Let's Put All Those Evil Guns in Jail

 

Liberal Party leader Steven Del Duca has announced a plan to ban handguns if his party takes power, to “protect the people of this province against gun violence.”

Would a handgun ban have any such effect? Most mass shootings happen in gun-free zones. Switzerland and Israel require all able-bodied men to own guns; their rate of gun violence is lower than Canada’s.

Arguably, if there were fewer guns, there would be fewer guns in the hands of criminals. Equally arguably, if there were fewer guns, the criminals would still have them, and nobody else would.

There are other reasons why a gun ban is a bad idea. 

Both the American Bill of Rights, and the English Bill of Rights, include the right to bear arms. Both say this is a basic human right. Why?

It follows from the right to self-defense. Not just against predatory wild animals, or predatory criminals, but against predatory government. The development of democracy in Britain has a lot to do with the fact that the English longbow could penetrate a suit of armour—a man’s home became his castle, because he could defend it against the nobility. Swiss democracy emerged because Swiss pikemen could do the same—hold off their armoured overlords. The continuing right to bear arms ensured and ensures this.

This being so, any attempt by any government to limit arms should be looked at with suspicion. Especially so soon after a peaceful protest was illegally suppressed in Ottawa.

There is yet another reason why gun control is a bad idea. Consider the current case of Ukraine. The government has passed out arms to every male citizen, and called on them to fight.

Consider the military advantage any country has in such a situation if its citizens generally know how to use a gun, and may have one in their basement. 

It has been said that the many guns in private hands make the USA unconquerable. It has kept Switzerland out of two world wars. Canada’s relative familiarity with rifles made Canadians the shock troops and flying aces of the Allied forces in two world wars. 

The cheapest and best way Canada could improve its own defense  would actually be to give or even require firearms training for all adult citizens, and hand out free guns.

I wager violent crime would go down too.

Guns Don't Kill People; Doctors Do

 The following is absolutely not mine. It was forwearded by a friend. I do not know who is the author. But I love the playfulness of the logic.

Doctors:

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Ratio of accidental deaths per physician is 0.171

Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

Gun owners:

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188

Statistics courtesy of FBI

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Not everyone has a gun, but almost everyone has at least one doctor.

This means you are over 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a doctor as by a gun owner.

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand.

Out of concern for the public at large, we withheld the statistics on lawyers. The shock could cause people to panic and seek medical attention.

Death on the Danforth

There has been another random mass murder, in Toronto, on the Danforth. Toronto, or Canada, is not any longer the peaceable kingdom it used to be.

The first reaction is of course for people to call for gun control.

This is not the solution:

1. more guns in public hands are logically no more dangerous than fewer guns. Note that most mass shootings in the US actually happen in “gun-free zones.” These ensure for a shooter that victims are defenseless: shooting gallery conditions. Secondly, the frequency of mass shootings is actually fairly comparable across developed countries—NOT most common in the US, which supposedly has the loosest gun control. And these various countries have different levels of gun ownership, and different gun laws. 
2. guns if completely banned can be replaced with bombs, vehicles, or—as we see recently in the UK—knives, for similar random mass attacks. Banning guns would do nothing for this reason. 

The second reaction is for people to call for better mental health care, so that deranged people no longer “fall through the cracks.” More funding!

Neither is this a solution.

1. Seemingly without exception, these mass killers are already under psychiatric care. They did not fall through the cracks. 
2. Any number of studies prove that the mentally ill are no more prone to violence than the general population. And, again, the incidence of mass killings is about the same across the developed world, despite different funding models for mental health. 

So what is the solution? Can we do anything?

One obvious suggestion, that nobody wants to make, is to end Muslim immigration. Such shooters do seem to be disproportionately Muslim, as in the current example. Surely this is an argument for ending the immigration of Muslims into any country?

It must immediately be said that Islam or Islamism was not involved in this case. The perp was mentally ill. Nevertheless, as any police department will tell you, there is a “copycat” element in crimes, especially spectacular crimes. One person does it, and others are inspired to do the same. Especially the mentally ill, who tend to be suggestible. Recall for example the spate of assassinations in the US in the late Sixties and Seventies.

The model of going on a killing frenzy against unbelievers will resonate among Muslims who are insane, creating a special danger. Regardless of whether the vast majority of Muslims would never even think of doing it. And such killing sprees against unbelievers are genuinely a longstanding element of Islam. They have been a problem for centuries in, for example, the southern Philippines. Not some new or transitory thing. Ergo, without individual Muslims being at fault, it is still a higher risk to the general population to let in Muslims as immigrants. This is a valid consideration in selecting immigrants. There is, the US Supreme Court to the contrary, no human rights question involved in discriminating on the grounds of religion for immigration purposes. This is an issue of freedom of association for those already here, or anywhere else. Any more than there is a human rights issue in discriminating on the grounds of language ability, or illness, or likelihood to need social assistance. None assume moral fault in the applicant.

