Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking

I think you missed the point. Gun control might be a good idea, but not because it will reduce the likelihood of psychopathic spree killings.

Psychopathic spree killings are such a low-probability, extreme event that there's almost nothing you can do, at a public policy level, to influence them. Your monkey brain may protest that this simply cannot be (as mine does), but our monkey brains are wrong.

Instead we need to look for significant trends. Or consider that our actions might cause other harms more often, which is especially likely when our actions are driven by low-probability events. Basing public policy on such extreme events is not just stupid, it's immoral.

And yet, that's exactly the job of the media. The media works, by and large, by telling individual stories to provoke general sympathy or outrage. This is a good thing when that story is representative of a larger problem. What we have now is random phenomena driving larger political discussions.

It's state and local. But I think you underestimate the distinction between a normal fire and one set to deliberately murder. To get back to the current topic, one reason the death toll at Virginia Tech was so high was the shooter chained shut from the inside all three exits of the building. No one could escape and that gave the shooter an extra 5 minutes before the police could breach a door.

Then there are the cases where the building codes are not observed; Wikipedia even has a category "Fire disasters involving barricaded escape routes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_disasters_involvi...). Only one of these is listed as an arson attack, I know of one other (Happy Land), although both of these were code type problems. Hmmm, and according to Wikipedia, the Dupont Plaza Hotel arson, 2nd worst in US history at a minimum of 97 killed, locked emergency exits on a casino floor were a factor (wow, I'm impressed Wikipedia's article does not use the word union once...).

Still can't find a list of arson fires, so further analysis by me will have to wait, but I know plenty of smaller scale ones I've read about have involved the arsonists blocking the entrances, often by setting more than one fire.

Ignoring 99.8% of gun deaths until paragraph 12 is pretty much the most ridiculous form of burying the lede I've ever seen.

Yes he eventually talks about all these gun deaths and then he hand waves it all away, too much thinking:

"I’m not even going to try to answer those questions, because they are extremely complex."

Too much work, forget it. Man, if only scores of other countries had gone through something similar and we could draw on those experiences but ... thinking is HARD!

The scale on that graphic is a little misleading. The spacing on the "gun homicides per 100K citizens" compared to the "firearms per 100 citizens" makes it look like the US has twice an many deaths as the next lowest just like they have twice as many guns. I don't know who is represented by the dot at 2.25 "gun homicides per 100K citizens" but the statistical difference between 2.25 and 3 when compared to 100K is not much. While that same dot represents 10 "firearms per 100 citizens". THAT dot seems to have a horrific kill rate. The US has 9 times more "firearms per 100 citizens" yet less than 1 additional "gun homicides per 100K citizens". Who is that dot?

Edit: Not saying the scale is misleading on purpose... just that it is misleading.

We frequently see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearm homicides in the US is higher than that of other developed countries.

We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.

I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.

If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.

Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.

I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.

edit As an afterthought, burgeoning fabrication methods (i.e. 3-D printing) will radically change arguments about gun control. Bullets will be an easier choke-point for regulation.

Also, people need to take very seriously the author's observation that the relative infrequency of these events will make prevention efforts extremely difficult to evaluate. New policies will likely have a time-lag, but even if we wait patiently to evaluate them (which seems unlikely in this political climate), mass murders on the rate at which we see them in Europe could easily 'blow the curve.'