24 thoughts on “Malcolm Gladwell is my new hero.”

1. I haven’t had a chance to look at the Gladwell video so I’ll just make a comment on my prior which is that he is doing his usual thing. Find some terrible academic theory that has no grounding in reality but pushes a concept that appeals to urban liberal upper middle class book buyers and act as if it’s a proven and yet edgy iconoclastic fact. I’m giving some odds that it’s based on the thoroughly debunked and bordering on fraudulent research of Michael Bellesiles because that’s exactly the kind of thing I expect Gladwell to do. But the controversy there is so well known that I can’t imagine Gladwell wading into it blindly… So I’m guessing he’s found some other source of bullshit to mine.

   The US has been a violent place for it’s entire history. There has been around 1 gun per person continuously since 1800 or so. The US supreme courts rulings on firearms are not popular with American soccer moms but they are consistent with the actual history.

   The state of CA which is extremely well motivated to find such laws could not find any laws at all banning the ownership of firearms in its recent case Miller vs Bonta whose ruling came out recently. The ruling is worth reading, though he does some janky math the basic ruling is clear and consistent and the historical legal record is pretty straightforward.

   https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.casd.642089/gov.uscourts.casd.642089.175.0.pdf

   Gladwell has proven himself to be untrustworthy over and over again. It’s not great to see Andrew get sucked in to his vortex. It’s pretty easy to find historical Sears catalogs where you could order firearms through the mail before the assassination of JFK. The idea that cowboy films from the 60s are what’s motivating SCOTUS decisions is pretty laughable.

   Reply ↓

   • Ok, so I made it through some of the Gladwell video and it’s pretty light on any kind of facts, but it seems I’m right in the following sense, he’s found Adam Winkler’s book “Gunfight: the battle over the right to bear arms in America (2011)”. And he references a somewhat famous photograph https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/21907/were-firearms-prohibited-in-dodge-city-kansas-in-the-1870s

     What isn’t discussed is how in the history of firearms laws in the US it’s ALWAYS been about selective enforcement and disarming the minorities and powerless people. All the laws regarding carrying or possessing firearms that CA could find in the Miller decision (referenced above) were about disarming “Catholics” or “Negros” or “Indians” or whoever else was a second class person according to the local powers.

     In this article linked below which is based on personal oral history, Dan Gifford describes the same thing going on in the famous “gun control” of Dodge city etc that Gladwell is promoting. Now, Dan Gifford is I don’t know who and oral history is far from completely authoritative, but he claims family who were US marshals in the 1880’s in the locations in question. The details and examples put into play by Gifford’s account are generally believable to me. Further he cites a few historical documents, such as 1881 newspapers. Given the history of corruption in small towns in the US I don’t find any of it implausible, unfortunately.

     https://crpa.org/news/crpa/did-the-wild-west-really-have-more-gun-control-than-we-do/

     If it’s true, essentially, all the friends of the police had guns at all times, and anyone coming into the town who wasn’t a friend of the police could be harassed with impunity. Furthermore the “powers” in these small towns were themselves corrupt, involved in prostitution, theft, extortion and soforth. This is extremely believable to me. This selective enforcement etc is a familiar pattern for CA gun owners, where most recently Laurie Smith, sheriff of Santa Clara was forced out of office amid well established policies of celebrity friends and pay-to-play bribes for concealed weapon permits and denying permits to everyone else https://sfist.com/2022/11/01/santa-clara-county-sheriff-abruptly-resigns-amidst-corruptions-scandal-after-otherwise-distinguished-career/
     https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/20/how-a-really-big-check-unraveled-a-well-oiled-patronage-system-with-santa-clara-county-concealed-gun-permits/

     The Sullivan Act in NY was essentially the same situation. It was named after a famous Tammany Hall politician who was himself running prostitution, gambling, and extortion rackets, and could utilize the law to disarm his opposing criminals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Sullivan#Involvement_in_criminal_activity

     CA laws on concealed carry etc were initially put in place to control mexican migrants in the 1920’s and then laws against open carry were put in place by Ronald Reagan in the 1960’s after the Black Panthers began carrying in public to project force in an attempt to protect black citizens from police abuse.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

     So, yeah, Gladwell doing Gladwell stuff is more or less still my conclusion.

