Lanes
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Doctors say gun violence is a public health issue, an epidemic. Here we go again, another round of the same tired lies.
Can we please acknowledge some obvious and simple truths? Guns don’t shoot people. People with guns shoot people. But not all people with guns shoot people, some of us have owned guns for decades without shooting anybody. And sometimes people shooting other people is perfectly justified and should have happened sooner, as in that Texas school.
The problem is bad people with guns shooting people. That means the real problem is not the guns; the real problem is the bad people. Take away the guns and they’re still bad people, still willing to do bad things.
Bad people are not an epidemic. There is no treatment. There is no cure. Best we can do is remove Bad People from society, keeping the rest of us safe.
Long term imprisonment. Death penalty. Vigilante justice. The old remedies are the only effective remedies for bad behavior committed by bad people. And everybody knows it, whether they’re willing to admit it, or not.
Joe Doakes
This, in fact, may be the most exhausting thing about being a gun rights activist; the population of gun grab activists (below the national level) recycles every 2 to 3 years.
And so every few years, you get to Saint deal with the same lies, clichés and emotion driven fallacies all over again.
Including this one.
June 10th, 2022 at 7:41 am
It’s interesting to me that, whenever there is a mass shooting, people call out for stronger mental health interventions.
Yet, these same people will complain that doctors are asking if they own guns.
June 10th, 2022 at 7:46 am
^^Your morning dose of incoherent blather.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:03 am
Why is it interesting, E? Are you suggesting gun ownership is a sign of mental illness? That any patient who says “yes” should be committed and therefore ineligible to pass the background check to buy a gun?
When I go to the doctor for my annual physical, I’m not there for a mental health exam. Why inquire whether I own a gun? It’s no more relevant to my physical wellbeing than inquiring whether I own a fire extinguisher – less, probably, considering how many people die in home fires.
Maybe I’m just not clever enough to understand why you find it interesting. Perhaps you could explain it in small words using short sentences?
June 10th, 2022 at 8:09 am
The NRA teaches how to use a gun to hit targets,
Hollywood teaches how to use a gun to hit people.
I would like to see a graph that charts the rise in mass shootings to the rise in gun violence as depicted in movies and on TV.
I remember my father, a WWII vet, refusing to let his kids watch The Untouchables on TV in this 60’s “because it was too violent”. Then came Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah.
Now we can watch bloodbaths at will on Netflex and Hulu (among others).
Unlike gun control advocates, I do not advocate Hollywood control, but the desensitizing of random violence on the screen needs to be just as much a part of the equation as the “marginal control” of guns.
The media will never adopt this approach, because their business model is to use violence to sell sugar water, laundry soap and subscriptions.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:20 am
“Doctors say gun violence is a public health issue, an epidemic.”
When they say that about male homosexual behavior, I’ll be more inclined to listen. The list of physical and mental diseases & trauma they spread among themselves and the general population is too long (and frankly, disgusting) to post here.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:28 am
When I go in for my annual physical, I’m always asked if I have feelings of hopelessness or depression, low self esteem or contemplate suicide. Funny. It seems that almost every time someone commits suicide, hid their symptoms. They are also almost always described as being funny, artistic, creative, loving, a gentle soul or some other flowery word. I’m humbled by the people that if they did take their own life, that have the courage to put the real cause of their loved ones deaths in their obituaries.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:35 am
^ People with mental illness are up to 10x more likely to hurt themselves with a firearm, mental illness is not a predictor of hurting others. Hatred is — antisoci@l personality disorder is. We are no more mentally ill in this country than in any other country and yet we have one of the highest firearm death rates of anywhere in the world.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:37 am
Blade is correct.
I think that psychiatry & psychology are 90% BS, but the truth is that homosexuality was included in the DSM as mental disorder because it was and is associated with numerous pathologies, including obesity, greater drug and alcohol use, greater involvement with law enforcement, greater chance of being diabetic, even lower weight at birth.
In 1974, after threats of violence and blackmail, the DSM board stopped listing homosexuality as a mental disorder, and instead explained the pathologies associated with homosexuality as being caused by society’s treatment of homosexuals. No word on how they ret conned this to explain lower birth weight, but there you are with another reason to believe that 90% of psychiatry and psychology is bunkum.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:38 am
Troll drops irrelevant, meaningless non sequitur. Clue troll, we are asking that criminals be put in, and KEPT in, jail. There, now you’re smarter. Or not.
Remember, it was the CDC who dropped the “you don’t have to pay rent” edict during the dempanic. On what authority? That’s why gun grabbers are always asking for money to the CDC to “research” gun violence. ‘Nother clue: ADULTS call gun violence by its right name: crime.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:39 am
You might be right about that, boss. I run through the questionnaire so quickly, I ignore the questions that don’t apply to me.
