Tag Archives: Assault Weapons

April Fools

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Also May, June, July, etc. Continue reading →

I long ago realized that the common view of human beings as rational decision-makers is hooey. Three things that I have recently encountered have reinforced this for me to the extent that I have been considering applying for membership to another species. The elephants that are featured on my World Wildlife Federation calendar look like an inviting possibility.

I have almost finished Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. One of the many astounding things that his research has uncovered is how incompetent most people are at using probabilities to make decisions. I already knew that many people are poor at calculating the probability of the occurrence of certain types of events, but I never would have guessed that even when they are given the probabilities they are unable to apply them to make utilitarian decisions. One of the many things that he discovered was that people routinely overweight the likelihood of unlikely events, and the effect is substantial. The research studies produced the following table:

Probability (%) 0 1 2 5 10 20 50 80 90 95 98 99 100
Decision weight 0 5.5 8.1 13.2 18.6 26.1 42.1 60.1 71.2 79.3 87.1 91.2 100

So, when people make decisions they exaggerate the possibility of a 1 percent likelihood by a factor of 5.5, and they exaggerate the difference between a certainty and 1 percent failure by a factor of 8.8! The former helps to explain why so many people waste their money playing the Lotto and gambling in casinos. It’s not just that they are fixated upon the payoff (as they are), that fixation makes them think that they have a much better chance of winning than they actually have.

The misjudgment of the difference between 99 and 100 percent results can make people continue to devote resources to projects that are almost certain to fail long after that likelihood has been manifest even to them. This helps explain why people keep pouring money and effort into failing businesses and projects with little chance of success. That 1 percent chance of the project succeeding looks much bigger to them.

I remember distinctly that I had an experience with a project like that. I developed a software system for nursing homes that allowed them to compute what they would be reimbursed by the state of Connecticut while they still had a chance to change policies. We installed it at one of our customers, and the proprietor loved it. I abandoned the project when I discovered that an accounting firm that numbered almost every nursing home in the state as a client already provided this kind of service. When I realized that my chances of competing with them were slim, I abandoned the project, moved on, and never looked back. Many others are apparently just incapable of admitting defeat early.

I have absolutely no idea why anyone would think that something that is 50 percent likely should be valued at only 42.1. Although Kahneman does not address that one, I believe that the assessment is probably correct. Sue has told me that she does not like to take finesses in bridge, which ceteris paribus have a 50 percent chance of succeeding, because she does not like the idea of losing that trick.

In short, most humans should not be trusted with a decision about any matter with a likelihood between 1 percent and 99 percent.

* * *
Since Sandy Hook there has been much discussion about reinstating the ban on “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines. Although I strongly believe in one form of gun control (a national ban on handguns), the arguments presented both in favor of and against assault weapons make me see red. Those in favor of the ban argue that the fact that a weapon that could hold so much ammunition allows a shooter to kill more people than if he needed to reload. I seriously doubt that that is true. The shooter carried two handguns and a shotgun in addition to his rifle, and he had ten magazines for the rifle. It does not take more than a few seconds to eject a magazine and put in a new one. Furthermore, at short range the handguns would be almost as accurate as a rifle. So, maybe he needs to bring four handguns instead of two. Does anyone think that this lunatic would have been deterred by the fact that it would have taken him ten minutes instead of five to fill up twenty-six body bags?

Of course, assault weapons with large magazines are not needed for hunting (other species), but the most salient argument that gun enthusiasts proffer is that if there were a dictatorship, as in, say Syria, and the populace needed to resist, it would need weapons. It is definitely true that the assault weapons would be more useful in such an endeavor than shotguns or handguns. Unfortunately, as the 70,000 dead Syrian rebels have discovered, the air power and tanks that are available to the government render any type of firearm fairly useless.

S.S.

S.S.

Needless to say, the solution to the Sandy Hook problem proposed by the NRA and a few others of arming thousands (millions?) of Fearless Fosdicks hired to patrol the hallways of the schools is so ridiculous as to preclude a serious examination. They can hire Steven Seagal (with his “millions of hours” of training) to do that in Arizona if they want. In Connecticut, the Land of Steady Habits, we prefer that there be no guns at all in the schools.

F.F.

F.F.

The point is that assault weapons kill very few people in the United States, and removing them (assuming that that is even possible) would cause very little, if any, harm, and do very little, if any, good. From a practical point of view this is just not a critically important issue. In short, this is a distraction from the real problems.

* * *
What is an important issue is what has happened to our labor force. Since the collapse of the economy engineered by the geniuses hired by the brokerage firms (I refuse to call them banks) and the previous administration’s misguided policy of trying to establish an “ownership society,” the ratio of employment to the total population has tanked. The Obama administration’s policies have had essentially no effect in the last four years. And yet, the unemployment rate has decreased markedly in that time. How is that possible? There is only one possible answer: lots of people have left the labor force.

Some of them have retired, of course. Another group has gone back to school. However, I was surprised to learn from a podcast produced by the radio show This American Life that fourteen million Americans are now receiving disability payments from the federal government. These people are not getting rich off of this program, but some private companies are:

  • States have been paying private companies to comb the welfare rolls looking for people who could qualify for disability. These companies are paid thousands of dollars for each person whom they successfully move from the temporary state program to the permanent federal one, and they have high success rates.
  • Law firms such as Binder and Binder (thirty thousand disability clients in 2012 alone) contact people whose applications for disability have been rejected by the Social Security Administration. They represent the claimant in a hearing before a judge. Incredibly, no one represents the government, and the lawyers who win receive 25 percent of the awarded backpay, which amounts to about $1 billion per year.