     Gun control in the US has always been about oppressing minorities and has little to do with safety at all.

     Reply ↓

     • Firearm:

       You write, “Gun control in the US has always been about oppressing minorities and has little to do with safety at all.” But what about that Supreme Court case about the domestic abuser. Taking guns away from domestic abusers, that’s not about oppressing minorities, it’s about safety, no?

       Reply ↓

       • This is an interesting case. Unfortunately bad precedent gets made in the context of bad cases about bad people. Rahimi is very clearly violent garbage who needs to be locked up. His felony charges are ongoing as I understand it, so he hasn’t been convicted yet, but I expect him to be convicted.

         I’ll be discussing this in the context of a liberal view as you might find on the extremely active Reddit forum r/liberalgunowners so I’m giving you a perspective that is probably not widely publicized as this is always taken to be a “liberals vs conservatives” thing.

         In the view of many, including many liberal gun owners, the issue surrounding domestic abusers and red flag laws is *precisely* about oppression. The issue is that many DV restraining orders and red flag laws allow for application of the law with *extremely limited* “due process”. It’s possible to get DV restraining orders against someone without them even being notified about the process, this is known as an ex-parte order. They are temporary, but if I understand correctly sufficient enough to cause loss of firearms rights.

         The problem with all of these laws is how they get weaponized in contexts they weren’t intended for. Yes, if someone is a violent person we’d like their guns taken. But if they’re actually violent the way to do that is to arrest them for crimes and convict them! Police themselves have incredibly high rates of domestic violence though, and they tend not to enforce domestic violence laws. It’s extremely common for women to be killed by domestic abusers after YEARS or DECADES of complaints that are not followed up on.

         On the other hand, it’s also common during divorces for opposing parties to weaponize these laws against their partner (and this goes both directions but the frequency of women complaining against men is probably much higher). Some people have valuable and sentimental collections of firearms… antiques, pieces passed to them by family members via estates, guns that are highly customized or used in sporting competitions etc. Collections can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Making false claims during messy divorces is far far too common. I’ve read accounts of this happening where even the friends of the false claimant come out of the woodwork to testify that the claim was false.

         There’s also the other direction… a legitimately afraid woman (usually) who purchases a firearm for protection could have it stripped by a conniving abuser by the abuser claiming false threats and getting a restraining order, then the firearm is removed, and they are free to go and kill their now disarmed partner who they’re crazy jealous about.

         The issue isn’t really a firearms issue per-se but rather an issue of due process. With sufficient due process the laws could be ok, but a history of police having high biases *in favor of* domestic abusers, and family courts being willing to throw out restraining orders at the drop of a hat leads to bad law.

         My own view is we need to prosecute domestic violence much more than we do, and we especially need to do it to police who are DV perpetrators. Red flag and DV restraining type laws could be beneficial if properly designed but almost none of them are properly designed. Those who write the laws are almost always anti gun in every way, and therefore have no incentive to ensure proper “due process” winds up in their laws.

       • Firearm
         Let me paraphrase your lengthy post: guns don’t kill people, domestic abusers do.

       • Dale, or maybe it could be rephrased: “constitutionally guaranteed civil rights should only be limited after due process as guaranteed in the 5th amendment, and a mere accusation of violence without a trial or conviction doesn’t qualify in my book”.

         Also, as a matter of fact, domestic abusers are vastly more likely to commit other violent crimes than other people. If we were looking to improve law enforcement to reduce crime focusing on that crime would be a good choice.

       • Josh
         Firearm says:

         “Yes, if someone is a violent person we’d like their guns taken. But if they’re actually violent the way to do that is to arrest them for crimes and convict them! Police themselves have incredibly high rates of domestic violence though, and they tend not to enforce domestic violence laws. It’s extremely common for women to be killed by domestic abusers after YEARS or DECADES of complaints that are not followed up on.”