Even if the answer was, “Yes, I’m old and lonely, I am depressed and have thoughts of ending it all,” is the correct response to ask, “Do you own guns?” What about people who own rope, an automobile, or pills, do you quiz them, too? And then what do you do with the answers? Report the patient to the police to be committed for his own good? Can’t happen without a court hearing at which the old buzzard will say, “Sure I have thoughts, but I’d never act on them, suicide is a sin” and the court will have no choice but to let him go.
The doctor asking about gun ownership is another form of political activism, just like the doctor insisting I get the ‘vaccine’ for a jumped-up flu virus. The lab coat doesn’t hide the agenda.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:43 am
Hatred, Em? Like the 44% of under 50 Democrat men who are pro-assassination of a politician whom they believe “is harming” our country? No, no illness, hatred, or evil there. No siree. Just good ol’ patriotic fervor, right?
Ok, I’ll grant you it was an anti-civil rights, hate-mongering group that published that poll, but even the SPLC can dig out a nugget of truth sometime.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:54 am
Ironically, the PBS show that Joe Doakes links to is an interview with Larry Krassner, the Soros-backed soft-on-crime Philadelphia DA. Krassner ended cash bail, refuses to prosecute gun crimes, and fired 31 of his staff on his first day in office. Since then 70 Philly DA office lawyers have resigned because Krasner will not allow them to prosecute criminals.
So of course PBS thought that Krassner was the go-to to talk about gun crime.
June 10th, 2022 at 9:02 am
@JD, I get those surveys, too. I believe they’re either SOP or required these days, not sure which. But I’m the son of two psychologists and instantly recognized what they were (if I had a dollar for every psych test I’ve ever taken, I’d be retired long ago). I’m not too bothered by them asking about depression et. al. since on my wife’s side there’s a fair bit of it and I’ve seen what it can do to families. Those questionnaires are not likely to catch depression in men, I’d guess, but they might stand a chance with females.
On the other hand, when I went to a physician in the same practice who doesn’t know me, he asked the questions about guns, despite no indications of depression. My reply was pretty simple: I smiled and replied, “Fuck off. It’s none of your business.” While he was a little surprised at the time, I’ve seen him on occasion since then, but when he gets to the point in the script where he’s supposed to ask, he just smiles and says, “I think we’ll skip the next question.”
June 10th, 2022 at 9:15 am
rAT squeaked: “mental illness is not a predictor of hurting others.”
Maybe not, rAT, but it *is* a predictor of someone’s political leanings.
68% of self identified leftists have been diagnosed with a mental disease. I think it’s prudent to round them all up for evaluation, just to be on the safe side.
June 10th, 2022 at 9:28 am
I am reposting because this statistic is appropriate for this thread. Why ban guns when hands and feet are more lethal? Just following libturd logic (or lack thereof):
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) showed that 454 people were killed with rifles in 2020, while 657 were killed with “personnel weapons,” which are defined as “hands, fists, feet, etc.”
June 10th, 2022 at 9:34 am
As Mitch correctly noted, it’s tiresome to have to rebut the same inane chanting points every couple of years but here we go . . .
Guns are not a public health epidemic. That’s a lie told by people playing on lab-coat-credibility to frighten voters with a scary word. Criminals with guns are on the loose causing havoc because Liberals let them.
There are 35,000 deaths by gun every year and two thirds of them are suicides, true enough. But they’re mostly old White men who have lost wives and careers and have nothing left to live for. Taking away their guns won’t save any schoolchildren, that’s a bait-and-switch. Plus, old men are resourceful at substitution – plenty of rope, pills and cars in the garage – so it’s doubtful taking guns would reduce suicide rates, even if Liberals actually did care about the fate of old White men, which I don’t believe for a second.
White women voters – the target for gun control campaigns – don’t care about gun violence in the ghetto because it’s young-Black-male on young-Black-male with a few bystanders hit in the spray. Those voters care about school shooters because it’s personal – their kids could be next. Liberals play on their fear to disarm law-abiding citizens while insisting the children be left defenseless.
Every one of the school shooters was nuts and everybody around them knew it but because of the laws Liberals insisted on creating, nobody could do anything to stop them in advance. And because Liberals place a lower priority on school safety than DIE, nobody did anything to stop the nuts once the shooting started (except pepper-spray parents who wanted to go rescue their own children).
Every one of the school shooters passed/avoided a background check. None of the school shooters used a ‘ghost gun’ manufactured in his basement. There is no technology to retrofit millions of guns to fire only by an authorized user. There is no practical way to seize every gun in America, nor to stop gun smuggling into the country. All those ideas are panaceas offered to cover the real problem: Liberals have forced society to lower its standards of acceptable behavior, have ‘defined deviancy downward,’ to the point we live in fear of feral youth among us. And the ultimate solution Liberals propose to save us? Defund the police.
