The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

<3 take care of yourself

the problem with widespread gun ownership that people forget is that humans are not rational, and even the most responsible gun owner might crack and decide to take their gun somewhere with cloudy or bad intentions following personal loss or trauma. and the places where those things happen are often the places where loss and trauma are addressed all the time, like hospitals.

i'm sorry, ENBB. what a horrible thing.

twice today i visited a certain boston newspaper website to read about this and they are focussing more on that risible new england patriots story, are news agencies finally getting around to downplaying or at least not luridly highlighting spree killer stories or does this just reflect local priorities

<3 E this is awful

technically not a spree killing in this instance but not dissimilar in effect

national priorities

wolf and sheep is standard gun-dude lingo, with "sheepdog" being the exalted state of armed goodguy

― goole, Tuesday, January 20, 2015 9:04 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the baffler just posted something on this:

http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/american-sniper/

Good article. Terrible book, On Killing, btw--or, I guess not terrible but before the end I was definitely hate-reading it and making notes of my arguments in the margins. The military history aspects were super interesting tho.

A+ trolling from gun advocates here. appropriate a left-correct issue toward their ends:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/in-bid-to-allow-guns-on-campus-weapons-are-linked-to-fighting-sexual-assault.html

i wonder if this will hasten the left's realization that the "campus rape epidemic" is nothing of the sort

campus rape is endemic, the social dynamic and other factors enable it or make boundaries unclear, the same issues (recognition of the humanity of others, personal boundaries, what's appropriate when intoxicated) would be even worse with guns

great now we have a bunch of poorly-socialized intoxicated kids shooting at each other, is what I'm saying

campus rape is about as "endemic" as rape is in american society in general, perhaps less so. or so the most well-designed and recent studies suggest. (btw rape along with other violent crime is in the middle of a historic decline in america). that's not to say that campus rape doesn't exist or isn't a big problem, just as rape is in general. but calling it an "epidemic" is misleading at best.

in any event i'm entirely in agreement w/ you that guns are not a good addition to this mix, however you characterize it.

From Wikipedia article Epidemic:

"The declaration of an epidemic usually requires a good understanding of a baseline rate of incidence."

also "epidemic" 1= "endemic"

aimless, that's correct. to claim an epidemic we'd have to see either (or both) a marked increase in the incidence of campus rape over previous eras, or a rate of campus rape significantly greater than the incidence of rape off campus. there's not good evidence for either of these things, despite the frequent citing of some very flawed surveys done a number of years ago. there have been a ton of good articles on this in e.g. the chronicle of higher education.

"endemic" is something i'd agree with (the bar is certainly lower), but again, there's not convincing evidence that rape is any /more/ endemic on campus than off, at least among the 18-25 age group.

I don't think we need to argue about how much rape is going on to agree that it happens and that putting guns in the hands of college students is dumb.

I guess if you think all rapes and murders are of the "criminal jumps out of the bushes, assaults person who happens to be walking by" variety, then in that situation having a gun might have a small bit of utility. But even then, probably not.

.. I don't think introducing terms into a discussion so that you can dismiss them as overreach is a sign of someone entering a conversation in good faith

btw here's a survey of some of the issues around data about rapes on campus:

http://chronicle.com/article/Behind-the-Statistics-on/151089/

so basically it's an argument that relies on people who think there's "real rape" out there and it's of the stranger assault variety

.. I don't think introducing terms into a discussion so that you can dismiss them as overreach is a sign of someone entering a conversation in good faith

― "Go pet your dog" is the name of my dog (DJP), Wednesday, February 18, 2015 2:06 PM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to whom is this addressed?

To you.

"the best rape prevention program is armed women" has been a gun-nut jpg slogan for my whole adult life; i'm surprised it took this long for something quasi-real to come out of it

i do think it matters whether we define it as an "epidemic" because that inevitably colors how we handle the problem through policy and otherwise. for example the dep't of education's "dear colleague" letter, which has caused many colleges to start adjudicating rapes in a way that many people (victims and those accused) have taken issue with, was in large part motivated by the perception of an "epidemic" or surge in campus rapes.

but in any case yeah guns won't help alleviate campus rape. that's why i referred to those advocating for guns on campus as essentially 'trolling' in their newfound concern for campus rape.

