@John James
Source?
Well, I’m consistently disappointed with “pro-gun” advocates on television. Never once has anyone ever addressed the root issue: production of security. The reason to “have a right” to own guns is in order to self-produce security, should one be unable to afford a bodyguard (which is actually insanely expensive if you need round-the-clock protection because you live in a bad neighborhood because… you’re poor!)
The police are not a security services industry. Police departments have been specifically exempted from the courts of any duty to intervene to protect a citizens who is in the process of being victimized by a criminal. They have the right to intervene should they choose but they have no duty to do so. So, the police are not a security service, even in principle. Their actual function is precisely what their name states: policy enactment. The police are the operational component of government policy, nothing more or less.
And this explains the in-practice uselessness of police in terms of security services. Some departments are worse than others but even the best police departments are unable to respond in under 3 minutes to a gun incident (to which they assign highest priority), even during daylight hours, even in a business district, etc. Most residential areas at night have a good 10-15 minutes response time… if you’ve ever been in a home-invasion situation (I have), that 15 minutes literally feels like eternity and is more than enough time for even a rational home invader to enter, kill, take what he came for, and leave. The irrational home invader is even more terrifying… he doesn’t care if the police show up, he will only be stopped with two to the chest and one to the head.
In every country - even those with ridiculous gun-control measures like Britain and Germany! - there are still lots private citizens running around with guns… they are armored truck drivers, armed premise security, private bodyguards, diplomatic security contractors, and on and on. So, the gun debate is not really about private vs. government gun-ownership. It’s about mass popular gun ownership versus gun ownership only by the government and by those who are privately contracted to work for the wealthy and powerful.
But the anti-populism of the anti-gunners is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Oh well.
Clayton -
I’m sure someone will find some way to whine, but all I did was take the number of murders as a percentage of population and quote the difference. Like I said, the population ratio is roughly 5 to 1…
UK:
Pop: 63,181,775[5]
“Gun murders”: 35 (I didn’t check this statistic, nor the exact definition of what qualifies as a “gun murder”. This is Piers Morgan’s term, and number.)
as percentage of population: 0.000055395721313622486
US:
Pop: 315,079,000[2]
“Gun murders”: 11,458 (again, I didn’t check this, it’s Alex Jones’ number, which Piers Morgan seemed to accept.)
as percentage of population: 0.003636548294237318
0.003636548294237318
- 0.000055395721313622486____
~0.0036
=
<0.004%
Also, a couple notes:
a) Comparing British and American murder rates is useless, meaningless. There is no ceteris paribus here, so there’s no way to assign causation. All you have is random facts and connecting those facts in any particular way, asbent some kind of methodology that can tease out causation, is just demagoguery.
b) The “gun murder rate” is particularly meaningless. Gun murders are no worse than knife murders or head-smashed-on-the-concrete murders. Murder is the problem. The unstated supposition is that, by reducing gun murders, we can reduce overall murder. However, this assumes the point in (a) - that restricting gun ownership will, in fact, lower the violent crime rate. When combined with the observations that AJ made - lower violent crime rates in more heavily armed parts of the US vis-a-vis less armed parts of the US, and lower overall violent crime rate in the US than in Britain - it is easy to see that this entire line of argument is a non-starter.
@JJ: I think the talking-heads would want to take the ratio between the two rates, not their absolute difference. But as I note above, it is all meaningless junk.
Clayton -
That’s what I was looking at.
Yeah in general that kind of goes without saying… Either you’re smart enough to understand that without it being stated, or you’re too dense to follow it when it’s explained to you.
That is actually a point Jones made (or at least tried to make) several times throughout the interview.
But “less guns” sounds so good.
It makes perfect sense. Because, I mean, duh, if nobody had guns, nobody would get shot. You redneck rubes. elitist facepalm
Yeah I actually thought about that too.
That way they could say the US rate is 6465% higher than the UK. Too bad people are too clueless to even consider other instruments people use to murder each other.
I don’t agree with that methodology because it just confuses the issue you’re trying to measure. But either way, as Clayton said it’s still meaningless. Particularly when all you have to do is look at other types of murder, other types of crime, and even overall violent crime…and the UK is horrible among the “civilized” or “developed” or “richest” or whatever else arbitrary differential people like Piers Morgan want to use to make sure those pesky third world or middle eastern countries don’t push the US down on the chart for most “gun murders”.
