I'm quite impressed by this piece on the NY Review of Books by Gary Wills. It's the most thorough take-down of the shoddy Second Amendment Scholarship now prevalent that it's a pity that it didn't get more traction when it was written...almost two decades ago. The whole thing repays a careful read, and even the exchange that Wills has with the other authors is quite informative, though (justifiably!) snarky.
This is a nice graphical summary of violence in America. It got a good deal of play thanks to Ezra Klein's derived blogging about it in the Post.
Some nice scatter plots of gun deaths vs. gun ownership internationally.
A great report, featuring a series of graphs about gun violence in the OECD. It's a UK production.
A short post in the Atlantic by Jonathan Stray with some key information on gun violence in the U.S.
A list of all the provisions from the various States' Bills of Rights bearing some relation to the Second Amendment. Really happy this is out there.
That's all for now. The talk is basically done. Just tweaking it and preparing the slide show.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Some Good Quotations
A few interesting quotations and perspectives I gleaned from reviewing John Donohue's debate with Don Kilmer on guns and gun control on C-span.
From Donohue's C-Span Debate with Don Kilmer:
"To assert that the Constitution is a barrier to reasonable gun laws, in the face of the unanimous judgment of the federal courts to the contrary, exceeds the limits of principled advocacy. It is time for the NRA and its followers in Congress to stop trying to twist the Second Amendment from a reasoned (if antiquated) empowerment for a militia into a bulletproof personal right for anyone to wield deadly weaponry beyond legislative control.”
--Erwin Griswold, former Soliciter General under Richard Nixon and Dean of Harvard Law.
The Second Amendment was "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I’ve ever seen in my life time. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies--the militias--[preamble] would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment [referring to the preamble] refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires."
--Former Chief Justice Warren Burger on McNeil Lehrer in 1991.
"First, we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period ... with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel."
--Wayne LaPierre, May 1, 1999 speech after the Columbine shootings.
"If it's crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," LaPierre said in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press. "I think the American people think it's crazy not to do it. It's the one thing that would keep people safe."
--Wayne LaPierre, Sunday, December 23, 2012, on the heels of Sandy Hook.
National Crime Victimization Survey: Guns are used in self defense approximately 47,000 times/year (=8/10 of 1% or 0.008% of violent crimes). Between 2005 and 2010, an average of 232,000 guns were stolen annually, meaning that for every time a gun is used in self-defense, 5 guns are stolen.
Lastly, Violence in America: Five Graphs. Very effective presentation.
A late addition, on general crime in the OECD nations. Good for broad comparisons.
"To assert that the Constitution is a barrier to reasonable gun laws, in the face of the unanimous judgment of the federal courts to the contrary, exceeds the limits of principled advocacy. It is time for the NRA and its followers in Congress to stop trying to twist the Second Amendment from a reasoned (if antiquated) empowerment for a militia into a bulletproof personal right for anyone to wield deadly weaponry beyond legislative control.”
--Erwin Griswold, former Soliciter General under Richard Nixon and Dean of Harvard Law.
The Second Amendment was "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I’ve ever seen in my life time. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies--the militias--[preamble] would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment [referring to the preamble] refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires."
--Former Chief Justice Warren Burger on McNeil Lehrer in 1991.
"First, we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period ... with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel."
--Wayne LaPierre, May 1, 1999 speech after the Columbine shootings.
"If it's crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," LaPierre said in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press. "I think the American people think it's crazy not to do it. It's the one thing that would keep people safe."
--Wayne LaPierre, Sunday, December 23, 2012, on the heels of Sandy Hook.
National Crime Victimization Survey: Guns are used in self defense approximately 47,000 times/year (=8/10 of 1% or 0.008% of violent crimes). Between 2005 and 2010, an average of 232,000 guns were stolen annually, meaning that for every time a gun is used in self-defense, 5 guns are stolen.
Lastly, Violence in America: Five Graphs. Very effective presentation.
A late addition, on general crime in the OECD nations. Good for broad comparisons.
