Month: February 2018

Against the Tyranny of Kindness

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I recently had an interesting political exchange–as have basically all of us, these days–in which I was called out for not being nice enough. At least, that’s how I interpreted it. My interlocutor suggested that my argument was deficient because I hadn’t started out by finding something we could agree on before launching my critique. A critique that was, just for the record, entirely civil and on-point. At no point did I get personal and there was no allegation that I had. The problem wasn’t that I had been rude, uncivil, or anything like that. The problem was that I hadn’t been nice enough.

Now, OK, it never hurts to be nice, right? Speaking as a purely practical matter, shouldn’t we always try to express our beliefs in as non-abrasive a way as possible? You get more flies with honey, and all that. So, what’s the harm in accepting as a new rule of debate the general principle that we should always find a point of common ground first and only then engage the issues directly. What kind of a person disagrees with this? Surely only a heartless and soulless person, and why would we want to listen to what someone like that has to say, anyway?

And that, my friends, is why I dislike the tyranny of kindness.

The problem with it is that it’s only a tiny jump from saying, “Why not be nice?” to then saying, “If you’re not nice, nothing you say matters.” And “nice” is an awfully subjective term. There is no logical reason why a general rule of thumb to look for common ground should lead to exiling some people from discussion for not following arbitrary rituals, but–given the incentives of political discourse–the outcome is inevitable.

I realize I’m swimming upstream here, so let me try a different tack and see if I can make some headway.

Requiring people to be nice enough in their debates is discriminatory against non-neurotypical people. The term “neurotypical” is one of those neologisms like “cissexual” that is invented to describe the category of people who didn’t need a description before because they’re just, well, normal baseline humans. A cissexual is someone who identifies as the gender that matches their birth sex. Neurotypical means “not displaying or characterized by autistic or other neurologically atypical patterns of thought or behavior.” So, people who aren’t on the autism spectrum are neurotypical.

Neurotpyical people have no problem conforming with this new minimum requirement to engage in public discourse. They are, by definition, able to conform with expected social conventions. It is easy and natural for them to both interpret ordinary social cues and conform their own behavior–including written communication–to standard expectations. A neurotypical can easily come across as nice with minimal effort. Someone who is not neurotypical, well, they might have a harder time. For them, the requirement to be “just be nice” is not actually something incidental. It’s something that requires an awful lot of conscious effort and attention, if it’s attainable at all.

So our seemingly benign call to emphasize niceness in discourse functions–whether we intended to or not–as a form of bigotry that excludes a certain class of people from discussion.

Which doesn’t sound very nice, does it?

I am not merely playing games here. This isn’t a theoretical problem, it’s a real one. Gender, as the saying goes, is performative. So is all human speech. And we’re not all equally good at it. Tying the validity of a person’s argument–the worth of their viewpoint–to their capability and/or willingness to perform well enough is not a benign requirement. It’s not a case that it might lead to unfair applications, it is intrinsically exclusionary and debilitating. Which is exactly why it’s so increasingly popular. Calling on people to be nice isn’t neutral. It’s a power-play. Which is why–in other contexts–minorities have long-rejected it as “tone policing”.

Look at that, I’m agreeing with an aspect of social justice ideology. Will wonders never cease?

I’ll be clear about what I’m saying here: refraining from personal attacks and incendiary language is a reasonable minimum standard for any discussion. You should be able to avoid meanness. Don’t insult people. Don’t troll. Don’t humiliate or mock people. These things we can expect, and should expect, because the toxicity ruins discourse.

But that’s it. That’s the extent of what it makes sense to require from people in a debate. The “thou shalt nots” are sufficient. There’s no reason–or excuse–to start adding “thou shalts” to the mix as well. Don’t expect people to proactively express their empathy. Don’t express them to follow rules like, “always start every disagreement by first finding common ground.” Don’t get me wrong, these things can be great practices. I’m not saying anyone shouldn’t do them. They can be very powerful, practically speaking, and certainly can make debate more pleasant.

I’m just saying that they shouldn’t be transmuted from “nice-to-haves” into “minimum requirements” because when we do that we engage in the tyranny of kindness. We insinuate prejudice and bigotry into our discussions, and we make it inevitable for perverse incentives to lead to defining “nice” in such a way that a person cannot disagree without violating the norm. This is already commonplace. To have a different opinion on certain hot-button social issues–abortion, sexuality, transgenderism, gun-rights, etc.–is defined as being not-nice. After all, the best way to win a debate is to bar your opponent for showing up, and that’s what happens as soon as we start imposing any kind of ritualistic performance requirements.

I try very, very hard to be civil. I also try to be emapthic although, for me, that’s not easy. It does require a lot of effort. I have worked deliberately and conscientiously for many, many years to come across better in online communication (political or not) and I’m still a work in progress. I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me as calling for worse behavior online. We’ve got enough toxicity.

I’m just calling for moderation. Expect your opponents to not be abusive.

But don’t expect–or attempt to require–that they validate you, either.

Moving the Conversation Forward on Common Sense Gun Reform

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While most Americans support the Second Amendment, and support the rights of hunters and homeowners to own rifles or handguns to defend themselves or bag deer, these same Americans also support restrictions on certain specific guns that are too deadly to be in the hands of civilians, because they lead too-readily to slaughter.

While certain gun-rights advocates take this to be a call to “ban all guns,” it’s really not. It’s only about particular guns, and the distinction is common sense.  It’s so simple I can explain it in pictures.

This is a picture of the rifle used in the 2011 Norway massacre where some 77 were slaughtered.

This gun is fully semi-automatic. While this is not an AR-15, it is based on an AR-15, and fires the same deadly ammunition at the same rate of fire used at both the Parkland shooting and the Las Vegas massacre. It has a detachable magazine that can hold up to 20 rounds and be readily changed. With an attachment like a bump stock, this gun can be altered to fire at machine-gun speeds.

Here is a picture of another rifle.

