Spending a ton of effort and political capital on getting a law passed that has very little effect on reducing gun homicides is silly. Because when a new AWB inevitably doesn't solve the problem, it's going to be all but impossible to pass another gun control law. If Hillary Clinton wins and forces through a new assault weapons ban she will have a tough time getting re-elected and Democrats will certainly lose Congress. Why not spend that political capital on something that will actually make a measurable difference.
Also keep in mind that gun violence is down dramatically[0]. So the problem isn't really that gun violence is increasing but rather public knowledge of it has.
Guns are often political focus because they are high profile in the media, but there are lots of "silent killers" that are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths per year that don't get high profile press coverage (medical malpractice, alcohol-related deaths, etc.).
Politicians aren't looking out for us, they are just trying to prop themselves up.
Disclaimer - never owned a gun, in fact never shot a proper one. The problem, among others, is definition what is assault rifle and what not. Military laughs at this definition coming from politicians, you can perform deadly assault with pencil, bow or a brick.
Is it ammo type? (ie 5.56 or .308 - but these are also common hunting calibers). Is it magazine capacity? - this can be cheated around super easily, especially if you prepare something nefarious. Full automats aren't sold anyway. Is it shape of the weapon? Now we left the land of facts and walking in the emotional wonderland. We can do better.
It's like some voices here in Switzerland stating military home-held guns should be banned because some people commit suicide with them. Yeah, let's forget the core suicidal issue and remove the tool, that will surely stop them, right?
Guns don't kill people (and don't get sentenced for that), people pull triggers and kill other people. But that's much harder to fix, so let's find some easy scapegoat, right?
'Assault rifle' is a clearly defined concept: it refers to a select-fire rifle chambered for an intermediate cartridge (the ur-examples being 7.62x39 in the first AKs and 5.56x45 in the M16) and fed from a detachable box magazine.
'Assault weapon' is a term with no military definition, but which might have a legal definition, depending on jurisdiction. In my home state, there's no such thing as an 'assault weapon,' because we have no statute defining such a thing.
Select-fire rifles are almost impossible to come by due to the '86 ban, but intermediate cartridges and detachable box magazines are common.
An earnest legislator might try saying that an assault weapon is one that's fed by a detachable box magazine and chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Then one of their constituents will see me at the range with my FAL, which is fed from a detachable box magazine, but chambered for a full-power cartridge. Why isn't that rifle - which based on its appearance is clearly the same sort of beast as an AR or AK - banned?
So the definition expands, based on cosmetic features, or naming specific models. Both of those solutions leave loopholes by their very nature; bans on pistol grips and barrel shrouds and folding stocks and bayonet lugs are solved by manufacturing functionally-identical rifles missing those features.
So perhaps we say that any rifle fed from a detachable box magazine is an assault weapon. Then the manufacturer makes a rifle with a fixed magazine, loaded with stripper clips. So we say that any rifle with a magazine capacity greater than some arbitrary number is an assault weapon - and I'll sell you a 'magazine repair kit' to increase that capacity.
I don't favor legislation restricting the purchase of firearms, but I certainly see how frustrating it must be for those who do. They earnestly want to eliminate this one evil totem of violence while leaving your grandpa in possession of his deer rifle (well, most of 'em), and we always dress up things that are allowed back into those same totems.
Come on, you don't go to a mall with a pencil, a brick or a bow and kill 50+ people. The point of assault weapons ownership laws is to introduce friction, so getting a weapon that can go through kevlar is hard, and if you get caught, hell rains upon you.
The line must be set at some point, and of course people are going to tip toe around it, but that's not the point. And don't go Switzerland, if everybody in the US had proper training in how to use and (more important) store their weapons, and the government had an exhaustive control of every shell... Well, it would be different.
> Come on, you don't go to a mall with a pencil, a brick or a bow and kill 50+ people.
Neither do folks with 'assault weapons.' More people are killed with knives than with all long guns; approximately as many are killed with fists & feet[1]. 'Assault weapons' bans are just feel-good measures.
What about the mass murder weapon you drive to the mall in? We gonna ban cars the next time someone plows through the waiting line for the new shiny at 100 MPH??
> Come on, you don't go to a mall with a pencil, a brick or a bow and kill 50+ people
Has this ever happened in the history of any 1st world country? The closest we've ever come is the Orlando shooting at 49, but... the events with the highest body counts are vehicular mass murder or bombs, not guns (9/11, Nice France, Oklahoma bombing, etc.)
> ... you can perform deadly assault with pencil, bow or a brick.
I'm not saying we shouldn't ban certain guns, but I don't think people realize that if someone is hellbent on killing, they'll use a hatchet or a machete if they can't get a gun. We'll have fewer deaths, but much, much nastier ones.
We don't have to use our imagination about what other weapons people might use to commit terror - Bombs and vehicles are already popular, and no less deadly.
> Yeah, let's forget the core suicidal issue and remove the tool, that will surely stop them, right?
Making it more difficult to commit suicide reduces the incidence of suicide. People who experience suicidal impulses but recover without having had the opportunity to attempt suicide (or who recover from a failed suicide attempt) are likely to seek help with either preventing the impulse returning or addressing the underlying issue that made them vulnerable.
> Guns don't kill people (and don't get sentenced for that), people pull triggers and kill other people. But that's much harder to fix, so let's find some easy scapegoat, right?