         I do think this is pointing the finger at the domestic abuser, not the gun. And, of course, it is true. But it is a hollow argument. Talk about protecting those critical rights – Firearm wants to protect the right to bear arms by recommending we enforce the domestic abuse laws – who can argue with that. Except that the reality is that we have other inalienable rights that make enforcement and prosecution difficult. That is not an excuse for failure to follow through. But it is a diversion from the gun issue. I am not claiming that reducing gun availability will solve anything. But I can say that I would feel more comfortable and I don’t think it hurts to make guns less readily available to a variety of emotionally explosive people.

         Firearm is raising a number of legitimate issues regarding a more comprehensive view of policies to reduce gun violence. Sure, reducing income inequality might lead to less gun violence. While we’re at it, less reduce racial inequality also. While I support both of those, there are a number of practical issues that make those difficult. But they are diversion from reducing gun availability. Firearm’s argument is essentially if we can find a hypothetical policy that would be more effective than gun control, then it makes gun control unnecessary and ineffective. That’s why I say, guns don’t kill people, domestic abusers do. If we only got rid of domestic abuse, then gun control would be unnecessary. If we’d only get rid of income inequality, racial discrimination, religious intolerance, …. then gun control would be unnecessary. I don’t find these arguments convincing – I think they are a distraction.

         Similarly, the history of gun control in the US, while interesting, seems mostly irrelevant. Actual gun control policies may, as Firearm suggests, have little to do with safety and more to do with oppressing minorities. But I have no doubt that many proponents of gun control are concerned about safety, not oppressing minorities. The inability of these intentions to translate into policy (for example, the repeated attempts to pass new laws after each school mass shooting) is worth analyzing. Is it because it lacks minority oppression as a rationale or is because of the political pressure of the NRA?

       • Dale I think you misunderstand my position. I’m not trying to put this on the DV perpetrators, or victims, I’m trying to point squarely to the systemic problem in law enforcement. DV is not something where say 4th amendment or 5th amendment protections are the big problem keeping them from being able to make cases… it’s that it’s just not a priority. The police exist to keep the rich comfortable, and that’s pretty much it. Middle and lower class everyday average schmucks can get stuffed, and it’s just not an important part of the actual role that police play to change that.

         The SCOTUS has rejected the idea that the police have ANY duty at all to protect citizens. Unless you’re in their custody as a suspect, they don’t owe you jack and can legally stand across the street and point and laugh while your abusive ex beats you to death with a hammer in a parking lot and have no legal ramifications of that at all.

         When it comes to intention regarding safety, there’s a very different intention between the average person who responds to a poll on gun control and the actual people who push gun control in legislatures. The laws actually passed are usually ridiculous. Assault Weapons Bans have a lot of public support… from people who don’t know anything about guns and have never fired one in their life. But how many people here knew that the CA AWB, the model for the whole genre in the country, is about whether your rifle has a pistol grip, flash hider, or adjustable stock… not anything else like what ammunition it fires etc? Does anyone really think that those laws prevent crime in any way? It’s completely legal to own the pistol grip for example… you just can’t attach it to the rifle… so if you decide suddenly to become a terrorist and want a better grip on your rifle, it’s about a 2 minute process with a hex wrench to put the $5 plastic pistol grip back on. That’s more or less what happened in the San Bernardino jihadist terrorism shootings. It’s actually legal to transport the lower piece and the upper piece of an AR 15 which when assembled would be an “assault rifle” as long as they’re separated. SO you can have two pieces when combined would be an “assault rifle” but if stopped by the police and searched would be legal… It takes 30 seconds and no tools to attach them together.

         What does a flash hider do? It diverts the fireball from unburned powder sideways so that in low light you don’t develop a bleached area of rods in your vision and can still see the sights to aim properly. In other words, the AWB *makes guns less safe* as they are potentially harder to aim, less accurate, and less well fit to the user (adjustable stock). The AWB is an *anti safety* law designed to harass a political out-group (gun owners) that has NO plausible positive safety effect at all.