Skepticamp! (And Some Notes on Guns!)
The 2014 Atlanta Skepticamp is almost upon us! As with last year, there will be lots of little presentations, and for the second time now, I'll be doing one. I'm actually pretty excited about it. I've chosen quite the topic, too: Guns!
So the relation between guns and skepticism might appear rather mysterious, but my general thought runs along these lines: Our contemporary debate about guns tends to run along three strands: Facts about contemporary gun violence; historical and legal claims about the Second Amendment; and philosophical justifications for (or against) gun ownership. And canvassing that ground, or at least a bit of it, will be the purpose of my talk. The skepticism part comes with the sheer glut of nonsense surrounding the debate.
For this post, though, I'd just like to make a tidy list of the references I've looked at so far, first so I can actually shut down my computer without losing all those tabs(!), and second so I have some record of what I've actually been looking at!
So here are the links I've found helpful, sorted by category.
I. The Data:
This Salon piece gives a brief review of the state of the research into gun control, and in particular gives a nice epidemiological perspective. It's essentially a rejoinder to Lott's "data" showing that concealed carry laws reduced crime. It's chock-full of good links.
"The NRA's War On Gun Science" is a nice piece about the more recent history the gun lobby has of defunding gun research. Truly disheartening.
The Harvard Injury Control Research Center has a nice and short breakdown on the latest state of the research on gun violence vs. levels of ownership.
This is a very interesting study on the use of guns in altercations. It's seeking to ask that small percentage of people who have either seen or been directly involved in any altercation involving guns what their role was (offensive, defensive, victim, etc.). The study interviewed all claims to self-defense, and then had those stories reviewed by criminal judges to make a prima facie claim about whether those uses were legal. The results are about what you'd expect.
This is a useful chart of international comparisons that Charles Blow used as his Op-Ed in the Times shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting.
Some useful Pew data on gun ownership trends.
This is an incredibly useful chart on Wikipedia that breaks down firearm-related violence nationally. The chart is great...but one gripe: You can't easily get it to Excel. The data is larded with text, so it takes some clean-up work to make it easy to chart.
U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health. That's the title of the report jointly published by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. It's a bleak read. A short journalistic piece giving the broad outlines can be found here.
A short Washington Post piece on the astonishingly high levels of gun ownership in the U.S., with charts!
A very long piece criticizing Lott's More Guns, Less Crime hypothesis, by Ian Ayres and John Donohue. Donohue has done some really first-rate work on, especially, criminological metasurveys. Good stuff. Thick, though.
II. The Second Amendment and the Legal Precedent
This is an extremely interesting and provocative paper by Carl Bogus about the origins of the Second Amendment, and in particular the relation to the institution of slavery in the southern states. A shorter review of the article by Thom Hartmann can be found here.
The ever-cantankerous Richard Posner wrote this fabulous takedown in The New Republic of the horrible Scalia opinion in Heller shortly after it was published. It's really a gem of an article; a first-rate example of legal scholarship for a popular audience.
This is Justice Stevens' dissenting opinion in Heller. It's a model dissent, and does a great job of picking apart Scalia. Note that there are links to the other parts of the issued opinions on the case at the top.
"The Embarrassing Second Amendment" is a nice review of the scholarship and history by Sanford Levinson. His case strikes me as fairly weak, but at least conciliatory and charitable toward the republican libertarian line of argument.
III. The Philosophy
"Why Gun Control Is Not Enough" is a nice, short piece by Jeff McMahan at the Stone in the Times. It's primarily on the philosophy of gun control. The argument is, to my mind, compelling. McMahan did a nice Philosophy Bites episode on the same topic that's short and sweet. It's here.
I wish there were more philosophy on the topic out there, but there just doesn't appear to be much on it right now. McMahan gives a plausible reason for that: the virtual unanimity of the philosophy world outside the small circle of libertarians who write papers to one another. It would be good to see more discussion of the problem in social ethics circles.