This gun is dubbed a “ranch gun,” intended for use by hunters and ranchers for life in the American West. It fires a moderate round, the Remington .223, which many believe to be a “varmint round” — that is, a bullet that is suited more to shooting coyotes than to hunting deer. The bullet caliber is nothing compared to more deadly ammunition intended to bring down elk or bears, and some states ban the use of this caliber for deer hunting, since it doesn’t always kill a deer immediately. And unlike an assault rifle, the ranch gun will not fire automatically.

It’s common sense that no one needs to own the first gun, which is intended only to kill, while the second gun has a legitimate use for ranchers. While some individuals may be calling for a blanket ban, most Americans wanting a reform of gun laws still believe in the right to own a firearm like the ranch gun to hunt or defend your property.  Most Americans want sensible gun control laws, that will still allow you to own the ranch gun, but not the deadly weapon used in mass shootings.

But It’s Not So Simple

This is the thing, though, about common sense gun reform: The two weapons shown above are the same gun. They are both the Ruger Mini-14.

Similar to automobiles, which can come in coup, hatchback, or sedan styles, guns can also come in different styles. What I just showed you are two different styles of the same gun: tactical and ranch. Those two guns have the same rate of fire (semi-automatic), fire the same caliber bullet (.223R), they both have detachable magazines that can hold up to 20 rounds. Neither of the guns is capable of automatic fire.

Further, the Ruger Mini-14 uses the exact same caliber bullet as the AR-15 and has the exact same rate of fire as the AR-15. Neither the Ruger Mini-14 nor the AR-15 is capable of automatic fire.

Aside from details of appearance and preference, there is no functional difference between the ranch gun I showed you and an AR-15. They are equally deadly as weapons.

This is where we see a problem with “common sense” gun reform. While I agree it seems obvious which gun to ban, that is a misperception formed from a lack of knowledge. The public is largely misinformed on guns, and it is crucial we clarify what we mean.

The Terms of the Conversation Are Muddled

There is a vocal movement of people calling to ban assault rifles. You hear about it very often in the news. FedEx just released a statement calling for ban on assault rifles, as did Dick’s Sporting Goods.  And it would seem common sense, that civilians do not need assault rifles for hunting.

Common sense gun-reform proponents will then be happy to know that assault rifles are already illegal for civilian use in the United States. Only certain professions are authorized to own assault rifles, and they may only own registered assault rifles manufactured before the ban went into effect.

You may further be stunned to learn that the NRA supported the ban on civilian ownership of assault rifles.

But now you’re wondering: if assault rifles are already illegal, then why is there a vocal movement to have them banned? And if assault rifles are already illegal, then how are these killers able to get their hands on AR-15s?

As to the second question, the answer is easy: it’s because an AR-15 is not an assault rifle.

I know, I know: who cares the terminology, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter what it’s called, you don’t need to own it. But it does matter. It matters because these words have definitions, and we can’t have a conversation about policy if we’re not going to use the policy-defined words to talk about it. It leads to confusion.

The word “assault rifle” already has a definition. An assault rifle is a rifle capable of selective fire between automatic and semi-automatic fire, as defined by the ATF.  Assault rifles (and all automatic weapons) are illegal in the US for general civilian use. An AR-15 is incapable of automatic fire, and so is not an assault rifle, and therefore not included under the ban on assault rifles.

The difference between firing rate is a common source of confusion, so let me explain: automatic firing means that the gun will continue to chamber and fire bullets for as long as the trigger is held down; semi-automatic firing means that the action of releasing the trigger causes a new bullet to be chambered. This is an important distinction. A semi-automatic rifle like the AR-15 or the Mini-14 can only fire one bullet with one pull of the trigger.

It’s important to remember this difference in firing rate, because it matters to policy decisions. For instance, because it is already illegal to own one kind of gun, and perfectly legal to own the other. If you talk about banning assault rifles, someone might think you mean to ban guns capable of automatic fire; someone else might think that guns like the AR-15 are capable of automatic fire. It leads to confusion on what we’re even talking about, and makes people claiming to be following “common sense” appear to not actually understand the issue at hand.

Assault rifles are already illegal, an AR-15 is not an assault rifle, because an AR-15 is not capable of automatic fire.

As to the first question, why the move to ban a category of weapon that is already banned… I think the answer is a lack of understanding.

If You’re Not Familiar With Guns, You Have a Bad Intuition About Guns

There is currently a proposed bill that would criminalize all semi-automatic rifles. When Marco Rubio, at the CNN Town Hall, warned about just this, he was met with defiant applause; as Trevor Noah of the Daily Show put it, that’s what we want to do; we want to outlaw all semi-automatic rifles.

Except think back to the ranch gun from earlier. You probably thought it was common sense not to ban it. And you probably didn’t think of it as a semi-automatic rifle.

The problem is that people are guided by their intuitions on this issue, and those intuitions are formed by a mix of Hollywood images and national news cycle that are at best misinformed, or at worst actively disinterested in accuracy in favor of sensationalism and theatre. In such media, words like “automatic”, “semi-automatic”, “assault rifle”, and “machine gun” get thrown around with reckless abandon, seeming to confuse them all in discussing guns like the AR-15.  We usually see the AR-15 is characterized as some sort of pinnacle of scariness, such as in the recent CNN investigation into them that kept trying to hype up their terror-factor. We’re told that the AR-15 is a toned-down machine gun with superior firepower and devastating ammunition.

I think many people calling for common sense gun reform believe what they hear about the AR-15, and don’t know of any other referent in the discussion of guns, calibers, and firing rate. If the AR-15 is the only semi-automatic weapon you’ve ever heard of, then you probably associate semi-automatic rifles with massacres; less so with ranchers shooting coyotes.

The fact of the situation is that semi-automatic rifles make up one of the most popular classes of hunting rifles (by some estimates more than 20% of all privately-owned guns), and make a larger proportion of gun sales each year. As it turns out, hunters (like video gamers) prefer not having to reload after every shot.

But the only difference between a semi-automatic rifle used for hunting and the tactical gun we need to ban, is the way it looks. There is no meaningful legal category that distinguishes them.