         To the extent that gun control laws could possibly have a beneficial effect on crime they would HAVE to affect the *stock* (amount) of extant firearms by a considerable amount… Or be blatantly unconstitutional. New York has gone the blatantly unconstitutional route and those laws are being dismantled as we speak. Those 500 Million guns in the US, yeah civilians own more firearms than the combined military of the entire continent of Europe and Asia put together including the Russian and Chinese army. These are physical objects with about a 200 year lifespan if well cared for. Considering we have 3 consecutive SCOTUS opinions making ownership of these firearms a legally protected thing, how could we plausibly remove even 50% of them?

         Gun control laws that are about sales and limiting the types of sales of certain guns violate equal protections… those who already have them have “more rights” than people say born later who weren’t old enough to purchase them. Furthermore all the gun control laws ALWAYS have exceptions for law enforcement and ex-law-enforcement… Ex law enforcement are statistically speaking far far more likely to be violent DV (domestic violence) offenders… but they’re exempt from many of the laws. For example in CA they can purchase any handgun they want even if it’s not on the “roster of safe handguns”. Why should a retired cop with a DV problem who is conveniently never really investigated by his ex cop buddies be able to purchase an “unsafe” handgun?

         The answer is that the “roster of safe handguns” has never been about safety, it’s always been about restricting access for its own sake. It also provides a nice way for police officers to make a lot of extra money, as they order off-roster guns from out of state at retail prices and resell them at a 3x markup to regular civilians in the person-to-person used transfer market. There are many law enforcement officers for whom that’s a just routine part of getting their paycheck… each month get paid, then buy an off roster handgun from out of state, skip the 10 day wait (another exemption), and then turn around and list it for sale by consignment… maybe 10 of those a year gets you an additional $30,000 in pocket cash.

         Tell me how that makes us safer?

         Firearms laws in the US are NOT about making people safer, they haven’t been forever. The support for them comes from people who have a mistaken belief that they will somehow make people safer, but there is almost no plausible mechanism whereby they could make people safer. Of course that’s not really true of some laws… laws that have been on the books uncontroversially for a long time. For example a violent felon loses the right to own guns. Some people argue that there should be no such law for nonviolent felons… people who embezzled funds or the like. But no one really argues that someone who just served 10 years for aggravated assault and battery should immediately have the right to own guns. And they don’t have that right, and that’s been true forever. Of course, they get access to black market guns easily anyway because there’s 500M of them in the US and so there’s a robust black market.

         I think I’ve said my piece now. Malcolm Gladwell was doing typical Gladwell things… the motivation for gun laws when looked at carefully is usually an us-vs-them in group vs out group political power thing, not a safety thing. That was most likely true back in the “wild west” that Gladwell misrepresents and it’s still true now. Most of the widely supported gun laws such as assault weapons bans, handgun rosters, licensing through the police, and soforth either have no plausible mechanism to actually affect safety or are blatantly unconstitutional like the recently passed OR law.

         I’ll let you have the last say, I’ve touched on most of the important points, hopefully some people in the audience even if they haven’t been convinced are willing to entertain an alternative view of the real issues.

     • So we have some “evidence” that gun control was practiced in the Wild West and some other evidence that this practice was selectively applied. I’m not convinced either way. There is plenty of evidence that drug laws in the US have been selectively applied – does that mean that the US does not really make such drug use illegal? Isn’t it possible that both are true: that there was gun control practiced in the Wild West and it was also selectively applied? Selective application leaves open the question of what the intent of the practice actually was – and I have no direct knowledge to help regarding that.

       What I would say is that I agree with your characterization of Gladwell – while entertaining, he is light on facts and liberally interprets what evidence there is to support his own beliefs. It seems that you are doing the same. Claiming that gun control in the US “has little to do with safety at all” is like saying “medical licensing has little to do with public health at all” because medical licensing has been used to limit entry into medical professions to enhance the earnings of medical professionals. It is just too simplistic – there are motivations of those that support regulations, some for public good and some for private benefits. Ultimate passage or enforcement is similarly complex. Any regulation is open to abuse by those charged with enforcement, but this does not invalidate the intentions of all of those behind such regulations. Similarly, the California case you cited was decided by a particular judge, and as we have seen (too often) judges vary enormously based on their own particular beliefs.

