I agree, and I also think that the type of thinking you’re describing is not generally irrational. Plenty of individuals will be exceptions to a typical population-level relationship, even one known to be causal. Each of us has information about ourselves as individuals that won’t have been measured in whatever population study. So if someone says, “I accept the results of this study, but I believe I’m an exception to its population-level conclusions,” I don’t see any a priori basis on which to contradict them.
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I didn’t RTFA, but does it come out and explicitly say that all these racist gun-owners are all caucasian?
How does that square up with some of the militant independence/civil rights movements?
Thanks. I know lots of people who own guns and are responsible with them. I also know, or rather knew, several people who were killed in accidental shootings. All of the cases of people who were killed were people who were acting irresponsibly with weapons - a teenager playing around with a gun, a woman waving a gun around as a threat during a fight when it went off, a teenager who was showing his cool new gun to his friend when he accidentally fired it. Most people I know who own guns would never treat a weapon this way and I don’t worry about my safety in their homes. The only person I know who was accidentally killed by responsible gun use was a boy who was killed by a family friend in a hunting accident. That was very sad. I also had a friend commit suicide last year but I do not know if he purchased the gun for that purpose or had one already available that made it easier for him to use it.
I think that when you realize that most people think they are better than average drivers, the rational thing to do is to keep in mind that you might be one of the deluded people. If you aren’t one then you don’t know how they think that makes them wrong and if you are one then you don’t know how other people think about it or how they determined that they are better than average.
In fact, the things you know about yourself that make you think you are competent may be precisely what makes you incompetent, it’s just that as an incompetent person you are incompetent both in terms of execution and in terms of judging competence. I do think it is irrational to assume you are and exception to a study without having knowledge of what about you would make you an exception.
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Reading between the lines of your post, it sounds like you and I have very different views on race. But I agree that using this scale as a measure of racism seems like a bad idea. I would score very low on this scale, and anyone who scored high on this scale would be someone whose views on race I would find misguided and wrong. But only questions 1 and 4 seem to directly measure racism. The rest measure liberality of opinion on race in America. Like a lot of my fellow liberals, if someone has typical right-wing views on race (and would therefore score high on this scale), it would seem likely to me that they were at least a little bit racist. But I wouldn’t claim to know it, nor would I assume it of an individual. The conclusions of any study that equates a high score on this scale with racism will be at worst wrong and at best only valid from a liberal perspective.
Bah - that is baloney. Yes I am aware of the slave riots of the times and the concerns voiced by some slave owners. But that isn’t the primary reason for the 2nd Amendment.
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OK, but mentally ill folks make “personal decisions” too and apparently (just going by the prevalence of suicide by firearms and your own reasoning that anyone who does that has “mental problems”) mentally ill folks do not have much trouble obtaining firearms.
Saying “it’s a big responsibility” isn’t much of an argument. A lot of people buy guns who don’t seem to take that responsibility as seriously as you think they should.
I agree that it is rational to keep in mind that we could be deluded about ourselves. But I think there’s a limit to how skeptical we can be about our own observations, since it seems to me they are ultimately all we have to go on about anything. So I don’t think we can take the reasoning in the first sentence of your second paragraph to its logical extreme, although it would not be irrational to do so. I guess it boils down to a rationalism vs empiricism issue.
I disagree. Though some of what makes up a “good driver” or a “responsible gun owner” is subjective, there are some things which drivers or gun owners can to to make sure that they are being responsible. A driver can not cut people off, use his or her blinker, and drive at reasonable speeds. Though what these things mean is also subjective, being safe and responsible with guns has less gray area.
Don’t ever point the gun at anyone.
Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.
Those are absolutes, in my opinion. I also think that people should keep guns unloaded, hidden, and locked. There’s a checklist of things you can go through to make sure that you are being responsible with guns.
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You. I like you.
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http://www.democraticunderground.com/117268831
According to federalist 29 it looks like the militia clause is actually really important…but nothing about slaves.
The slavery thing seems to come entirely from the work of one particular historian, Carl T. Bogus (you can’t make this shit up).
http://www.vpc.org/fact_sht/hidhist.htm
Edit: better reference on Bogus’ theory.