If you ban semi-automatic rifles, you will be banning the Ruger Mini-14 ranch gun. You’ll get the tactical Ruger Mini-14 and the AR-15, but you’ll also get the gun that shoots coyotes and may or may not be able to bag a deer.

So when someone tells you that there is no way to ban the AR-15 without banning all semi-automatic rifles, you, the advocate for common sense gun laws, should be concerned. Most Americans would feel that a rancher has a right to a gun that can defend his property from predators. It’s common sense. If you really feel he has a right to it, then you should oppose laws that infringe that right. And a ban on semi-automatic rifles would do just that.

The point of this has been to try to clarify the conversation, because so much misinformation exists out there. I get people calling for common sense gun reform. One school shooting is too many, and at first glance there is an obvious way to draw the line about weapons. AR-15s are deadly; but so are all guns, including the hunting and defense guns that most Americans think people should be allowed to own.

The point of this is not that stricter gun control is unnecessary. That is a conversation worth having. The point is to make sure we’re being clear what we mean when we say “ban assault rifles” or “common sense gun control.”

To summarize:

Assault rifles are rifles capable of switching between semi- and fully-automatic firing. They are already banned. Any weapon capable of automatic fire is illegal for general civilian use. Ordinary civilians cannot purchase an assault rifle, or an automatic rifle. Modifying or building any weapon to be capable of automatic fire is strictly illegal.

AR-15s are not assault rifles. (The “AR” is for “Armalite Rifle“) They are not capable of automatic fire. They are semi-automatic, which means they fire one bullet for each pull of the trigger. The trigger must be released before a new bullet will load. They fire a Remington .223, which is not a particularly deadly round compared to other ammunition in other rifles. (Update: as a visual illustration of this point about caliber, here is slow-motion video of a ballistics test of an AR-15 vs. a .30-06 hunting round; the AR-15 impact is shown first from two angles, and then the impact from the hunting round)

An AR-15 definitely looks intimidating, but that’s only a style. An AR-15 made with gray metal and a wooden stock would look like a normal rifle, and still be just as deadly. The way a gun looks doesn’t determine how deadly it is; that is primarily a combination of accuracy, rate of fire, and bullet caliber.

Semi-automatic rifles are very popular with hunters, and are available in styles that look more “common sense.” They make up a very large, if not the largest, class of rifles used in hunting. When we’re talking about banning semi-automatic rifles, we’re talking about removing staid-looking hunting rifles from the hands of hunters; we’re talking about going against what we earlier thought was common sense.

There is no way to ban the AR-15 and not ban the ranch gun, because there is no meaningful difference between them. Enacting a kind of “common sense” law that bans the AR-15 and the Mini-14 tactical rifle, but not the Mini-14 ranch gun, would not solve any problems; the next shooter would use the equivalent Mini-14 ranch gun. A ban distinguishing guns by their style would be security theatre; you might feel something was done, but no one is any safer for it.

With all of that in mind, hopefully we can continue having this conversation more intelligently, with a better understanding of the terms, and what exactly it is we’re talking about banning

Jenga and the Meaning of Life

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This comic from Existential Comics gave me a good laugh this morning:


As renoun philosopher Al Davis said, the meaning life is to just win, baby.

It also reminded me of how much I like Camus. I believe he’s the most authentic philosopher of his time period. And he asks a fundamental question: Why do I even bother going on living? What in my set of beliefs makes life, with all its suffering and uncertainty, few of days and full of trouble, worth living?

Image result for job suffering
I wouldn’t turn to Job’s friends for advice
Quick caveat, please don’t go out and kill yourself, but it’s a question we must face squarely and answer. And I believe whatever we answer will naturally orient us towards, as Jordan Peterson would put it, the highest possible good we can conceive. It’s kinda fun to see what your first, unscripted answer is. I said to myself, “Because the Lord has commanded I live on this earth and do good with the time I have here.”
 

Well how do I do good? I would answer that I become the kind of person who knows the right thing to do in any given situation. How I do become that kind of person? I’m not entirely sure, but since excellence is a habit, I’ll take some lines from virtue ethics and Jordan Peterson. I can start by telling the whole truth (which I don’t always do), being diligent in my tasks at home and at work (I’m often a ‘close enough’ kind of person), taking care of my body (which I just injured..oops), etc. And now here we are on the adventure of life, because I answered the rather macabre question of why I don’t wake up and just kill myself. Victory!

Image result for jordan peterson lobster

Follow up on liberal media bias.

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A media bias fact checker found that 12 out of 15 major US news outlets fell on the left side of the spectrum, while the other 3 fell on the right.

A little over a year ago I wrote a post looking at some of the evidence for subtle but pervasive liberal bias in media. In that post I referenced a study from Public Opinion Quarterly that found that 13 out of 15 major US news outlets produced more left-leaning articles than right-leaning ones.

Today, out of curiosity, I looked up each of those 15 sources on MediaBiasFactCheck.com. Here is there methodology for rating bias. Of the 15 sources, 12 were biased left (7 Left-Center bias, 3 Left bias, 2 Least Biased, slightly Left) and 3 were biased right (1 Right-Center bias, 2 Right bias). Here is how each source rated:

  1. BBC News – Left-Center bias.
  2. Breitbart News Network – Right bias.
  3. Chicago Tribune – Left-Center bias.
  4. CNN News – Left bias.
  5. Daily Kos – Left bias.
  6. Fox News – Right bias.
  7. Huffington Post – Left bias.
  8. Los Angeles Times – Left-Center bias.
  9. NBC News – Left-Center bias.
  10. New York Times – Left-Center bias.
  11. Reuters – Least biased (ranked minimally Left biased).
  12. USA Today – Least biased (ranked minimally Left biased).
  13. Wall Street Journal – Right-Center bias.
  14. The Washington Post – Left-Center bias.
  15. Yahoo News – Left-Center bias.

Each page in the links above includes a spectrum showing where the given source falls from left to right. If you juxtapose all of the spectra, you get the spectrum above (logos added).