Again, nobody wants to say it, but there is another reason to want to restrict Muslim immigration. On a vital issue, Muslims will tend not to assimilate, on religious grounds. Unlike in Christianity or Buddhism, or, at least for historical reasons, Judaism, in Islam there is no separation of church and state. Any government that is not specifically both religious and Muslim is, in Muslim terms, illegitimate. Accordingly, if and when a group of Muslims forms a majority in any area, however small, there will be an inevitable demand for a separate government, with their own laws, on a religious foundation. They will therefore never consider themselves any more than transitionally and regrettably “Canadian.” Witness Bosnia, the southern Philippines, or Chechnya. Letting in a large Muslim minority creates an inevitable future conflict, probably bloody.

But, you may argue, not all Muslims will think like this. So just let in the “good” Muslims who recognize the separation of church and state.

Problem: these are not the good Muslims. These are the Muslims who do not take their religion seriously. Accordingly, they are just as likely to be fast and loose with its other requirements, most of them involving objectively good morals. From the Muslim perspective, to be secularized is to be wicked, and such Muslims will see themselves as having defected to "the wicked West." No rules any longer need apply.

But none of this really does much regarding the immediate question of mass shootings. You cannot deport Muslim Canadians, and there are a good number of them.

The real problem is, I think, a critical diagnostic failure in the psychiatric profession. Psychiatry does not distinguish between two opposite conditions, melancholia, and narcissism. This is the only way you can end up with mass killers always being mentally ill, but the mentally ill not being any more likely to be mass killers. We must have two separate groups being given the same diagnosis of “mental illness.” One has to be less likely than the general population to be violent, and the other more likely, so that the two statistically balance out.

Melancholics, the product of some abuse or trauma, and narcissists, who have mostly simply chosen to do wrong, show similar symptoms, of depression and anxiety; and all psychiatry is capable of seeing, because of its empirical prejudices, are symptoms. So both are treated with antidepressants, or antipsychotics, which give purely symptomatic relief.

These helpfully dull the floating anxiety, the troubling thoughts, or, in the case of psychosis, the hallucinations. In a melancholic, it allows them to function more normally, without unjustified anxieties caused by systematic abuse or PTSD. In a narcissist, however, the anxiety and depression are really the voice of conscience, expressing genuine guilt. Giving them the pills allows them to continue to function narcissistically, and ramp up, by stilling this troubling voice of conscience.

If the former group, the melancholics, experience a crisis, they want to kill themselves. If the latter group, the narcissists, experience a crisis, they will want to kill everyone around them. Big difference. Give them antidepressants and antipsychotics, and this will happen. This itself explains the growing incidence of such mass murders.

How to tell the difference? Not hard, on several bases.

Both groups will also tend to seek similar relief in alcohol, as a form of “self-medication.” But there are two kinds of drunks, aren't there? A melancholic drunk, who drinks to ease the pain of abuse, will get funnier and more outgoing when drunk, or just dopey, or fall asleep. A narcissistic drunk, who drinks to still the inhibitions of conscience, will get belligerent, or self-pitying, or nasty.

It might be a good diagnostic tool, if psychiatry knew what it was doing.

Guns and Mental Illness on the Rampage in Florida. Why Won't the Politicians Do Something?

The usual suspect.

Seventeen people have been killed in a random mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. And, with annoying predictability, politicians are exploiting the catastrophe, as they always do, to blame Republicans for not bringing in some new law further restricting gun ownership. As if the solution to the problem were obvious, and the Republicans were just being evil. They’ve all been bought by the NRA.

The real problem is, there is no good reason to suppose that any possible law involving gun ownership would make such events less likely. As this painstaking statistical analysis shows, mass shootings are actually no more common in the US than in other developed countries. Folks in the US suppose they are, first, because the population of the US is much larger, so that there are inevitably more such events there, and second, because in America, mass shootings in other countries are given less media coverage.

These different countries have different gun control laws, and indeed different policies in many areas. This is strong evidence that no law is going to make any difference; and no law on gun ownership is going to make any difference.

Those in support of greater gun control point to Australia. Oz significantly restricted gun ownership after a mass shooting in 1996—about 20% fewer guns in private hands now—and, the gun control advocates point out, there have been no mass shootings in Australia since.

Still, this is not strong evidence. Mass shootings are rare; there having been none in Australia since 1996 might only be a small statistical anomaly. There have also still been mass killings in Australia, but not using guns. Does it really matter what weapon is used? There have even been attempted mass shootings, but they did not succeed well enough to meet the standard threshold of four people dead.