The result of this bizarre system is that, as hard as it is to believe, since 2009 the economy has created about 150,000 jobs per month, but in the same period about 250,000 people per month have applied for disability. The system that was designed to help cripples has become the safety net for people for whom the modern economy has no use. I know a few of these folks; you probably do, as well. I doubt that the current approach is optimal, but I have yet to hear or read of a better approach. It is difficult not to think of Soylent Green at this point.

The Gun Control Debate

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Ban assault weapons or put armed guards in every school? Continue reading →

When I started competing in debate in 1966 I learned that there was only one way to make a prima facie case for a significant change in policy. Every affirmative case began by portraying a compelling need that inhered in the present system. Inherency in this instance meant that the problem could not be addressed by tinkering with the system. The solution required a structural change. The second step was to provide a plan that solved the problem. This approach was based on a concept of burden of proof widely attributed to Richard Whately, an early nineteenth century Archbishop of Dublin in the Church of Ireland.

This line of reasoning has commonly been heard since the massacre of the children at Sandy Hook school. No one publicly denies that the need is compelling; after all, everyone cringes at the sight of blood-spattered youngsters. Those arguing in favor of gun control have asserted that the widespread availability of certain types of weapons systems make this kind of crime possible, and they should therefore be banned. The other side has argued that the only way to prevent these assaults is to increase security in all schools by hiring guards who, presumably, will be able to match the assailant in accuracy and firepower. “It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.”

In the fifteen years in which I was involved in debate I heard many cases concerning gun control, but I never heard anyone propose either of the above plans. In the first place, of course, frustrated young (wait — the latest guy holed up in a survivalist bunker in Alabama is older than I am!) men in those days were not in the habit of taking semi-automatic weapons into public gatherings for the purpose of blowing people away. So, the compelling need was not at all evident.

The gun control plan that several debate teams did propose was the banning of handguns, which were generally defined as firearms with barrels of a limited length, less than a foot or so. These weapons were then and are now used in the vast majority of murders. No one would claim that eliminating them (if that were possible) would prevent all of those murders; some murderers would doubtless choose a different weapon. On the other hand the murder rates in countries that are otherwise comparable to the U.S. are so much lower that it is difficult to argue that there would not be a significant reduction in the total number of homicides. The psychology behind firing a gun, which is a rather obvious phallic symbol, is quite different from the psychology of stabbing or poisoning.

In all of those debates I only heard two cogent argument against the banning of handguns. The first was the claim that widespread gun ownership deters crime. The studies that support this notion are controversial, to say the least. Furthermore, even if the concept is plausible, the guns evidently do a very poor job of deterring murders, which have a permanence not associated with property crimes.

The second argument, which is much more prevalent now than it was at that time, was that we need an armed populace as an assurance against the government getting out of control. This argument is easier to ridicule than it is to refute. It clearly is the reason that the second amendment is in the constitution in the first place, and even if a fascistic or “Mad Max” scenario seems outlandish now, neither is inconceivable. Those supporting a ban on handguns, however, had little difficulty with this argument since a person armed only with a handgun would not pose much of a threat to heavily armed storm troopers or to Mel Gibson.

In a majority of the cases there is a common goal to which everyone is accountable and that policies, practices, and resources are aligned with the goal. Archbishop Whately’s approach began to lose favor in the world of competitive debate in the seventies. Instead, the concepts of systems theory began to be applied to policy considerations. The reasoning was this: “If one system were clearly superior to another, why not adopt it even if the new system does not solve a compelling and inherent problem?”

A ban on handguns (once again assuming that such a notion were practicable) would almost certainly lead to the advantage of fewer murders and suicides, and it is very difficult to imagine disadvantages that would come close to outweighing this benefit. Therefore, an attractive debate case can easily be made.

The same cannot be said of either of the current proposals. The assault weapons ban might prevent an incident like Sandy Hook, but the number of people killed by these weapons in the U.S. is still quite low by any standard. Some of those murderers might well be able to obtain an equally lethal way to accomplish their nefarious purpose. It could also be argued that assault weapons might be useful if the government runs amok. The difficulty of proving the likelihood of such an event could be offset by the importance of maintaining a free and civil society.

The best argument against the placing of armed guards in the schools is the cost. There are over 140,000 schools in the United States, and many of those have more than one building that would need guarding. Furthermore, there is not a scintilla of evidence that deployment of these guards would reduce the number of dead children. Introducing so many guns in schools would inevitably lead to their accidental or purposeful firing. Even if they did deter an assailant from shooting up a school, there are many other places where children congregate. Are we going to station armed guards at every soccer field, movie theater, and amusement park ride? Uh oh, I may have just given Wayne LaPierre an idea.

This last proposal reminds me of the government’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. A handful of jihadists figured out that airport security was incredibly lax in the U.S. and that onboard security was essentially nonexistent. They had no difficulty hijacking four planes and used them to kill 3,000 people. The federal government responded by creating the gigantic Transportation Security Administration, which was apparently mandated to serve as such a visible annoyance that people would not be worried about another hijacking. Surely no one could argue that all of these labor-intensive airport security procedures are worth the money and effort. The agency’s budget is over $8 billion per year! If each passenger wastes fifteen minutes being screened, and their time is valued at $10 per hour, that is another $2 billion lost. If you think that this much spending might be necessary to prevent another terrorist event, then why have there been no attacks on the poorly screened methods of transportation — trains, subways, and ships? No sensible debate team would have ever proposed such a stupid approach to an easily soluble (by locking the cockpit doors on airlines) problem.

In my opinion we would be a lot better off if political decision-makers and pundits thought like debaters, but I am not naive enough to think that it will ever happen.