       I think you have overstated your case, at least from my perspective.

       Reply ↓

       • Dale, obviously my beliefs come from a long history of watching this play out over decades. It’s impossible to lay out an airtight case in blog comments. I started writing a detailed book on the topic from a liberal and data based viewpoint but stopped when I realized how incredibly stressful it would be to be put into the spotlight with all the attendant death threats and soforth. I considered doing it via a pseudonym. I try not to get heavily invested in online debates, it’s terrible for my blood pressure.

         In any case, selective enforcement has been the rule forever, in the Miller case CA was tasked with providing their list of laws. It is here, it covers a time period from 1383 to 1888 there are a number of statutes involving racial and religous minorities as you might expect.

         https://assets.nationbuilder.com/firearmspolicycoalition/pages/5381/attachments/original/1673544279/Miller_v_Bonta_163_Survey_1.pdf?1673544279

         Consider the Miller case which is about so called “assault weapons”. Every single firearm in the photo at the top of this page is legal in CA despite the assault weapon ban: https://www.pewpewtactical.com/featureless-ar-15-rifle/

         If one were to remove the grip and put a standard pistol grip they would become felony assault weapons. If you were to remove the muzzle device at the end and put a standard “flash hider” (all of the depicted firearms look to have a “compensator” which reduces recoil but increases concussive noise) it would become a felony. if you were to replace the stocks on those rifles with one that adjusts its length over a range of say 5 or 6 inches in half inch increments so that different sized users could use the same firearm it would become a felony. Even just adjusting between two settings a half inch apart… felony straight to jail. This doesn’t bring any “safety” it’s about oppressing the Republican minority in CA who are the main people who want to own those firearms. That’s changing in recent history… far more “soccer moms” are becoming gun owners and realizing these laws have no plausible safety component. But it’s still a small minority of liberals californians who have any real knowledge on the subject.

         People who aren’t knowledgeable believe that assault weapons bans are about banning semiautomatic rifles. They have not been. Firearms like the Ruger Mini-14 simply don’t have a pistol grip, flash hider, or adjustable stock in the first place, and have always been legal even since the 1980’s when the original law was passed. It fires the same ammunition at the same velocities with identical results.

         These laws aren’t about safety, they’re about oppressing a group of people that CA democrats don’t like. There’s no plausible argument that a flash hider is what really makes your gun dangerous and someone elses not.

         I’m glad we’re on the same page about Gladwell. I don’t think he ads to the debate in any meaningful way.

         It would be nice if the US were less violent. There are actual things we could do about that. Ending the war on drugs and using a mandatory drug treatment policy similar to Portugal would do a LOT. Ending the economic warfare on the lower income classes would do a lot. Neither of those policies are popular with either Republicans (who like “hard on crime” policy) or Democrats (who prefer to rile up the base with meaningless gun bans while seeking lots of money from billionaires who like to buy gun laws, like Bloomberg)

         here’s an article that has a graph of humboldt county homicide rate https://www.times-standard.com/2019/12/30/humboldt-county-sees-lowest-homicide-rate-in-years-in-2019/

         guess which year CA legalized marijuana (Humboldt is a major growing region for cartels), that’s right 2016 going into effect in 2017… homicides declined dramatically after. This is obviously not a good statistical analysis like we’d like to see here on this blog, but I think we all know by now that violence associated with drug crime is a major source of violence in the US. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/DRRC.PDF

         Guns are a problem in the US, but far less than the things that underly our gun crime… mainly drugs, poverty, suicidality including that caused by a large number of veterans of mideast wars, access to mental health care, and economic inequality.

         people like to talk about simple “silver bullets” like “just ban guns” because no-one in the US wants to address the underlying decrepit nature of our society.