The problem of gun crime in America is entirely the result of policies demanded by Liberals and none of the proposed solutions will end it. Time to return to the old ways, the tried-and-true solutions. And the first step is . . . stop listening to Liberals.
June 10th, 2022 at 9:34 am
I’d say it depends. Like most things, when it comes to making money they have incentive to get things right. If you look at the monetization of loot boxes in video games, for example, you’ll see solid results.
If you look at the vast majority “studies” published, I’d agree with the BS assessment. The subjects are nearly always young college students (and they’re hardly representative of the population at large), the studies are small, and they’re nearly always not replicable. And the current practice of “data mining” studies to get some results to publish, even if the study wasn’t designed to measure that, is almost an invitation to get invalid results. But hey, they got a publication out of it and that’s the biggest concern of professors!
And yes, psychology and psychiatry are horribly politicized right now. My leftist uncle is also a psychologist and even he is dismayed at the situation there. His example was pedophiles: they’re basically incurable according to all the data, but that’s not a result that’s politically acceptable to say.
June 10th, 2022 at 9:42 am
Yea, it’s usually the nurse who’s getting my vitals that ask me the questions. They’ve never asked me about gun ownership, which is surprising. That practice is tied into Allina.
And Emery, you’re so full of crap that your eyes are brown. We have far more mental illness in the US, if for no other reason than over prescribed drugs. A buddy of mine used to work in water treatment. The science related people in his company identified trace amounts of 98% of commonly prescribed and illegal drugs. If you’re drinking from a municipal water supply, that would explain your mental issues. The problem is, even the most effective purification method, reverse osmosis, will not remove all of those traces.
June 10th, 2022 at 9:43 am
Psychology and psychiatry are two different things, just like optometry and ophthalmology. Conflating the two does not further the argument of “Science” vs “Studies”.
June 10th, 2022 at 12:09 pm
Maybe there’s a reason that so many people use binge drinking, playing the lotto and overeating to support their mental health: because the effects are reliable. Because they don’t require a prescription. And because they’re available, right now.
June 10th, 2022 at 1:49 pm
rAT squeaked: “ Maybe there’s a reason that so many people use binge drinking, playing the lotto and overeating to support their mental health: because the effects are reliable. ”
Whatever keeps you sedated, rAT. It’s good.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:04 pm
nerdbert on June 10, 2022 at 9:34 am said:
I think that psychiatry & psychology are 90% BS
I’d say it depends. Like most things, when it comes to making money they have incentive to get things right. If you look at the monetization of loot boxes in video games, for example, you’ll see solid results.
I was simplifying for the sake of argument. The quantitative stuff that is done rigorously (and can be replicated) is good. But a lot of it is “gnostic knowledge.” I am talking about published research that doesn’t add to the corpus of knowledge.
If no physics or chemistry research had been published for 20 years, the world would be a different place. Not so with psychological research.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:19 pm
I was really spoiled by working in the hard sciences for thirty years (I am not a scientist, I did technical work for scientists). I once took a survey course in psychology and the lack of precise definitions and, well, a scientific outlook bothered me so much I talked to the prof about it. He told me that the nature of psychological research on a large scale meant that it was often impossible to design experiments that could be replicated.
I have my doubts, I think that much psychological research is poorly designed and could be more rigorous, but that is not what researchers are rewarded for.
Anyways, the prof told me that if psychological researchers had to produce research up to the standards of physics research, they would never get anything done, and that, it seems to me, is putting the cart ahead of the horse.
Bad data is often worse than no data at all if you take action on bad data. Look at the actions taken by Walz in May of 2020 when he believed that there would be 70,000 Minnesotans dead from covid by August 2020 unless he locked down . . . The truth is that in some fields “the best available science” is shit.
June 10th, 2022 at 8:37 pm
Should be “even if” and not “unless” Walz locked down.
June 11th, 2022 at 2:39 am
MP, anything dealing with animals is pretty sketchy as far as reliability and replicability. The interval of confidence is pretty bad, and that’s not all that surprising when you consider how different folks are. I can’t stand the taste of coffee, but getting between my wife and her morning coffee gets hazardous duty pay.
In physics, the gold standard is 5-sigma. In psychology and the softer sciences the goal is to get to the 95% confidence level, meaning that at best they hope for a 1/20 chance of not having invalid results. But these days, most studies are data mined, and meta studied to try and get *some* result out, and there are few experiments involving small groups of people where you can’t find some random result that passes your “confidence test.”
June 11th, 2022 at 9:22 am
I wonder, Nerdbert, how much psychological (and social) research has been reproduced to validate a claimed 95% confidence level? I don’t see how you can do a good regression analysis with research that focuses on observed or self-reported behavior or thoughts.
