OSD 171: Articles for emergencies
Some evergreen pieces to help sort through stressful times.
The outline of the discussion after a mass shooting is so rote that even the observation that it’s rote is now itself a cliché. That’s a second terrible layer on an event that already lacks no horrors.
What this also means is that there’s little new to say on the subject. And if there was something new to say, you should be wary of it — during emergencies, it’s important to be grounded in the thinking you did beforehand, while calm. The alternative is to be grounded in the emotional flailing that happens when a situation gets ahead of you. That alternative is not a recipe for good outcomes.
So, let’s establish some grounding. Here is a recap of previous writing we’ve done on mass shootings. It covers the major themes within the subject, helps debunk some false factoids, and most importantly injects some optimism that with the right actions, things can get better.
Why people worry more about mass shootings than car accidents: lessons from the Lebanese Civil War
When you drive home from the airport, you’re doing something statistically insane. Everyone knows this. You’re trading a plane, a vehicle with 0.07 fatalities per billion passenger-miles, for a car, a vehicle with 7.3 fatalities per billion passenger-miles. Pound for pound, the plane is 100 times less deadly. But somehow that doesn’t help when you’re flying through a thunderstorm at 35,000 feet.
The difference in a car is that you’re in control. Half of the people killed in automobiles weren’t wearing a seatbelt. Alcohol was involved in a third of highway deaths. Men die at three times the rate that women do. People between ages 18 and 29 are at a 50-90% higher risk of death than the baseline. (All stats from the link above.) Accidents happen, but if you wear your seatbelt and drive safely, they’ll happen a lot less to you.
On a plane, the only thing you control is the angle of your seat. If you’re going down, just put your hands together and praise Sully.
Guns are specifically designed to kill: the logic error behind the whole gun debate
There’s a well-worn template of gun discussion that goes like this:
Alice: Why crack down further on gun ownership?
Bob: Because a lot of people get shot to death every year.
Alice: A lot of people die in car accidents, but that doesn’t cut in favor of a crackdown on car ownership.
Bob: True, but cars have a lot of constructive uses. Guns are specifically designed to kill.Each sentence there has several essays’ worth of material to scrutinize. (We’ve written, and will write, a few such essays.) But this archetype is interesting in a way that both sides tend to miss — there’s an unspoken assumption in “guns are specifically designed to kill” which both Alice and Bob skipped over. Let’s unpack it.
From Handwaving Freakoutery: “I just made $100 off some dead kids, and that’s the problem”
My experience running this publication has taught me some interesting trends. If I have an article that pops on Reddit, the traffic decay envelope is quick — several days, as the thing falls off the front page. If it hits Facebook, the decay is a week or longer, and the amplitude is much larger as well. The Medium snapshot above is the attack and decay from three major articles hitting Facebook feeds in the wake of two consecutive mass shootings.
From Handwaving Freakoutery: “Everybody’s lying about the link between gun ownership and homicide”
This looks less like data and more like someone shot a piece of graph paper with #8 birdshot.
Game theory and guns: why universal background checks are a debate — and how to solve it
Each side presents facts, but the facts don’t really matter. People have made up their minds, and that’s it. If they hear a fact that bolsters their position, they’ll spread it. If they hear a counterargument, they double down against it. So the real question isn’t what the “truth” is, because empirically, the truth doesn’t matter. The real question: why doesn’t the truth matter?
The problem is that the two sides are in Nash equilibrium: “a strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium if no player can do better by unilaterally changing his or her strategy”. If you want to spread gun rights, would making a unilateral concession to the gun control crowd help you spread gun rights? If you want more gun control, would supporting an advancement for gun rights help you get more gun control? Obviously not, in both cases. In Nash equilibrium, a unilateral concession would by definition only hurt you. So in that sense, of course both sides are trying to cram victory down the other side’s throat. Mathematically, a unilateral compromise can only open the door to more concessions.
What is going on with mass shootings? Lessons from past solved problems.
We all know the discussion. Hell, Open Source Defense is a gun rights group, we [post debunkings] too.
Then the gun control crowd hits back with a Voxsplainer, the gut-wrenching emotional horror of these events, the sense of helplessness, and all the rest. And it rolls up into a feeling: “There’s only so much time in the day, and I don’t know all the details about this stuff. I just know that we have to do something.”
It’s tempting to dismiss that as the politician’s syllogism: we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this.
But this discussion has too much momentum to ignore. Either you engage it or it is going to run you over. And more importantly, there’s a good, insightful question here! Both sides are too busy shouting at each other about gun bans to step back and engage the question: wait, what is going on with mass shootings?
So. Let’s engage it.
This week’s links
Pistol, bear spray, or both?
Demos from MeatEater’s Clay Newcomb. And a good interview with Todd Orr, the guy who back in 2016 posted a video to Facebook minutes after being attacked twice by a grizzly bear.
Annual lobbying expenditures by industry
You can guess that gun rights lobbying is less than you’ve been told. But you probably won’t guess that it’s smaller than … the sea transport industry?
How to shoot a bird’s head grip shotgun, with Rhett Neumayer
Ian McCollum exploring another of Rhett’s unorthodox techniques. The first was the cheek pistol video from last year.
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