       • “Any regulation is open to abuse by those charged with enforcement, but this does not invalidate the intentions of all of those behind such regulations.”

         Effects matter, not intentions.

       • I don’t exactly disagree with anything you say. But in the same way that adding suicide nets under bridges and factories and university buildings can be a smart and effective idea without addressing root causes, I still think addressing the proximal cause of gun availability would have a significant net causal effect on deaths without addressing the reason people want to kill themselves and others. Guns are just, by design, a way better tool for killing than pretty much anything else, oneself or others. A typical shooting is many times less survive-able than a stabbing or an overdose.

         The US has been a violent place for it’s entire history

         I hear this a lot and it’s not clear to me that it’s true in either a historical or contemporary global context. It’s a pretty difficult thing to bring quantitative evidence to bear on since:

         1. Generalized “violence” or “violent-ness” is a squishy concept that can mean different things to different people
         2. Statistical reporting on violence below the level of homicide is highly heterogeneous across cultures. Reporting rates on things like this are typically proportional to the seriousness in which they’re held, which is also often inversely proportional to how common they are.

         Anecdotally, I live next to a notorious housing project in NYC, and I’ve never seen an actual fight, or even heard about one second-hand in the last 4 years. On the other hand, people from places like Ireland or Thailand always talk like drunken fistfights are an ordinary activity for adult men. If I had to guess based on feelings and personal experience, I’d say the contemporary USA is pretty middle of the road; more casually violent than, say, switzerland, Japan, Korea (two rare alcoholic non-violent cultures), but less casually violent than Ireland, Scotland, Thailand, the Phillipines, Russia.

       • somebody.

         Thanks for engaging in a reasonable way. The problem with trying to address violence through gun availability is what actually does that look like?

         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country the 2017 small arms survey estimated more or less 400M guns in the US. Since 2017 when it was conducted we’ve sold around 15-20M through official channels per year ever since. so let’s call it half a billion firearms in the US today. More guns than people as has been the case for a long time. Also 2017 was before 3d printing became a viable mechanism for building firearms. The portion of an AR15 style rifle that is the serialized “firearm part” is the part called the receiver which is more or less a box that can be 3d printed successfully. You can fire thousands of rounds through such a firearm. The other parts are unregulated. So you can buy the barrels and bolt carrier group and stocks and grips and such through the mail. It’s the serialized receiver that is regulated. Similarly the part of a Glock 9mm pistol that’s regulated is the lower receiver, the portion that you “grip”. The barrel, slide, firing pin etc are all considered replacement parts and can be ordered in the mail. The receiver is a solid piece of plastic you can print at home in designer colors.

         In all likelihood there have been millions of receivers 3D printed in the last several years.

         Criminals have essentially zero difficulty getting their hands on guns. They steal them from cars and houses, and sell stolen ones to each other all the time.

         It’s also the case that criminals have had little difficulty getting ahold of firearms in Australia, despite their well known buyback and the estimate of only 0.145 firearms per person in 2017 a 90% reduction in availability vs the US

         https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-04/illegal-firearms-shooting-police-gun-crime/101306628

         So, to make criminals have a hard time getting firearms we should reduce their availability below something like 0.1 guns per person. We know in Japan that in fact people have a harder time getting guns, but not so hard that a random guy can’t assassinate Shinzo Abe. Still, their firearm level is .003 per person.

         At the current US level of 1.5 or so that suggests we need to confiscate maybe 99% of all firearms just to get started on the issue of availability, bringing the level down to about .01 per person which is 90% less than Australia but still 3x compared to Japan.

         Does that sound like a sane plan? We’ll address crime by reducing the *world* population of available firearms by more than half (something like half of all guns in the world are owned by US citizens) and we’ll successfully take away 99 out of every 100 guns US people own without any major bloodshed on the scale of WWII? Also the constitution requires compensation, so to confiscate a half billion firearms will require buying back a couple trillion dollars in assets. Furthermore people LOVE to 3D print “firearms” and sell them at buybacks to make money. They don’t have to function, just print a shitty receiver that plausibly could be attached to a barrel etc. $0.75 in materials and get paid $250 in buyback value or something.