Overall, violence involving guns in Australia has indeed declined since the tougher gun laws were passed. However, gun violence has declined in the US over the same period, and even at a faster rate. And the US, during that time, has somewhat loosened its gun laws. In the first three years after the laws were passed, in which one should have seen the most dramatic effect, gun violence in Australia actually grew.

Nothing there that counts as scientific evidence. Nobody knows why the rate of violent crime has been declining, in the US or in Australia. My bet is improved technology leading to more efficient policing.

In sum, there is no reason to think that new and tighter gun control laws would do anything but win some politicians some votes. And, if there is any valid reason for the US Second Amendment, that too goes out the window.

Alongside the demand for stricter gun control laws, there has been a demand to attack the “real problem,” which is supposedly putting more money into mental health. President Trump just made that call, and it is almost as familiar a response.

It is no more sensible. Just as the various other developed countries have various other gun laws, yet do no better at preventing mass shootings, they have various mental health systems, yet do no better. If there is a problem here, then, it is not with the particular laws or resources surrounding mental health, but with our general understanding: with the mental health field. For the “science” of mental health will be more or less the same in all those countries.

Actually, many studies show that the “mentally ill” are in fact no more likely to commit violent crime than the general population. There seem to be no studies showing that they are more likely. Accordingly, putting more money into mental health, while it might be a fine idea for other reasons, would do nothing to reduce mass shootings.

Those advocating this “more mental health” approach will point to the fact that, although statistically the mentally ill are not killers, statistically, the killers are mentally ill. Again and again, when someone has gone somewhere with a gun to shoot everyone in sight, it turns out he was either taking antidepressants, or had just gone off antidepressants. This column makes that case. Other studies show that, while there is no statistical connection between mental illness and mass shootings, there is indeed a more specific statistical connection between [diagnosed mental illness with substance abuse] and [mass shootings].

So is putting more money into the treatment of mental illness indeed the answer? No—all the killers examined by Leo Knight in his column are actually united not by being mentally ill, but by being treated for mental illness. They were already in the system and receiving the standard treatment. More of the same will not make matters better. The problem is not that people are being overlooked, missed by the mental health system, not receiving needed treatment.

In fact, you could as easily argue from this data that the problem is with the treatment. Was the violence caused by the depression, or was it a side effect of the drugs? If the latter, the best way to prevent mass shootings might be to put less money into mental health, not more.

So, okay, is the problem with antidepressants, then? Not in itself; that cannot be so. When statistics show that the mentally ill are no more likely than the general population to commit acts of violence, how do they determine who is mentally ill? This almost has to mean anyone who has this medical diagnosis, and anyone who has this medical diagnosis will, as a matter of course, have been given these same antidepressants.

Another important question is going begging here. How can it be that, one the one hand, the mentally ill are no more statistically likely than the general population to be violent, yet violent people are statistically more likely than the general population to be mentally ill? The solution to that puzzle should give us the answer to the mass shootings.

I think the only possible explanation is misdiagnosis. There are two quite different phenomena, two quite different classes of people, being diagnosed and treated as depressive or mentally ill. One group is significantly less likely to be violent than the general population, and the other is significantly more likely to be violent than the general population. Since we use the same diagnosis for both, the stats for both get thrown together, it ends up a wash, and we miss important data.

My hypothesis: the symptoms we call depression, and more broadly the symptoms we call mental illness, can come from two sources. In the first—the non-violent group—they are essentially caused by PTSD. They are caused by trauma; by being abused; or by experiencing some intolerable life situation. In the second, the violent group, the same symptoms, of sadness and anxiety, are largely the voice of the individual’s conscience. They are caused by his or her own tendency to choose to do evil. They are anxious because of instinctive fears of cosmic justice; they have negative thoughts about themselves because they have, in fact, done negative things. A narcissist or psychopath will also feel they deserve whatever they want. Life and other people will not give them whatever they want. As a result, they will feel a general ennui, dissatisfaction, depression, if you like.

While the first group might want to kill themselves, this second group, with the same superficial symptoms of sorrow and anxiety, will instead want to kill everybody else.

These are opposite tendencies. In fact, the people with tendency two are probably the people who originally abused those suffering from tendency one.

It is a crowning injustice, if I am right, that the very victims of injustice are now being accused of and blamed for the acts they suffered. This is what happens when you conflate the two groups.