Link collection: America’s Gun Debate

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In the last week or two I’ve read (or at least skimmed) a lot of interesting pieces on guns, gun crime, gun control, etc. Below are most of the links, listed in order of their publication date. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse everything in each link (obviously, since some of them are directly contradicting each other), but they gave me a lot to think about, so I’m including them here if anyone else wants to read more.

2013:
Analysis of Recent Mass Shootings – National Criminal Justice Reference Service, 2013; Study found that up to 77% of mass shootings did not involve an assault weapon or even a high capacity weapon.
Reducing Gun Violence in America – Center for Gun Policy and Research, 2013; This link is to an entire book. I read the forward, in which the authors make the following suggestions:

  1. Require background checks for all gun sales, including private sales at gun shows and online,
  2. Make gun trafficking a federal crime,
  3. Limit the availability of military-style weapons and of high-capacity magazines with more than 10 rounds,
  4. Have all federal agencies to submit their relevant data to the national gun background check database,
  5. Have the Justice Department to make a priority of prosecuting convicted criminals who provide false personal information during gun purchase background checks,
  6. Make a recess appointment to get someone to head the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and
  7. Stop supporting the Tiahrt order, which keeps the public in the dark about who gun traffickers are and how they operate.

Guns and School Safety Survey Results – School Improvement Network, January 23, 2013; a little over 1 in 8 educators (13.5%) both own a firearm and would bring it to school if they were allowed to.
Guns In Schools: Firearms Already Allowed In 18 States With Few Restrictions – Huffington Post, March 17, 2013
Police Gun Control Survey: Are legally-armed citizens the best solution to gun violence? – PoliceOne.com, April 8, 2013;

  • 91% of LEOs didn’t believe an assault weapons ban would help,
  • 91% supported conceal and carry permits for civilians,
  • 86% believed casualties would be reduced at recent mass shootings if armed civilians had been present, and
  • 81% were in favor of arming teachers and school administrators who had been properly trained.

Colorado’s school shooting — over in 80 seconds – CNN, December 15, 2013; An armed Student Resources Officer responded immediately to a school shooter.

2015:
Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe – Crime Prevention Research Center, June 23, 2015
Here’s where you’re most likely to own a gun – Business Insider, July 3, 2015; Alaska has the highest percentage of gun ownership; Delaware has the lowest.

2016:
13 Charts Put America’s Gun Violence in Perspective – Independent Journal Review, January 8, 2016
Across the country, school districts are quietly arming teachers for the next shooting – The Washington Post, April 14, 2016
The Media Keeps Misfiring When It Writes About Guns – Slate, June 26, 2016
Texas school warns: Our teachers ‘may be armed and will use whatever force is necessary’ to protect students – The Washington Post, September 22, 2016
Firearms on College Campuses: Research Evidence and Policy Implications – Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, October 15, 2016; Table 1 summarizes State Campus Carry laws
What Conservatives Get Right About Guns – GQ, October 28, 2016

2017:
America’s Complex Relationship With Guns – Pew Research Center, June 22, 2017
Illinois school where teacher took down gunman recently trained for active shooters – CBS, September 22, 2017; An unarmed teacher stopped a gunman.
How to Reduce Mass Shooting Deaths? Experts Rank Gun Laws – New York Times, October 5, 2017; Experts ranked assault weapons bans as slightly more effective than a ban on all semiautomatic guns.
6 Reasons Your Right-Wing Friend Isn’t Coming To Your Side On Gun Control – The Federalist, October 6, 2017
Supporters of stricter gun laws are less likely to contact elected officials – Pew Research Center, October 12, 2017

2018:
Background Checks Are Not the Answer to Gun Violence – New York Times, February 12, 2018
US Mass Shootings, 1982-2018: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation – Mother Jones, February 14, 2018
Why The AR-15 Is America’s Rifle – NPR, February 15, 2018
“Fuck you, I like guns.” – AgingMillennialEngineer.com, February 15, 2018
An ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban Won’t Stop Mass Shootings – Reason, February 15, 2018
How white nationalists fooled the media about Florida shooter – Politico, February 16, 2018
Disarming ‘Individuals With Mental Illness’ Would Affect a Quarter of the Population – Reason, February 16, 2018
Texas Teachers Can Pack Heat; Florida Lawmakers Pushing For Options – WFMY News, February 17, 2018
Gun Rights Expand Even as Mass Shootings Spur Calls for Stricter Laws – Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2018
A Cure for Mass Shootings Doesn’t Exist – Reason, February 18, 2018; The author explains why he doesn’t believe an assault weapons ban, background checks for private sales, and broadening the exclusion for mental health problems would curtail mass shootings.
Real Solutions for Curtailing Gun Violence – The Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2018; The author suggests dramatically increasing penalties for stealing a firearm, enforcing laws against straw purchases of handguns, and finding practical, legal ways of stoppping people with mentall illness from purchasing firearms.
Mass Shooting Survivors Come Out Against Gun Control Too – The Jack News, February 22, 2018
In 2017, Americans narrowly opposed allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns – Pew Research Center, February 23, 2018
Poll: Support for stricter gun laws rises; divisions on arming teachers – CBS, February 23, 2018
The case against arming teachers – Vox, February 23, 2018
Sources: Coral Springs police upset at some Broward deputies for not entering school – CNN, February 24, 2018
What Critics Don’t Understand About Gun Culture – The Atlantic, February 27, 2018

Click on the image to go to the Pew Research Center’s report.

How difficult would it be to arm teachers?

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Recently a friend of mine shared this post in which Jim Wright asks a few “basic questions” about how we would arm teachers. Wright suggests it would be essentially impossible to properly train teachers to respond to school shootings, saying even our soldiers aren’t trained to handle such a situation. He asks who will pay for the training, who the teachers will answer to, which weapons will be allowed, what insurance the school will acquire, and whether a teacher will be held liable for mistakenly shooting an innocent bystander or for failing to stop an active shooter. He claims “the hole is bottomless,” concluding:

I’m asking BASIC questions about this idea of arming up teachers and putting amateurs with guns in schools. Questions that any competent gun operator should ask. You want to put more guns, carried by amateurs, into a building packed full of children. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here.

