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.