Morgan: “Do you understand the difference between 11,000 and 35?” (gun murders in US versus UK or something in Europe)
Why is a gun murder so heinous that we can focus entirely on them at an exclusion to all other murders, or all other causes of death? Though, Jones should have answered the question calmly, and then asked why non-gun murders were being excluded, then perhaps quoted a per-capita murder rate (since otherwise a larger population will generally have more murders).
Jones sure does poorly with this. It’s unfortunate that this is just pure dessert for people who want to ban guns. I can see that Jones is not up to following Morgan’s script, and won’t “fall into” his questions, even though avoiding them is seen as validating them. And for the record, I dislike Jones and haven’t ever listened to him before. Even his voice annoys me. And I’ve never owned a gun and have no plans to anytime soon (I’d probably end up harming myself with it). Even though all this I still think that Jones is on the side of the truth.
// Undergunned?? Jones left Morgan literally speechless for almost the entire first segment. //
Yes, Alex was factual. He is well-informed, too. I meant by ‘undergunned’ that he was unprepared to allow Morgan enough rope to hang himself - like the gun president guy was. Almost as though he was a little fearful of not being able to refute Morgan’s bogus arguments. Maybe that comes from having mostly everyone you talk to on a daily basis agree with you.
Some debating nous goes a long way. Angry is good but if you want to get anywhere in a rational debate - and let’s face it, being relatively well-informed is our strength in the liberty movement - it can’t be all unbridalled. We should learn from it, that’s all I’m saying.
@jim: No, I’ve seen Alex in level debate with serious opponents and he’s plenty capable… he had clearly consciously chosen to not debate Morgan not because he was afraid but because he had a better use of the time-segment in mind… to vent on behalf of his audience and to give Morgan a little dose of the medicine he dealt out on Pratt, etc.
Clayton -
//@jim: No, I’ve seen Alex in level debate with serious opponents and he’s plenty capable… he had clearly consciously chosen to not debate Morgan not because he was afraid but because he had a better use of the time-segment in mind… to vent on behalf of his audience and to give Morgan a little dose of the medicine he dealt out on Pratt, etc.//
Hm. Interesting… but that, if it is true, doesn’t endear me to him. To me that would make him pretty immature. I mean, if that was his strategy… to shout down his opponent with a string of facts. If he comes out of this without a change of tact, I’d be dissappointed. Because if you know your stuff and you can debate with people too, how is shouting sombody down going to bring people’s attention towards your trump arguments? Maybe he managed to land some blows by talking over Morgan, but he also forfeited an entire 3rd segment. I’d say he’d be far more effective by patiently waiting for Piers Morgan - or whoever - to make his dubious point/s and then to nail them, one-by-one. This tit-for-tat, two wrongs-make-a-right angle - again, if that’s what it was - is simply noise. Larry Pratt made Morgan look like the prat, and he only had to do what Morgan did to Jones… let him rant and wait your turn without yeilding to the temptation to meet fire with fire.
Perhaps I read it incorrectly, but I thought when Alex flew off the handle, it was because he couldn’t help himself. It looked like a lack of self-control. I’m prepared to keep backing someone if they can learn from mistakes. But lack of self-control is - to me, anyway - still a flaw, not a virtue.
Jones made valid points, but it was at the expense of ignoring Morgan’s question. “A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue.” If you asked me, “How was your day?” and I said, “5+5=10” then what I’m saying isn’t invalid; it’s simply irrelevant. Even if I brought up something surrounding the same topic (like Jones did) and answered you with, “One day equals 24 hours” or “most people make a distinction between day and night,” it’s still irrelevant. How wasn’t Jones committing this fallacy? He did everything except answer the man’s question until 5 minutes into the debate!
And as I said [which you actually quoted]: If anything I would say it was Morgan and his cherry picked statistics questions that were meant to distract from the real issue at hand.
The issue is violent crime in general, or at the very least, murder. As Clayton said, “The unstated supposition is that, by reducing gun murders, we can reduce overall murder.” As others have pointed out, the specific weapon used to murder someone is pretty much irrelevant. But of course, Morgan has a hard on for gun bans and wants them instituted everywhere so that only his body guards can have them. So he strategically chooses to focus on just one “factoid” that seems to support his position (the alleged number of “gun murders”), and ignore anything else, because all the other data hurts his case. He is using the largely irrelevant statistic of gun murders (again, not even using the rate…just the actual nominal figure) as a red herring to distract attention from the original issue of violence and murder…and the fact that statistically stricter gun laws = more crime, more murders.