Wright is reflecting the skepticism and indignance of many people. In particular some of my friends who are teachers have made posts clearly stating they do not want to carry weapons to school and are dismayed by the thought. More than one of them have shared this video in response.

Click the image to see the public video on Facebook.

Several go beyond saying they personally don’t want to carry weapons to asserting no one else should have firearms on school property either, often making demands along the lines “Don’t bring more guns into my school.”

Two quick notes on that last part:

  1. Assuming any increase in quantity of guns means an increase in danger seems simplistic to me. More guns can increase or decrease danger depending on who is carrying them and why. A gun in the hands of a kid hoping to kill as many people as possible is not equivalent to a gun in the hands of a trained Student Resources Officer or conceal carry permit holder hoping to keep as many people alive as possible.
  2. In this context, the phrase “my school” is off-putting. Schools don’t belong only to the teachers working in them; they also belong to the children attending and the parents of those children, especially when we are discussing the best ways to protect our children. I understand there are many parents who do not want armed school staff. And there are many parents who do, like me. My point here is not that the answer is simple, obvious, or unified; my point is teachers don’t have the only say in this debate.

Anyway, the objections to arming teachers seem to make several assumptions:

    1. We don’t have the resources to arm teachers.
    2. The logistics of arming teachers are too difficult to disentangle.
    3. Teachers don’t want to be armed.
    4. Armed teachers would make schools less safe, not more safe.

In terms of the law, as of May 2016, there were 17 states that banned conceal carry guns on college campuses; 1 state (Tennessee) banned students and the public from carryng guns on campus but allowed faculty members to do so; 8 states allowed conceal carry guns; and the remaining 24 states left the decision to the school. Of course this information is for only college campuses, not K-12 schools.

Given the option, many school districts already allow their teachers to be armed. This fact alone puts the first three assumptions to rest. Apparently resources, logistics, and desire were not dealbreakers in arranging to have armed school employees on campus. Here is an excerpt from a 2016 Washington Post article:

The Kingsburg Joint Union High School District in Kingsburg, Ca., is the latest district to pass such a measure. At a school board meeting on Monday, the Fresno Bee reported, members unanimously approved a policy that allows district employees to carry a concealed firearm within school bounds.

The employees will be selected by the superintendent, and will have to complete a training and evaluation process. The new policy was made effective immediately.

While proposals to arm teachers have been familiar refrains in Texas and Indiana, the passing of such a mandate on the West Coast signals that the strategy is being considered elsewhere in the country.

In fact, the Folsom Cordova Unified School District covering the cities of Folsom, Rancho Cordova and Mather, Calif., has allowed employees to bring guns to school since 2010, but only revealed the policy to parents last month.

Some people against the idea of arming teachers say it will create an intimidating environment for kids, but note Folsom Cordova’s school district allowed it for 5-6 years before anyone even knew about it. Arming teachers had so little impact on the daily school environment people couldn’t even tell it had happened.

In the wake of the most recent shooting, more school boards are following suit, voting unanimously to allow trained employees to carry concealed weapons.

People opposed to arming teachers seem to envision a bureaucratic and expensive process that results in an intimidating environment where teachers nervously walk the hallways with rifles over their shoulders. The reality is that arming teachers has so far consisted of allowing those who want to be armed to first get training and then either carry concealed weapons or keep weapons locked in safes. From what I can tell, the individuals who want to be armed cover the costs of the training, permit, and firearm themselves. Again, the school’s resources, logistics, and the teacher’s desire don’t seem to be issues.

To my mind, the only real issue is the question of whether allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons will overall increase or decrease student and staff safety. Despite how horrifying school shootings are, they are also exceedingly rare. And while I have no specific data on this, I suspect that even if firearms were permitted on all schools across the country, relatively few teachers and other school staff would choose to carry them. The odds seem very low of a school shooting happening in such a way that an armed staff member would even be present to react. Meanwhile, having legal guns on campus opens the door to accidental injuries. Some of my friends against armed school staff have posted stories about teachers forgetting their firearm or having it stolen while on school property. There’s a cost-benefit question here: if arming teachers increases the chances of accidentally injuring or even killing students but also increases the chances of saving lives during school shootings, how do we quantify those two factors and weigh them against each other?

I know of no hard data here. We do know that in our country, in general, guns are used more often in accidental deaths than in justifiable homicide. However we aren’t just considering accidental deaths but also accidental injuries, and we aren’t just considering justifiable homicide but also self-defense that involves injuring but not killing the shooter or even not firing the gun at all but brandishing it and getting the shooter to stand down. Additionally the overall statistics for the whole country include people who have received no training in the safe use and storage of firearms, whereas conceal and carry permits typically require training, and individual school districts could require further training as needed. Apparently there are quite a few school districts that have allowed armed staff for years, and I have not been able to find any stories of accidental deaths or even injuries from a teacher’s gun on school property.

Meanwhile, it is intuitive to me that if a teacher were to find herself in the position where there is a mass shooter attacking her or her students, both she and her students would have a greater chance of survival if she had a gun than if she did not. When Sandy Hook happened, I cried as I read in absolute horror about Lauren Rousseau and her first graders, completely trapped and defenseless. Even at the time I wondered if it would have been different if she had had a gun.

A note here: I don’t want the world we live in, the society we live in, to require first grade teachers to need guns. I don’t want there to be any guns on any school property at all. I don’t want children to have to do active shooter drills, or teachers to have to be trained to recognize gun shots, or parents to drop their kids off and worry if they will be safe each day. It’s awful. It’s infuriating and heartbreaking, and sometimes I can hardly stand to think about it.