No one in this conversation called it an epidemic so I don't see why you need to make an argument against a position no one here has taken.

context for dep't of education thing: http://chronicle.com/article/Campus-Is-a-Poor-Court-for/134770/

No one in this conversation called it an epidemic so I don't see why you need to make an argument against a position no one here has taken.

― "Go pet your dog" is the name of my dog (DJP), Wednesday, February 18, 2015 2:10 PM (11 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're right, sorry

i guess i was doing some trolling of my own. this is a conversation i've been having with folks not-on-ILX for a while, so i guess i kind of imported that context here in my mind.

"women must be armed to prevent rapes" is once again putting the onus on women to fight off rapes rather than, ya know, punishing and preventing rapists from committing rape

Yeah, I would like to drop that conversational byway. It's mostly an artifact of people coming around to acknowledging non-stranger rape is real, and rather than admitting it's been happening all along, they have to make some amazing claim that it suddenly came into existence in order to invalidate their past inaction.

On the other hand, most people who shoot others do shoot people they know.

xpost

true, but i guess the advocates would argue that it's on a continuum with the sort of women's self-defense training that's pretty common on campus and doesn't obviate the need to reduce rapes through prevention/prosecution.

multi-xps

I see that "epidemic" does not occur anywhere in the NYT article.

I will admit I have no especially well-developed ideas about rape on campus, but it doesn't take much thought to observe that campuses have high concentrations of 18-25 year old women, which is a fairly vulnerable cohort for rape, including both assault rape and acquaintance rape.

I expect that dealing with those two different categories would require two different strategies, but greatly multiplying the number of guns on campus seems like a policy that is particularly ill-suited to addressing acquaintance rapes, and a pretty damn poor way to reduce assault rapes, too.

nb: not having any grip on the preferred jargon for what I am calling acquaintance and assault rape, I simply used the terms that fell to hand. feel free to flay me for this indiscretion.

there's not a lot of agreement about what the "typical" campus rape looks like. there are some high-profile folks who advance the theory that most campus rapes come from serial offenders who are effectively sociopaths or worse, but many others have strongly challenged this idea. i think the alternative idea--that "good" men commit rape, because of their (likely alcohol-aided) disregard for boundaries--is particularly unsettling.

and yeah like you i really have no idea what the reality is. i think there's a big move afoot for better-funded and more carefully-designed research on this very subject, so maybe in a few years we'll have a better sense of what goes on and thus how it might best be prevented and dealt with.

but yeah i doubt the answer will be "guns"

I find that the questions best answered by "guns" are along the lines of "what do I need if I want to shoot somebody"

"What is the most fun way of making a hole in something from 20 feet away"

you guys should write a jeopardy category

but it doesn't take much thought to observe that campuses have high concentrations of 18-25 year old women, which is a fairly vulnerable cohort for rape, including both assault rape and acquaintance rape white men in an environment where they can feel reasonable certainty that their actions will go unpunished, which are all indicators for a high occurrence of sexual assault.

Also having said that iirc the incidence of rape is actually higher among women who don't go to college though, so....

I like to keep my personal career talk to 77, but you are very near the mark xp

orbit I'm curious if there's some statistical reason you call out white men specifically there

or is that just a "white = more likely to get away with it" type of thing

Specifically because it was the very first point at my source: "Sex offenders are overwhelmingly white males. Nearly 99% of sex offenders in single-victim incidents were male and 6 in 10 were white (Greenfeld, 1997)."

http://sapac.umich.edu/article/196

huh. weird.

"Sex offenders are overwhelmingly white males. Nearly 99% of sex offenders in single-victim incidents were male and 6 in 10 were white (Greenfeld, 1997)."

http://sapac.umich.edu/article/196

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, 18 February 2015 21:18 (10 minutes ago)

this statistic would suggest a large cohort of white american men would contain fewer sex offenders than cohorts american men other races?

7 in 10 men are white, I believe, so... inconclusive

also, at least 9 in 10 white men are men.

eh shove off, I actually looked that up for north america

i wasn't making fun of you, just of statistics

:)

Specifically because it was the very first point at my source: "Sex offenders are overwhelmingly white males. Nearly 99% of sex offenders in single-victim incidents were male and 6 in 10 were white (Greenfeld, 1997)."

http://sapac.umich.edu/article/196

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, February

considering 77% of americans are white, 60% is pretty good. tho as shakey points out part of that could be due to who actually gets charged for sexual assault

actually check that 62.6% of americans are non-hispanic white