The Metrics Of School Shootings
BY Herschel Smith
10 years, 6 months ago
As I’ve said before concerning gun rights and favorable statistical outcomes:
… what happens to society at the macroscopic level is immaterial. My rights involve me and my family, and don’t depend on being able to demonstrate that the general health effects in society are not a corollary to or adversely affected by the free exercise of them.
It’s insidious and even dangerous to argue gun rights as a part of crime prevention based on statistics because it presupposes what the social planners to, i.e., that I’m part of the collective.
Kurt Hofmann has weighed in with an affirmative vote for my position here and here. This is [partly] why I don’t give John Lott the time of day (there are other reasons). But occasionally it pays to examine the anti-gunner’s data and show them up for the poor scientists they are. One such example comes to us from The Washington Post. The author waxes knowledgeable about school shootings, and then presents this map.
What the author doesn’t tell you is this. Savannah State, historically black college; South Carolina State University, historically black college; Paine College, historically black; Stillman College, historically black; Grambling State, black college; Stevens, inner city St. Louis, majority black; Elizabeth City State University, historically black college; North Carolina A&T, black college; and Tennessee State, black college.
Chris Conover also upbraids the anti-gunner statistics at Forbes. The lesson is that they anti-gunners see what they want to, and when they [inadvertently] land on a meaningful social and cultural observation concerning black-on-black crime, they don’t turn it into a full blown commentary or analysis.
Because it doesn’t fit the narrative of collective responsibility.
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On June 26, 2014 at 9:24 pm, Anonymous said:
“For the children” is always a lie anyway.
When people think of “mass shooting,” they think of the ones with five or ten or more victims–the ones that happen maybe once or twice a decade. And not a weekday morning rush hour goes by in this country without multiple chain-reaction accidents happening in various metropolitan areas with five or ten or more killed. Automobile accidents, many of them resulting from DUI, driving while blabbing on a cell phone, and so on, rack up thousands of times the body count that these “mass shooters” who supposedly endanger all our lives do. Yet one of these phenomena is relentlessly politicized and one is not–the one with the smaller body count.
Obviously, these people don’t give a good goddamn about public safety, about lives cut short. If they did, they’d be demanding changes to the laws so that DUI would be a felony with a mandatory minimum ten-year prison sentence and loss of driving privileges for life for the first offense, life without parole for the second offense. None of that is on the table. No, they’re bloviating about guns.