But I also don’t think we have a way to 100% ensure that deranged or evil people will not be able to show up and try to kill as many unarmed teachers and children as possible. In fact, given our country’s unique relationship with guns, and our relatively unique 2nd amendment, I think preventing such shootings is ridiculously difficult. I still think we should try, but I don’t think our efforts to stem the death toll should be limited only to preventing shooters from showing up in the first place. I think we should also have efforts to address what innocent people can do if a shooter does show up.

As I write this post, a news story is breaking suggesting that not only did the School Resources Officer fail to engage Nicholas Cruz, but so did three additional deputies present during the shooting. All four officers remained outside the school while Cruz shot unarmed teachers and students. Some opponents to arming teachers point out that if even trained officers struggle to engage a mass shooter, how can we expect teachers to be able to handle it? But this question presumes that teachers get any choice; the reality is that if the shooter is already in the school and breaking into the classroom, the teacher will have to face the shooter anyway. And I can’t help but wonder: if police won’t engage the shooter, how can we disarm teachers and tell them to wait for the police?

 

Does Family Structure Really Matter When It Comes to Poverty?

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Not according to a recent op-ed in The New York Times. The authors–sociologists all–argue based on findings from their new study

that reducing single motherhood would not substantially reduce poverty. Single-mother families are a surprisingly small share of our population. Among households headed by working-age adults, 8.8 percent of people lived in single-mother households in 2013 — the most recent year we were able to analyze. The share of people in single-mother households actually declined from 10.5 percent in 1980 and has increased only modestly since 18=970, when it was 7.4 percent. True, compared with other rich democracies, America does have a relatively high portion of families headed by single mothers. Nevertheless, we still fall below Ireland and Britain and are quite similar to Australia and Iceland.

Because fewer people are in single-mother families than you’d think, even large reductions in single motherhood would not substantially reduce poverty. 

However, sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox takes issue with the way the NYT piece presents the evidence. He explains,

Nobody…is claiming that reducing the number of single-mother households will lead to lower poverty rates among elderly or childless men and women. The concern among poverty scholars has always been that single motherhood leads to higher rates of child poverty. And there is no denying the close connection between single parenthood and child poverty in America.

To begin with, children living in single-mother families are about five times as likely to be poor, compared with children living in married, two-parent families. This is clear in a recent analysis of trends in the official poverty rate from our colleague Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institution.

Moreover, research done by one of us, Isabel Sawhill, indicates that if the share of children in single-parent families had remained steady at the 1970 level, then the current child-poverty rate would be cut by about one-fifth, even after adjusting for the fact that single mother have different characteristics from married mothers. In other words, dramatic increases in single parenthood — from about 12 percent of children in 1970 to about 27 percent now — more recently have played an important role in fueling child-poverty rates.

Single parenthood is not the factor driving child poverty in America, but it isa factor.

What about Europe?

Well, it turns out that even in Europe children are more likely to be poor if they are living in a family headed by a single parent. Research done by social scientists Janet Gornick and Markus Jäntti indicates that children being raised by a single parent are about three times as likely to be living in a poor family as children being raised by two parents, even after accounting for generous welfare policies in Europe.

In fact, this is true even in Scandinavia. Relative to children in two-parent families, children in single-mother homes are about three times as likely to be poor in Denmark and Sweden, more than four times as likely to be poor in Norway, and nearly five times as likely to be poor in Finland, after taking into account their welfare policies.

Now, it’s true that the levels of child poverty in Scandinavia are markedly lower than those in the United States — indeed, about 75 percent lower because of their social policies. And it’s also true that the unique poverty risk associated with single parenthood generally goes away when you control for other factors, such as age, education, and employment, as Brady and his colleagues have done. What that misses is that mother-headed families are more likely to be formed as the result of an unplanned birth outside of marriage or a committed relationship, and that these unexpected births tend to occur at young ages, to interrupt a young woman’s education, and to make it less likely that she will ever marry or form a stable partnership and have the second income that such a partnership makes possible.

In other words, even today, one reason that two parents are generally better than one parent, economically speaking, is that having two parents in the home dramatically increases the odds not only that at least one parent is working full-time but also that there are two parents working on behalf of the children. And this is true even in Europe.

What’s more,

The social science tells us that children raised by single parents are significantly more likely to have children young, to drop out of high school, and to work less as young adults. Not surprisingly, the children of single-parent families are more likely to end up poor as young adults.

…Indeed, new research from economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine indicates that young adults are at least ten percentage points less likely to be poor at age 25 if they were born to married parents, as opposed to an unmarried mother. These effects are especially strong for children born to mothers in the middle of the educational and age distribution — that is, for “children of mothers with high school degrees and mothers in their early/mid-20s.” In other words, in America at least, the long arm of single parenthood seems to extend into adulthood, increasing the likelihood that children of single parents will be poor as adults, compared with adults who were raised in intact, two-parent families.

Wilcox concludes, “It’s useful to point out that family structure is not destiny. But the evidence suggests it remains important and shouldn’t be dismissed as one important factor affecting children in particular.”

 

Does Gender Egalitarianism Reduce the STEM Field Gender Gap?

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Apparently not, according to a new study. Similar to findings in cross-country studies regarding gender differences in psychological traits, this study finds,

that, paradoxically, countries with lower levels of gender equality had relatively more women among STEM graduates than did more gender-equal countries. This is a paradox, because gender-equal countries are those that give girls and women more educational and empowerment opportunities and that generally promote girls’ and women’s engagement in STEM fields (e.g., Williams & Ceci, 2015).

In our explanation of this paradox, we focused on decisions that individual students may make and decisions and attitudes that are likely influenced by broader socioeconomic considerations. On the basis of expectancy-value theory (Eccles, 1983; Wang & Degol, 2013), we reasoned that students should at least, in part, base educational decisions on their academic strengths. Independently of absolute levels of performance, boys on average had personal academic strengths in science and mathematics, and girls had strengths in reading comprehension. Thus, even when girls’ absolute science scores were higher than those of boys, as in Finland, boys were often better in science relative to their overall academic average. Similarly, girls might have scored higher than boys in science, but they were often even better in reading. Critically, the magnitude of these sex differences in personal academic strengths and weaknesses was strongly related to national gender equality, with larger differences in more gender-equal nations. These intraindividual differences in turn may contribute, for instance, to parental beliefs that boys are better at science and mathematics than girls (Eccles & Jacobs, 1986; Gunderson, Ramirez, Levine, & Beilock, 2012). 