The problem with antidepressants, and psychiatric drugs generally, is that they only treat symptoms. They are like taking an aspirin for pain. The leg is still broken. For the first tendency, this may be worthwhile. But for the second group, the narcissists and psychopaths, the antidepressant will largely serve to numb conscience. Allowing them to dig their grave that much deeper. It is telling that this violent group is the same group that tends to abuse alcohol and drugs—these work the same way, numbing conscience, “inhibitions.”

To reduce mass shootings, and violence in general, we need to become aware of this vital distinction. We need more accurate diagnosis, and different “treatments” for some. But legislation has nothing to do with it, and can do nothing.

More Examples ...

... of armed civilians taking down "active shooters."

Roseburg and Guns

The deadly English longbow. For national defense, every English freeman was drilled in its use. It could take down a knight on horseback. Result: human equality.

Another mass shooting in the US, in Oregon, and another general call for tougher laws on gun control.

First point: appearances to the contrary, and for what it is worth, mass shootings in the US are not becoming more common. They are becoming less common. Nor are there actually more mass shootings in the US than in other developed naions. Apparently, there have been more proportionate to population in Finland and Norway.

Second point: tougher control of guns will probably do little to prevent mass killings. If it amounts to anything less than banning all guns, the killers will just adapt accordingly; they will use a different model. Security checks are of slight use; they will only catch previous offenders, who will then, being criminals, probably acquire what they want on the black market. As for the mentally ill, we are totally incapable of predicting who is dangerous and who is not. Banning all guns would obviously be unconstitutional in the US, even if desirable.

Nor would banning guns necessarily reduce mass killings. How many people were killed on 9-11? How many guns were used? How about at the Boston Marathon? How about suicide bombers? Why wouldn't the method simply adjust?

Third point: banning guns is not desirable. The Second Amendment exists because an unarmed citizenry is vulnerable to an oppressive government. The historical evidence is plain that a yeomanry armed with the longbow, effective against armoured men on horseback, was the critical factor in the development of human rights and then democracy in England. From there, the British right to bear arms, enshrined in the British as well as the US Bill of Rights, spread it throughout the Anglosphere. The right to bear arms was an important protection for blacks in the South in quite recent years.

Fourth point: if we want to reduce mass shootings, there is one simple thing we could do that probably would be rather effective. Ban publication of the name of the shooter, or his or her photograph, or any details that would allow him or her to be identified by the public. The public has no legitimate need to know these details; they probably have little interest. This would withdraw the single strongest motive behind the killings: the chance at fame.

Fifth point: it is no coincidence that these mass shootings always take place in advertised “gun free zones.” Such places are a natural magnet to mass killers. Would you post a sign on your front lawn saying “no guns in this house”? Why not “no dangerous dogs, no alarms, and doors are unlocked”? I suggest that any institution that enforces such a “gun-free” policy is implicitly taking responsibility for protecting the safety of all on the premises. If someone gets shot in a “gun-free zone,” they or their family should be able to sue the institution. Big time.

A recent Rolling Stone article claims, more or less against this, that no mass shooting has actually been stopped by a civilian bearing arms in the last thirty years.

Eh? Canadians will immediately want to say, “but what about Kevin Vickers?” The assault on Parliament, of course, like the recent incident on a train in France, happened outside the US, and so will not show in US statistics. But they also would not appear for another reason: something is called a “mass shooting” when at least four or five people are killed. When there is a civilian nearby with a gun, things are unlikely to go this far, and they did not in either of those cases. Rolling Stone's evidence actually works against its point, and shows what a disaster gun free zones really are. For what it's worth, BuzzFeed cites a variety of other cases in recent years where armed civilians prevented mass killings.

Two action items, then: ban all publicity for the killers, and put the kibosh on gun-free zones.

By contrast, just calling for more gun control is revoltingly cynical.

The Real Reason for the 2nd Amendment

... to the US Constitution.

I have no strong views in the debate over gun control, but this piece is interesting for the quotes it offers from the founders of the US, and for the fact that it appears in the Daily Kos. Usually pretty left wing.

Let's Control Those Guns

Following the terrible school shooting in Connecticut, not to mention the shooting only a couple of days before at an Oregon mall, there will of course be calls for stricter gun control. There always are.

This is purely a cynical ploy by politicians, as far as I can see. They need to be seen to be “doing something” to prevent such things from happening. Few seem to stop to think whether gun control is the best way to do it. It recommends itself instead because it is an easy thing to do; not because it would fix the problem.

As far as I can tell, there are no stats to indicate that tighter gun control leads to fewer deaths from gun-related crime. The Wikipedia entry on “gun control” has none. Logically, the same law that makes it harder for the aggressor to get a gun makes it less likely for the victim to have a gun with which to defend himself. Seems like a zero-sum game. Except that gun control interferes in the lives of ordinary citizens, and gives us that much less freedom.