Just because Jones didn’t lay back and let Morgan proceed with his distraction doesn’t mean Jones was throwing out red herrings. His whole effort was to keep the focus on the real issue, and not let Morgan fool viewers with his misleading selective info presentation.
Your example neglects to mention the part about how our conversation was about 5+5. You left out the part where we were originally talking about if I had 5 dollars and you had 5 dollars, what we could afford to buy. You asked “well what’s 5+5?” If I responded “how was your day”? And you replied with “5+5=10”…obviously your statement was not the red herring.
But you can choose to focus on whatever you want I guess.
I usually can only take Alex Jones in small doses. That being said I don’t think that interview was as bad as the fuss being made over it. I’ve seen him be far more cringe-worthy in the past.
Well done Alex Jones. I read the first page of this thread before watching the video, and I was expecting a lot worse. I thought he did really well there and the buzz that followed his appearance (#1 on US Twitter trends) will bring him and the issues he raised a lot more attention. That far outweighs any “damage” done to the reputation of the movement. He made the CNN producer cry and caused them to abandon their plans for a debate in the third segment… CNN really screwed up and Alex played it brilliantly, as only he can.
Here are a couple of articles with some more relevant statistics than the one Morgan spouts: one and two.
Here is Ben Swann being as brilliant as ever:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMbfEiVk08
Clayton and JJ have already said everything else I wanted to say.
I loved the Jones appearance. Why go a show like Piers Morgan and be serious? No matter what you say or do, they are going to pants you (either during or after). The anti-gun crowd ALREADY thinks the pro-gun crowd are crazy baboons. Imo, Jones achieved two nice things on this interview:
-
bullying Morgan like Morgan often does to his guests
-
passing on the message that there will be a revolution if they try to take the guns… very important to shore up the base
Ben Swann deserves an award… a Nobel prize would be an insult to this man…
Clayton -
I noticed he set all of his Reality Check segments on his YouTube channel to “private”. I’m wondering if the station forced him to do it. From what I saw, his segments kept getting uploaded by various channels throughout the Ron Paul campaign, and eventually he created his own channel and started hosting them himself, presumably to house them in a single, official location, and possibly to generate revenue for the station (so that they would sanction the uploading.) I’m wondering if they revoked their approval.
An interesting tidbit about the station though…
"The reporter himself (Ben Swann) said on his facebook chat that the reason he is able to report so openly on the Paul campaign, and not face the media blackout like other channels do, is because his local Fox news is owned by Raycom Media.
According to their ‘About us’ page, Raycom is:
…an employee-owned company … and owns and/or provides services for 48 television stations in 36 markets and 18 states. Raycom stations cover 12.6% of U.S. television households"
That being said, as mentioned here, the Internet finds a way … Ben Swann Archive
Howdy Ho Marko, I agree with you now.
Oh and this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDlbg1VoMZ0
I of course agree with it but I think they shouldn’t be so repetative…
According to the UN, the US has a homicide rate of 4.2 per 1000. The UK has a homicide rate of 1.2.
That would put the homicide rate of the gun totting US well above that of the gun controlled UK.
On the other hand UK’s homicide rate equals the homicide rate of Serbia — by one survey home to the second most well-armed populace after the Americans.*
So the gun-controlled Brits nonetheless manage to carry out homicide with the same frequency as do inhabitants of a gun-totting Balkan country renowned for mafia executions. Either the British are more inclined to violence than peoples in the Balkans, or else gun control does not bring down homicide.
- Albeit I don’t personally believe they’re actually second, there’s a lot unreported ownership going on in some places that come below Serbia in the survey. Nonetheless they must be pretty well armed, eg Top 20, to show up as second.
From your link:
List of countries by intentional homicide rate per year per 100,000 inhabitants. The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.[1] The legal definition of “intentional homicide” differs among countries. Intentional homicide may or may not include infanticide, assisted suicide or euthanasia. Intentional homicide demographics are affected by changes in trauma care, leading to changed lethality of violent assaults, so the intentional homicide rate may not necessarily indicate the overall level of societal violence.[2] They may also be underreported for political reasons.[3][4] Another problem for the comparability of the following figures is that some data may include attempts. In general the values in these lists should not include attempts except when mentioned otherwise.
Just one more reason these knee-jerk country comparisons are essentially meaningless.