We also found that boys often expressed higher self-efficacy, more joy in science, and a broader interest in science than did girls. These differences were also larger in more gender-equal countries and were related to the students’ personal academic strength.

…We propose that when boys are relatively better in science and mathematics while girls are relatively better at reading than other academic areas, there is the potential for substantive sex differences to emerge in STEM-related educational pathways. The differences are expected on the basis of expectancy-value theory and are consistent with prior research (Eccles, 1983; Wang & Degol, 2013). The differences emerge from a seemingly rational choice to pursue academic paths that are a personal strength, which also seems to be common academic advice given to students, at least in the United Kingdom (e.g., Gardner, 2016; Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, 2015).

The greater realization of these potential sex differences in gender-equal nations is the opposite of what some scholars might expect intuitively, but it is consistent with findings for some other cognitive and social sex differences (e.g., Lippa, Collaer, & Peters, 2010; Pinker, 2008; Schmitt, 2015). One possibility is that the liberal mores in these cultures, combined with smaller financial costs of foregoing a STEM path…amplify the influence of intraindividual academic strengths. The result would be the differentiation of the academic foci of girls and boys during secondary education and later in college, and across time, increasing sex differences in science as an academic strength and in graduation with STEM degrees (pgs. 10-11).

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Why Are We Addicted to Panic?

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Photo by Charles Knowles.

Four days ago The Independent (an online UK magazine) ran this story: Bulletproof backpacks for children reflect a new reality in America. The article, and plenty like it, are leading to dramatic Facebook posts from or about teachers about how they help their high school students deal with the new reality that they might be gunned down in their schools at any time. Parents are afraid, kids are afraid, teachers are afraid, everyone seems to be afraid.

But why?

And no, I’m being earnest here. Why?

If there’s one topic that’s been prominent in media over the past few years, it’s been human irrationality. For a while there, “cognitive bias” threatened to become almost as much of a buzzword as “machine learning” has become, and it seemed like Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases was getting a new entry every day. Everyone in any academic discipline even tangentially related to how humans evaluate risk–evolutionary psychology, economics, finance, etc. etc.–had a new book or a new study that showed how bad humans are at evaluating risk.

Some of the most prominent cognitive biases studied in experiments and written about in the popular press include the availability heuristic and the recency effect. So we know–or at least we should know–that in the immediate wake of a horrific school shooting our cognitive biases are going to go into overdrive to exaggerate the threat. This isn’t unique to school shootings. We do the same thing with all kinds of dramatic/traumatic events, especially terrorism. More Americans died because of the shift from flying to driving in the wake of 9/11 than died in the attack themselves. The fear of terrorism was quite literally more deadly than actual terrorism.

This over-reaction to the threat of terrorism has had horrific consequences. Some have been felt here in the United States, including the erosion of civil liberties and a lamentably paranoid tinge to any discussion of immigration, but for the most part we (ordinary Americans) have been free to go about our lives because we have outsourced the cost of our fear-driven policies. We don’t pay the price. The small minority of Americans who volunteer to serve in the armed forces pay the price–including physical and mental trauma that no amount of yellow ribbons at home can compensate for–along with children killed in drone strikes, collateral damage from American interventionism, and desperate refugees who were barred a safe escape.

Now, in the wake of another awful school shooting, we’re witnessing again America’s masochistic addiction to panic and fear.

If you read an article like the one from The Independent or this one from The Cut or any of the thousands of emotional Facebook posts about how teachers and students shouldn’t have to fear for their lives just because they’re going to school, then you’d think we were suffering some kind of massive tidal wave of school shootings.

But what’s actually going on?

Enter Business Insider with their article: How likely is gun violence to kill the average American? The odds may surprise you. The centerpiece of the article is this chart, which compares lifetime odds (for Americans) of dying from various causes:

Right off the bat, the odds of dying in a school shootings are significantly lower than the kinds of deaths that we Americans don’t fear: car accidents, drowning, choking are all much more likely to end your life than a mass shooting. What’s even more interesting, to me, is that you are apparently more likely to die because a police officer killed you than because a mass shooter killed you.

However, a major problem with the Business Insider numbers is that they aren’t talking about school shootings, they’re talking about “mass shootings” with the definition of “any event where four or more victims were injured (regardless of death)”.

I went to Wikipedia and created two lists of my own. One of all the school shootings for 2015 – 2017 (the same years as the data available from the BI article) and another of all the school shootings that fit the popular perception of a school shooting. I called this narrowest category “mass school shootings” and I counted any shooting perpetrated by a student / former student resulting in at least 2 fatalities (other than the attacker) at a school. This table illustrates what the numbers look like using these three different categories:

From this, I’m able to calculate the lifetime odds of death from the two new categories: school shootings and mass school shootings. Compared to the 1 in 11,125 odds for any mass shooting, the odds of dying in a school shooting are 1 in 280,350 and the odds of dying in a mass school shooting are 1 in 934,500.

First, let me deal with a couple of quick math issues. These numbers are for all people. Obviously a random 70-year old is unlikely to be in a school and so is much, much less likely to die in a school shooting, and a high school student is (relative to some random 70-year old) much, much more likely. But if you want to do a relative comparison, then you should keep this list as-is. The only way to get the risk assessment for high school students (or all K-12 students, or all K – college students) would also be to look at their likelihoods of dying across all the categories. You’d see heart disease drop off the list, but you’d also see car accidents go much higher. So no: this is not scientific. These are what I’d call back-of-the-envelope calculations. And according to them, you’re more likely to die from being struck by lightning than from a school shooting (category #2) and the only things on the BI table less likely to kill you than a mass school shooting (category #3) is a regional asteroid impact or a shark attack.

Asteroids and shark attacks, people.