> Other studies, he said, have suggested attacks with semiautomatic guns – particularly those having large magazines – “result in more shots fired, persons hit and wounds inflicted than do attacks with other guns and magazines.” Another study of handgun attacks in Jersey City during the 1990s, he said, “estimated that incidents involving more than 10 shots fired accounted for between 4 and 5 percent of the total gunshot victims in the sample.”
> Koper, Jan. 14: So, using that as a very tentative guide, that’s high enough to suggest that eliminating or greatly reducing crimes with these magazines could produce a small reduction in shootings, likely something less than 5 percent. Now we should note that effects of this magnitude could be hard to ever measure in any very definitive way, but they nonetheless could have nontrivial, notable benefits for society. Consider, for example, at our current level of our gun violence, achieving a 1 percent reduction in fatal and non-fatal criminal shootings would prevent approximately 650 shootings annually … And, of course having these sorts of guns, and particularly magazines, less accessible to offenders could make it more difficult for them to commit the sorts of mass shootings that we’ve seen in recent years.”
It doesn't quite work that way. There is a reasonably consistent trend among studies that somewhere between 3% and 5% fewer gun deaths occur if magazines are smaller than 10 rounds. That is also more than the margin of error for such studies.
Similarly, even a 2% reduction saves ~1,300 people a year.
So pretending its a mere scapegoat is...stretching quite a bit. Now you can argue a thousand or two thousand people dying is an acceptable cost to maintaining the status quo but that isn't the argument you tried to make.
Smaller magazines provide a margin of safety of several seconds which you might actually be able to get clear and accuracy is frequently low, so that first shot after reloading is likely to miss.
Read up on the pros and cons of infantry rifles chambered for a full power or intermediate rifle cartridge. The gist of it is that in any given contact a very, very very small minority of shots hit their target therefore infantry should be equipped with something that fires the smallest, lightest cartridge that does the job so that they can carry more of them.
Magazine capacity reductions are easy to circumvent (a $30 stamp set can put a "pre-ban" date on your magazines) and most of the people doing mag dumps are either not subject to those laws (cops) or have no intention of following them in the first place (criminals).
The other problem is someone dressed and equipped like a fully armed infantryman showing up in a mall...gets noticed. You can't stealthily carry a ton of cartridges AND have them easily accessible. You'll have to put them in a backpack or the like, changing the equation.
Yes, if they play things perfectly, you will lose every time. The reality is, most of these guys are pretty average and make numerous mistakes. The guys who play it out perfectly never get caught regardless of the law. That isn't an argument we should make murder legal.
This is exactly what the GP is referring to. "We have to do something! This thing won't actually solve the problem but it lets me feel better because we did something, so let's do it! Pretty close to the definition of a crap solution.
It won't stop any one occurence from happening, but it likely will mitigate the damage on that occurence. It's hard to argue it's not at least a step in the right direction. But I agree it won't solve the problem at heart.
Not trying to get into an off-topic political discussion, but the AWB I'm familiar with is almost entirely cosmetic in nature and would not have prevented any of the tragedies that are often used to prop it up. There are many effective things that could be done to lessen gun violence without needlessly restricting something that has no connection to that violence. Barrel shrouds are cosmetic but they make something an assault weapon, as does a pistol grip on a shotgun (which makes it less accurate for 99.9% of users).
Comprehensive, mandatory background checks? Of course.
"This gun looks scary and is therefore dangerous?" Nonsense.
If it where purely cosmetic people would not be fighting it. Instead, there is opposition specifically because it is a meaningful, though small change.
A purely cosmetic change would be requiring all guns to be panted orange.
PS: Most people don't have tools or mechanical know how, making 'simple' changes difficult.
> If it where purely cosmetic people would not be fighting it.
Simply not true. People fought the AWB because it was largely cosmetic (not entirely). Even those in support of the bill have said many of the banned items were cosmetic.
> Soon after its passage in 1994, the gun industry made a mockery of the federal assault weapons ban, manufacturing 'post-ban' assault weapons with only slight, cosmetic differences from their banned counterparts.
From the Violence Policy Center, a pro-gun control group.
If a manufacturer can make strictly cosmetic changes to a weapon and have it be compliant, it's kind of hard to argue there was "meaningful change." That's not a loophole, that's banning a cosmetic feature and a manufacturer getting rid of that cosmetic feature.
An assault weapons ban is something that everyone agrees with, unless they know something about guns and have seen what the ban actually looks like. Once you see the list that is banned vs the list that is not banned, you realize that it usually isn't useful (at best) and is actively problematic for some people (at worst).
Its the same problem as we have with a lot of laws in the US. It sounds like a good idea, but ultimately addresses the wrong problem.
Legislators have to take what they can get -- it's the nature of politics because you have two groups who disagree, going back and forth until they reach some solution the other guy hates, but will accept.
Creating a department that has full authority to regulate a matter is the best way to get in effective laws. But then the laws get too effective and lobbyists have to then push to have their power reduced.
>we cannot provide free or extremely inexpensive mental health care, or somehow get 340mil Americans not to behave like jackals and crass narcissists all the time, to actually treat each other with respect, dignity, and compassion
Not with that attitude you can't!
>I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution.
Sometimes you can't address a problem with an easy band-aid, and pushing as hard as you can on the difficult part of the problem is the only effective option.
Why ban assault weapons (which are hardly ever used in shootings) instead of handguns (which are by far the most common type of gun used in shootings)?