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Right, but the point is that it’s perfectly plausible that a great many of these folks who have committed suicide with a firearm followed your checklist to the letter every day right up until the day they lost their life savings or the house or found out their spouses were cheating on them. Earlier, you insisted that anyone who commits suicide must have “mental problems” – but apparently those mental problems weren’t so severe as to prevent them from obtaining a firearm in the first place. (Umm, maybe they didn’t actually have “mental problems” in the first place right up until the event that made them decide to commit suicide; insisting that they must be “mentally unstable” really looks like an attempt to avoid thinking about this possibility on your part.) And maybe right up until that last day they were responsible gun owners by your own criteria.
Like Humbabella said, if you don’t know why those folks made the decisions they did then to assume that you’re immune to making similar decisions – even on some hypothetical worst day of your life – then you’re making an assumption. And since guns are involved it’s a potentially lethal assumption.
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Coincidentally, guns are also more likely to own racists. Fun Fact
My point is that people who don’t think of your rules as absolutes buy guns and some of those people presumably do so thinking that the guns will keep them safe or give them power rather than cause a fatal accident.
What makes someone a “responsible gun owner” may not be very subjective, but people who are not responsible gun owners either don’t understand how to be responsible or don’t understand the importance of being responsible - so why would they not think that their behaviour is responsible behaviour?
If you are actually going to the effort of getting a checklist or otherwise conferring with experts on gun safety to ensure you are following good practices then you probably don’t have to worry you are falling into this trap. That is precisely what I would advocate - test your ideas against something external rather than assuming you are not one of the foolish people who can’t tell they are being foolish.
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Fair enough; that’s a good point. Some people are driven to suicide after leading a healthy life. My uncle actually shot himself, and even though that doesn’t make me an authority on the subject, I do have some perspective. In his case, like in many cases of suicide, there were some signs which weren’t really noticed at the time, but my family has since attributed to depression, probably a side-effect from his heart medication. Probably, if my family had read more into some of his actions, it could have been prevented. Certainly, if he had told anybody that he was having trouble, it could have been prevented. But I honestly believe that even if he hadn’t had a gun in his house, he would have still committed suicide, and in my view, the problem was him not getting help. The gun being there wasn’t what killed him.
It’s terrible that this kind of stuff happens - I know that as well as anybody.
But the hypothetical worst night of my life might not involve me losing all of my money and spiraling into depression; it might involve somebody breaking into my house and trying to kidnap my future kids. And in a situation like that, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. I need to be able to protect the people I care about. I don’t know what the worst day of my life will be, but I know myself very well, and I trust that if I ever use a gun against anybody, it will be in self defense.
Right, so how many other people have “known” that and gone on to kill themselves or committed a crime of passion?
That’s what I’m getting at. Most people have good intentions but we all know where those lead.
Plus someone breaking into your house and kidnapping your kids is a lot less probable than you simply forgetting to follow your checklist on some random day over the course of 15 years, ya know? There’s not much money in kidnapping anyone who can’t already afford private security.
In fact, considering the improbability of the types of situation that can be solved by guns I feel completely justified in saying that buying a gun only gives you the illusion of being able to protect the people you care about. If the people you care about die untimely deaths it is overwhelmingly probable that it will happen as a result of some kind of automobile accident in which a gun will not actually be much help.
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Related to correlation/causation- here in Britain, I am pretty certain that the average legal gun owner is wealthier than the average non-gun-owner. That doesn’t mean that guns are a good investment!
Well, I don’t know how many otherwise responsible gun owners commit crimes of passion. I’d like to see some stats which show who is a first time offender. But either way, I trust myself.
I was just giving an example of a hypothetical situation. I don’t expect that that will ever happen, but I also don’t expect that I’ll spiral into depression and shoot myself. And I really don’t expect that I will ever slip up on my checklist. Either I haven’t fully expressed how much I care about gun safety, or for some reason, you don’t believe what some random guy on the internet says. Haha. Probably both.
Ok, I’ll concede that I’ll probably never have to use a gun to protect myself or my family. But no matter how small the chances are, I want to be prepared. And considering how careful I am, and assuming that I’ll never slip up on my checklist, I think the chances of something bad happening are as low or lower than the chances that I’ll someday find myself glad to have a gun.
I hope you can understand my point of view. I certainly understand yours, but I suspect that neither of us will ever convert the other. I’m going to call it quits on this discussion - I have some Firefly to watch.
Narrowness here is good, not bad. Objectively, we’re all at least a little racist, and by some definition this makes us all racists, period.Obviously the study has to pick out one metric and in the United States of America, restricting declarations about racism to groups not everyone has had to deal with before skews the results.Restricting it to black people is a good indicator of general racist attitudes. Asking if people are racist against Tibetans would be a waste of time in this context.