I know people are going to be mad at me for being insensitive, but maximum sensitivity isn’t always the right course. When you have a child–your own child or a kid that you’re responsible for–and they are afraid of something than your job as an adult is more than empathy. You can’t just share the child’s fear. You have to allay that fear when possible.

When my children were younger, they were really, genuinely afraid of dying in a tornado. We had moved from Virginia to Michigan and they heard the tornado sirens being tested every now and then, and so they were afraid. Part of my job was to empathize. Part of my job was also to allay their fears by explaining realistically that–while dangerous–tornados were not that common.

More recently, one of my children came to me and confided with a quaver of real fear in their voice that they thought they might have tetanus because “my jaw is starting to feel kind of tight.” This is funny to us, but my kid was really, truly scared and on the verge of tears. My job was not to participate in their fear. It also wasn’t to mock their fear. It was to empathize but–again–allay the fear.

Please note that this doesn’t mean I’m trivializing the devastation of an actual tornado. During the tornado outbreak of Dec 2015, 13 people were killed. Nothing about that is funny. Nothing about that is trivial. Tetanus isn’t a joke, either. Because of vaccinations, only a few people die in the US every year from tetanus, but historically it was a real killer and it continues to be a serious health concern in many parts of the world (especially India).

So I’m not trivializing terrorism when I point out that more people died from avoiding planes after 9/11 than died on 9/11. I’m not trivializing tetanus or tornados when I help allay my kids’ fears. And I’m not trivializing school shootings when I point out that our fears of them are vastly overblown.

Far from it. The reason I’m writing this is that it broke my heart to read a post from a friend on Facebook about how his wife (a teacher) could do nothing but share the fear and panic of her high school students. They are afraid, and she wasn’t able to offer anything substantive to combat that fear. I don’t blame her personally for that at all, but–as a society–we should be mature and sober enough to tackle risk and fear responsibly. We need to do better for our kids.

I think I know the answer to my question. I know why we’re addicted to fear. Some of it is human nature, as we mentioned already. Evolutionarily, risks are more important than rewards. But there’s more to it than that.

For one thing, fear is profitable. It drives traffic and donations. That explains most of what human nature alone cannot.

But I have my suspicions that it doesn’t explain everything. I wonder if human beings are calibrated to a certain degree of threat and risk in our lives. And–living in what is without any doubt the safest and most comfortable period of human history–it’s almost as though we are incapable of accepting that realty and intent on manufacturing risks and dangers we keep expecting to be there, but aren’t.

This post is not about gun control or even school shootings in particular.

It’s just about risk, and fear, and how we need to deal better with the fear if we want–individually and as a society–to find ways to batter manage risk.

Are There Effective Gun Control Laws?

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Guns are once again a hot topic with the latest shooting in Florida. I’ve written about gun control before. Ultimately, is there any evidence that gun control laws work? If so, which ones? According to a 2016 study in The Lancet,

The three laws most strongly associated with reduced firearm mortality were universal background checks for firearm purchase, background checks for ammunition, and requiring firearm identification by either microstamping or ballistic fingerprinting. We showed that federal-level implementation of these three laws would substantially reduce overall national firearm mortality. Finally, the three laws most strongly associated with reduced homicide-specific firearm mortality were universal background checks for firearm purchase, background checks for ammunition, and firearm identification; firearm identification was associated with reduced suicide-specific firearm mortality (pgs. 7-8).

Scientific American has a useful rundown of other laws, including:

  • Permits: “An effective solution would be to require people to apply, in-person, at local law enforcement agencies for gun purchase permits…In a 2009 study involving 53 cities Webster and his colleagues found this approach, which gives law enforcement officials discretion about who they gave permits to, was linked with a 68 percent reduced risk of guns being diverted to criminals post-sale. But after Missouri repealed its permit-to-purchase handgun law in 2007, firearm homicide rates increased by 25 percent, a jump that was not seen in neighboring states or the rest of the country, Webster’s team reported. Missouri’s repeal was also linked with a 52 percent increase in handgun murders of law enforcement officers in the line of duty.”
  • Ban anyone convicted of a violent crime from gun purchases: “In 1991 [California] passed a law preventing individuals with violent convictions from buying guns. And in a study published in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001 Wintemute and his colleagues studied its effects. Convicts who were allowed to buy guns before the law passed were nearly 30 percent more likely to be arrested later for a gun crime or other violent act compared with convicts who tried, but were unable, to buy guns after the law was passed. “That’s a big effect,” Wintemute says.”
  • Make all serious domestic abuse offenders surrender guns: “Some states are now passing state laws requiring individuals convicted of domestic violence crimes to surrender their firearms; an October 2017 study found that these “relinquishment” laws are nearly 50 percent more effective than non-relinquishment laws at reducing intimate partner violence. It would also help a lot to restrict guns from people with domestic violence restraining orders against them. In a 2010 study Webster and his colleagues found restrictions based on restraining orders were associated with a 19 percent reduction in the risk for intimate partner homicide in large U.S. cities. Such restrictions are in place in 35 states and Washington D.C. These changes are important because intimate partner violence is strongly tied to mass shootings: A 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service found more than one fifth of all public mass shootings between 1999 and 2013 were precipitated in part by domestic disputes. During this period there were also 127 nonpublic mass shootings in the U.S. that involved an individual killing at least four family members. Keeping people prone to domestic violence away from firearms would prevent many massacres.”
  • Temporarily ban alcohol abusers from firearms: “Federal law prohibits people who are addicted to and/or unlawfully using controlled substances from owning guns. But recent data suggest some nine million U.S. firearm owners also binge drink, which is a specific medical problem involving abuse of the substance alcohol. Wintemute’s research suggests people with DUIs (driving under the influence) are four to five times as likely as people with no criminal record to be arrested for a violent crime in the future. Based on these data, Wintemute proposes a temporary ban on gun possession among individuals who have had, in the past five years, two or more convictions for DUI or another crime that indicates alcohol abuse.”

Many proposed laws are already in place. Nonetheless, the more you know.

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