         You might argue that you only need to bring firearm availability down into the range of say Switzerland or Austria or Czech republic which has a right to firearms in its constitution similar to the US. So that could be accomplished by confiscation of “only” maybe 90% of firearms. But those countries have similar levels to australia (0.125 per person for Czechia 0.3 for Austria) and it’s not hard for Australian criminals to get guns….

         The reason Austria or Czechia have such reduced crime is that they don’t have the motivating factors we do in the US. There’s no impoverished lower class of people involved in heavy drug trade or smacked out on Fentanyl or Meth. In the US Methamphetamine use is common in many lower class jobs, like sheetrocking, painting, or fast food. Go on Reddit and just look for people posting pics of fast food workers with meth pipes in their back pants pocket.

         Desperate people do desperate things, and there just aren’t large numbers of desperate people in Switzerland or Austria. US overdose deaths exceed 100k people per year (rate of 30/100k/yr). Overdose deaths in Czechia?? 44… not 44/100k but 44 total deaths in 2015. That’s 0.06/100k/yr https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/4511/TD0416912ENN.pdf I’d bet if we had 1000x fewer major drug users we’d have a lot less crime too!

         The evidence suggests eliminating desperation will do more than eliminating guns and is vastly easier and will have many many other benefits. The correlation is pretty strong with income inequality. Czechia has Gini coefficient about 0.25 while the US has about 0.4 the relationship between Gini and homicide in international data is exponential (log homicide ~ linear in gini). So yeah, reducing income inequality could plausible be associated with massive reductions in crime and violence specifically.

         As for the US being a violent place… consider the Indian wars for the period 1800-1900 we have a tendency to forget about that. Also the Civil War, the Jim Crow era and lynchings, and then of course the US involvement in violence overseas throughout the 1900’s and continuing until we pulled out of Afghanistan a few years ago.

         Obviously there are many different kinds of violence. So I don’t think you’re wrong per se. I think fistfights at soccer games and things are definitely less common in the US than in Ireland, but then in the 90’s we had crack cocaine wars… so yeah it’s complicated.

       • Ghillie Dhu
         I can’t let this pass unchallenged. Effects matter, yes, and I’d agree more than intentions. But I think it is a mistake to discount intentions completely. And, if you think of your statement as “the ends justify the means” it becomes more worrisome. I don’t think those statements are equivalent, but once we focus only on the results, a lot of bad things can be justified.

         Also, an observation and question about Firearm Knowledge:

         In the past year, I’ve seen posts by dpy6629, Firearm Knowledge, and Anonymous (probably one of many with that name) that sound similar to me. Are they the same person? Or is there something about these firearm aficionados that accounts for what seem like common traits to me? Namely, overly long and detailed diatribes packed with details that appear to aim to impress with expertise, but are often not much relevant, and a tenacious insistence to have the final declaratory word.

         Just asking.

       • Dale:

         Regarding your last question: I have no idea who are the identities of various anonymous commenters, and I purposely don’t try to do any sleuthing using IP addresses etc. This blog is one of the few places on the internet with good discussions, so I can respect that people with a lot to say can sometimes leave long comments. At some point it can be too much, but if someone lays down a few comments like this, it doesn’t bother me; I feel that it adds to the discussion. Every once in awhile we get some annoying trolling, but there’s not too much of that, in part because people here respond so reasonably that there’s not much point to trolling.

       • “Firearm, Let me paraphrase your lengthy post: guns don’t kill people, domestic abusers do.”

         Dale, I’m a regular reader of this blog and a regular reader of your comments. Because I generally appreciate your comments, I want to call you out on this one. This was not a reasonable paraphrase of Firearm Knowledge’s post. We can do better here. :)

       • Dale

         The modal policy arguments I have seen that elevate intentions over effects boil down to “the *intention* jusitifies the *effect*”. It appears we share similar principles but operationalize them very differently.