June 11th, 2022 at 9:54 pm
Your skepticism is well warranted, MP. They try to make arguments about the statistical significance of very small groups and, unfortunately, almost uniformly get it wrong. You can see that in the fact that not even 50% of the most influential studies can be replicated, and that figure goes well past 75% overall in recent studies.
Statistics is hard, and generating valid results harder still. “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.”
Like I said, I never trust computer simulations or psychological studies unless there is real, personal money behind it. Professors are motivated by publications, since that’s how their measured, and any published result is good for their careers. As such, bucking the conventional wisdom is an extremely perilous thing since peer review will generally block the paper. On the other hand, measuring how best to structure the payout/rewards of a mobile game, or the simulation of loading of a bridge both come with very strong monetary rewards for getting the answer right, not politically correct. Follow the money, my friend, follow the money if you want to see replicable results.
June 12th, 2022 at 9:04 am
Coincidentally, Ann Althouse this AM points a Scientific American blog post examining just how “sciencey” psychology is:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/is-psychology-a-e2809creale2809d-science-does-it-really-matter/
I see a lot of goal-post moving. The author seems to believe that psychology can legitimately be called a science because some of it is useful, but this just points back to psychology’s humanist orientation. It is true that some areas of study in psychology are scientifically rigorous, but you can use scientific techniques within any of the humanities. I can use a software package to analyze the number of gendered pronouns in Shakespeare’s plays, but that doesn’t make what I am doing a scientific endeavor, I am still studying Eng Lit, and that is a humanity, not a science.
June 12th, 2022 at 2:35 pm
A woman I know obtained her Doctor of Education degree, college professor now. I read her paper. She studied whether community colleges which have a strong study-abroad program have strong study-abroad program leaders and concluded there is a statistically significant correlation.
Whether it’s a good thing for community colleges to have study-abroad programs was assumed on the basis of earlier studies. Whether strong program leaders built strong programs or strong programs attracted strong leaders, was left for future study.
I’m not knocking the effort. Sending the survey cards, pestering for returns, tabulating, calculating, statistical analysis – I wouldn’t want to do the busy work even if I knew how to do the math. But I’m a lot less impressed by the details of her ‘doctorate’ than I may have been in the past, hearing about someone earning a doctorate. I’m not convinced her advanced the sum total of human knowledge in any worthwhile way. I wonder how many other prestigious degrees are like that?
I wonder how many of the people advocating gun control measures on the basis of “studies” are people with qualifications like hers, doing studies like hers, achieving results like hers?
June 12th, 2022 at 4:17 pm
The Rand corp. has reputation for doing good research.
Rand sez that Red Flag laws can significantly reduce suicide, not just by gun, but overall. No significant effect on mass shootings, not sure about other gun crimes.
Just as I predicted, the advocates of Red Flag laws are pushing positive results based on the number of Red Flag gun seizures accomplished, not a statistically significant reduction in mass shootings other gun crimes. Today I heard someone brag on the success of Florida’s Red Flag law because it had resulted in over 2,000 gun seizures. So the claim was what? 2,000 mass shootings had been prevented? 2,000 other gun crimes had been prevented?
The great thing about the Department of Future Crime is that it can never be shown to have failed, since the crime existed only in the imagination.
June 12th, 2022 at 4:30 pm
Exactly, MP. Applying the same rigorous logic, we could prevent 500 young Black men from being murdered by police, simply by requiring all cops to leave their guns at the station. 500 guns out of the hands of cops, 500 Black lives saved. How much easier can it be?
June 13th, 2022 at 10:02 am
JD: My father had completed his EBD (Everything but Dissertation) for his Doctorate of Education. He said he didn’t do the dissertation because he knew that one of the Profs that would have judged his dissertation was in disagreement with my father’s theory about education of the mentally disabled. The other reason was that he had hit the highest pay on the chutes and ladders structure of his union contract, and having the Ed.D. after his name wasn’t valuable to him.
But the first reason says a lot about the furtherance of the base of human knowledge, when you don’t advance an idea because those in power will punish you for it.
My father was a non-traditional educator. He started life as the infant child of a widow during the Depression. He started his own family (me!) as a Diesel mechanic, working at sawmills and road construction job sites for many years. My sister was mentally disabled, and that lead him to Special Education as a major when he returned to college, part-time. I went to his college graduation from Eastern Montana College as a Jr. High freshman. He eventually started teaching Diesel mechanics at a vo-tech, and obtained his Masters of Education from the U of MT. He then transitioned into high school teaching special ed, continued to study at the U of MT towards his doctorate.
Father’s Day is coming up, and I wax nostalgic. I look back at my own life, and fell that I am just a small shadow, compared to him.
But anyway, under the current system, the advancement of knowledge is repressed to that which is PC.
June 13th, 2022 at 10:03 am
^feel, not fell