Saturday, December 15, 2012

Ezra Klein — Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States


Ezra summarizes some of the research.

The Washington Post | Wonkblog
Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States
Ezra Klein

Related:

Ezra Klein, Six facts about guns, violence, and gun control, July 23, 2012

Interesting to compare Ezra's latest article with his last, at the time of the Aurora, AZ attack.

Gary Kleck, Guns and Violence: A Summary of the Field, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, address delivered to the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association based on his book of the same title.

Data is dated but the analysis is still relevant.

Harvard University Press Blog, Gun Control, Mental Illness, and the Arizona Shootings
In a Salon piece titled “Why Psychiatrists Can't Predict Mass Murderers,” McNally addresses the reasonable urge to make sense of the senseless and to learn from this incident. While many in the media have been recounting Loughner’s troubled past and wondering why authorities seemingly failed, time and again, to take action in ways that could have prevented this tragedy from occurring, McNally explains the difficulty of such intervention:
Let's assume that we've identified a set of characteristics often exhibited by mass murderers. What does that buy us? It enables us to answer the question, “Given that someone is a mass murderer, what characteristics is he likely to exhibit?” That's an interesting question, but it's not the one we want to answer. Rather, the question we really want to answer is, “Given that someone exhibits this profile of characteristics, how likely is he to commit mass murder?” Answering this question is extremely difficult because the predictors are invariably far more common than the event we hope to predict, and mass murder is very rare. Although mass murderers often do exhibit bizarre behavior, most people who exhibit bizarre behavior do not commit mass murder.
Despite the difficulties presented, McNally accepts for science the need to learn from incidents like the Arizona shooting. “The consequences of missing a future mass murderer in our midst are appalling, and the enormity of such a mistake fuels the hope that someday science will overcome the daunting challenge of distinguishing the truly dangerous from the merely odd.”
 Balkanization
A Thought Experiment
Gerard N. Magliocca | Samuel R. Rosen Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law

Take the test.

10 comments:

Bob Roddis said...

About 500 people a year are killed with rifles. That's about as many people who die falling out of bed. The Keynesian State of Clinton and Albright murdered 500,000 Iraqi kids. No one cares about that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x4PgpbQfxgo

In the absence of a gun, a nutcase could easily fashion a bow and arrow or dart set tipped with fatal poison.

Then we have the worship of the Keynesian mad bombers FDR and Truman.

http://bobroddis.blogspot.com/2012/08/keynesian-new-dealers-are-only-people.html

Tom Hickey said...

The Keynesian State of Clinton and Albright murdered 500,000 Iraqi kids.

Another mindless rant. The first Iraq war was prosecuted under Poppy Bush and the Second under Sonny Bush of the Texas Bush Dynasty.

Bob Roddis said...

There's no rant and it's not "mindless". Clinton's sanctions on Saddam killed a massive amount of children. And rifles in the USA kill relatively few people. I realize that facts are inconvenient to MMTers.

Tom Hickey said...

Nonsense. The "collateral damage" under Clinton and Obama pales against that of Bush I and II , although none of it is excusable.

My issue is with your use of "Keyensianism." which is wrong historically. Here is an article on neoliberalism beginning with Jimmy Carter, rather than Ronald Reagan, with Gerald Ford the last New Deal president.

Michael Lind, How Reaganism actually started with Carter: Think Reagan was the first modern president to preach low taxes, free markets and morality?

Presidents Clinton and Obama are also Third Way aka New Democrats, which makes them neoliberals rather than Keynesians. Third Way New Democrats "are identified with centrist social/cultural/pluralist positions and neoliberal fiscal values." (source)

Matt Franko said...

Reagan was a Democrat and challenged Ford for the nomination in 1976, I think he came over from the Dems to the GOP in the Goldwater era of the 60's...

Tom do you have a view on the GOP turn from the Lincoln/Ike/Nixon type of policy over to what we have now which perhaps got it's start during the Goldwater stuff...

What the hell happened?

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

I would say that the die was cast in the Harding administration post-Teddy Roosevelt. This was interrupted by the Great Depression and FDR-Truman administrations, but the GOP held strongly to very conservative principles during this time and look forward to reversing the New Deal even as it was being implemented.

Barry Goldwater was in this tradition, but the US was still predominantly liberal under JFK and Lyndon Johnson, but moving rightward, too, due to the Cold War and the hot war in Vietnam. Johnson trounced Goldwater in 1964.

Then came the Civil Rights movement and civil rights legislation, and the subsequent Nixon Southern strategy.

The present conservative paradigm and its proponents were established in the Nixon administration.

The rightward swing was on and Carter adopted a Third Way New Democrat approach. This was insufficient and Reagan came to power, solidifying the conservative position although Congress and the courts were predominantly liberal.

Gingrich led the conservative take-over of Congress under Clinton, whose Third Way New Democrat approach was insufficient to save Congress for the Dems. This led to a GOP sweep under W.

At this time, the Libertarians came to realize that they had no future as a third party, so they decided to go for a seat at the GOP table. They were rebuffed by the Establishment, so they decided that they would have to go on the offensive.

Now there is a battle to the death going on in the GOP between the LIbertarian and conservative wings of the party, with the Establishment largely with the conservative wing. However, there are several billionaires backing the Libertarian faction, so it is a well-matched fight, which the conservatives are still winning. As a result of this, moderates are out and no longer have a seat that the GOP table.

The result of the is the push of Third Way New Democrats to bring disaffected moderate GOP'ers into the fold — think Alan Specter and now Charlie Christ, for example. As a result, progressives have been thrown under the bus to a great extent and the Democratic Party has been moving increasingly rightward.

So neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-colonialism still rule US policy.

Matt Franko said...

Why did Nixon do the "southern strategy"?

Pick off Democrat voters in the deep south who disagreed with Johnson's Civil Rights Act? When as I understand it the GOP supported the CRA?

Why was this necessary for Nixon? Or was it "vote greed"?

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

The plan was to flip the "solid South" after civil rights. See Southern strategy. It' wasn't some dastardly plot as some imagine. The GOP figured that as Blacks gravitated to the Democratic party the crackers would gravitate away from it to the GOP. But the ugly fact is that it was a racist move that the GOP did exploit in campaigns, and it cost the GOP Black support down to the present day, with Black solidly in the GOP camp and white demographics shrinking. Now it is so entrenched the GOP cannot reverse it with only tokenism and anything more risks losing racist whites.

Matt Franko said...

From the wiki:

"“I think that [Southernization]’s absolutely over,” said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South. He noted that the Republicans had become "a Southernized party."

GOP leadership would do well to accept this and move on.... not what I'm getting though, they still seem pissed off and some are still digging in... rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

There's a big tussle looming between the pragmatists and the diehards. The diehards are either in denial or just reject democracy and seek to get around it with voter suppression, changing electoral college votes, etc.