     • Firearm Knowledge, presumably a pseudonym, but one never knows, brings up the defining phrase, “the right to bear arms.” Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court Justice, was an extreme literalist, and he took it to mean that a firearm was OK as long as one could lift it, and thus, he equivocated regarding a private citizen owning a cannon. Because my spelling is suspect, at first, I read Scalia’s remark as being against a private citizen owning a canon–some sort of violation of church and state.

       There is however, another possibility due to misspellings–“the right to bare arms”–but winter is coming on so that is of little interest right now.

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       • Personally, I’ve always felt that the right to arm bears has been a cornerstone of our constitutional freedoms.

2. Allow me to say something nice about Gladwell. The Bomber Mafia was an interesting read. I didn’t know that the jet stream was largely unknown prior to the war. It made precision bombing of the aircraft manufacturing physical infrastructure very difficult. I was led to believe by the movies that in WW II the US had very good targeting using the Norden bomb sight. General LeMay decided to target the human infrastructure of Japanese industry. The night of March 9-10, American bombers flying well under the jet stream dropped fire bombs on residential areas of Tokyo leading to a genuine firestorm and close to 100,000 deaths. Gladwell tells the history well and without self righteous preaching. The horror is conveyed.
   I know that in our time every public person is either a pure creature of light or a satanic beast, but I wanted to say something nice about that guy.
   Andrew, you can count on me to say something nice about you if I encounter someone who thinks that you’re a bad guy.

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   • Oncodoc:

     Sure, but planes don’t take off in a tailwind, do they?

     But, yeah, I agree on your general point. Gladwell’s kind of a punch line because he’s made some obvious bad calls, and his style is mostly to move on from these rather than examining what went wrong. But we all make mistakes. As with Freakonomics, Gladwell has lots of interesting things to say too. Along those lines, see this post from awhile back, Possible models for Freakonomics 3.

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3. In one of his comments making the case for arming the population to the hilt, Firearm Knowledge, in his homage to weapons, refers to Czechia several times. I had never heard the term but Wikipedia claims

   “The English long form ‘Czech Republic’ is searched online in over 80 % cases but the use of the short form “Czechia” is increasing in time from less than 1 % in 2015 to more than 16 % in 2023.”

   Admittedly, I live an isolated existence, but a more than a 16-fold increase in eight years sounds dubious to me.

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   • Except that, as the same Wikipedia article makes clear, the government didn’t endorse using the name until 2016. And the fact that the official UN didn’t change until then makes it a lot less dubious to me.

     ‘In 2013, Czech president Miloš Zeman recommended the wider official use of Czechia,[42] and on 14 April 2016 the government agreed to make Czechia the official short name.[43] The new name was approved by the Czech cabinet on 2 May 2016 and registered on 5 July 2016.[clarification needed][44][45] In November 2016 the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented recommendations on how to use the short name Czechia in international contexts.[46] On 1 June 2017, the geography department of the Faculty of Sciences of Charles University in Prague organised a special conference to assess the progress of the name’s proliferation.[47]”

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     • Clearly, I am out of my league when it comes to knowledge about the Czech Republic and anything linguistic thereof. However, I found this strange fact:

       “Ahoj is an informal greeting used in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, both when welcoming and saying goodbye. Etymologists at the Czech Language Institute believe the word entered Czech from the English “hoy”: a word originally used by seafarers. The word was used as a naval exclamation, used to attract the attention of, or warn, fellow crew members, or as a general greeting.

       Of course, the Czech Republic is landlocked, and no one is quite sure how the term got here, but there are competing theories. Some believe that Czech boatmen brought it up the river with them from Hamburg, whereas others believe that recreational paddlers helped to spread this naval salutation through the countryside.”

       Even stranger, from the same article,

       “Meanwhile, others have claimed that the word originates in some rather spurious acronyms, from the religious Latin “Ad honorem Jesu” (for the honour of Jesus) or to the political “Adolfa Hitlera oběsíme jistě” (we will surely hang Adolf Hitler).”

       Once again, there is no telling what one can learn from reading this blog.

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