Writes Jack Hunter:
The Herostratus effect must be an order of magnitude larger than any further attempts to restrict the public's access to guns could hope to be. A decade their senior and having never toked up in my life--despite the multi-billion dollar, decades long drug war--there are several teenagers I know who I could go to if I wanted to have marijuana in front of me within the hour. Not only do far more people want guns than want weed, the sale only has to occur once for the potential 'problem' to persist in the case of firearms. With drugs it must happen over and over and over again. The idea that the government has the capacity to control gun access is beyond risible.
Then there are Pinterest-primed pieces of propaganda like this that, despite their cheap polemical attractiveness, carry with them a cautionary message worth contemplating:
But this might provide a clearer explanation for why gun control is a perennial objective of the leftist Establishment:
The inverse correlation between the percentage of a state's population that owns guns and Obama's share of the vote in 2012 is a vigorous .78 (p = 0). This is affordable family formation territory. Gun ownership rates thus 'explain' over 60% of how the states voted. Parenthetically, the most conspicuous outlier is Vermont, a deeply blue but also very rural state that has a fairly high number of firearms in it. Removing it from the analysis (not that there is necessarily any reason to do so) pushes the correlation up to .82.
Gun ownership rates tell a lot more about a state's political orientation than they do about its residents proclivity for violence. In fact, there is no meaningful relationship between gun ownership and homicide rates at the state level (r = .09, p = .52).
In the cause of preventing future tragedies, it would make FAR more sense to ban the media from ever mentioning the names of these evil murderers than to further restrict guns. Think they'll give up their 1st Amendment rights? For public safety?Ever the proverbial fool, after seeing that pithy rhetorical ploy I knew I had to say something.
The Herostratus effect must be an order of magnitude larger than any further attempts to restrict the public's access to guns could hope to be. A decade their senior and having never toked up in my life--despite the multi-billion dollar, decades long drug war--there are several teenagers I know who I could go to if I wanted to have marijuana in front of me within the hour. Not only do far more people want guns than want weed, the sale only has to occur once for the potential 'problem' to persist in the case of firearms. With drugs it must happen over and over and over again. The idea that the government has the capacity to control gun access is beyond risible.
Then there are Pinterest-primed pieces of propaganda like this that, despite their cheap polemical attractiveness, carry with them a cautionary message worth contemplating:
But this might provide a clearer explanation for why gun control is a perennial objective of the leftist Establishment:
The inverse correlation between the percentage of a state's population that owns guns and Obama's share of the vote in 2012 is a vigorous .78 (p = 0). This is affordable family formation territory. Gun ownership rates thus 'explain' over 60% of how the states voted. Parenthetically, the most conspicuous outlier is Vermont, a deeply blue but also very rural state that has a fairly high number of firearms in it. Removing it from the analysis (not that there is necessarily any reason to do so) pushes the correlation up to .82.
Gun ownership rates tell a lot more about a state's political orientation than they do about its residents proclivity for violence. In fact, there is no meaningful relationship between gun ownership and homicide rates at the state level (r = .09, p = .52).
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