A late entry: John Donohue has participated in several debates on the topic of gun control. Unfortunately, while he's obviously a very smart guy, he's a terrible public speaker. But two of his performances may be found here and here.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Sunday, April 13, 2014
The Poetics
So as I mentioned, I've been reading the Butcher translation of Aristotle's Poetics. As one might expect, it's rather dry. For all that, though, it's quite interesting, and is, so far as I know, the earliest preserved systematic account of the subject.
Aristotle begins with a bit of taxonomy. Poetry is a type of imitation, and includes as its subspecies "Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms." After building out the taxonomies a bit, things get interesting.
There are, apparently, two basic "drives" that result in our poetic tendencies: Our natural inclination toward imitation, and our corresponding inclination toward harmony and rhythm. There's a bit more interest in the first part, since Aristotle (plausibly) thinks that imitation is a primary vehicle of learning. The fact of our enjoyment of poetry, on this account, is at least related to our enjoyment of learning, and in particular, of recognition.
This is, of course, highly reminiscent of Plato's criticisms in Republic II-III. Plato doesn't deny that people learn from poetry; his critique rather relies on it. The problem is that they (often) learn the wrong lessons, and in particular, they learn that gods are frivolous and men ignoble; that being, say, a general, amounts to little more than, e.g. giving grand speeches. It's rather that the spectacle of the stage distracts them from the actual practices that serve as the objects of imitation.
But back to Aristotle. The first pass at defining tragedy comes in Chapter VI:
I've never been very satisfied with the discussions of this term, since they seem to imply (implausibly) that fear and pity are being treated as analogues to pollution or disease, and that the artist's aim should therefore be to give people a platform for the expression of these emotions. There's something compelling about this, to be sure, since pity and fear involve negative judgments, and insofar as they are harbored without avenues of expression, can develop into forms of psychological trauma. That said, I suspect that this, falling quickly on the heels of a discussion of the value of imitation for learning, implies no more than that aim of tragedy is to teach people the proper expression of pity and fear, not simply by provoking (or eliciting) those emotions from their audience, but by giving them an example of how such events should be met. In this case, the primary emphasis of the catharsis here might just be the development of human empathy. I, at least, like that reading better.
Anyhow, we're discussing the work today at my little group, and though I've had to work myself into it, I'm now rather looking forward to it.
Aristotle begins with a bit of taxonomy. Poetry is a type of imitation, and includes as its subspecies "Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms." After building out the taxonomies a bit, things get interesting.
There are, apparently, two basic "drives" that result in our poetic tendencies: Our natural inclination toward imitation, and our corresponding inclination toward harmony and rhythm. There's a bit more interest in the first part, since Aristotle (plausibly) thinks that imitation is a primary vehicle of learning. The fact of our enjoyment of poetry, on this account, is at least related to our enjoyment of learning, and in particular, of recognition.
This is, of course, highly reminiscent of Plato's criticisms in Republic II-III. Plato doesn't deny that people learn from poetry; his critique rather relies on it. The problem is that they (often) learn the wrong lessons, and in particular, they learn that gods are frivolous and men ignoble; that being, say, a general, amounts to little more than, e.g. giving grand speeches. It's rather that the spectacle of the stage distracts them from the actual practices that serve as the objects of imitation.
But back to Aristotle. The first pass at defining tragedy comes in Chapter VI:
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. By 'language embellished,' I mean language into which rhythm, 'harmony' and song enter. By 'the several kinds in separate parts,' I mean, that some parts are rendered through the medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song.I'm reminded, reviewing his definition and immediate discussion of it, of the tremendous value of Aristotle's method. He begins by defining a domain (imitation), then discussing its variations, finally narrowing in on tragedy and its essential characteristics (in this case, the imitation of action concerning characters of a higher type, and goes on to identify a specific purpose: the proper "purgation" of pity and fear. The Greek for "purgation" is κάθαρσις. The term has ritual connotations, denoting purification from pollutants.
I've never been very satisfied with the discussions of this term, since they seem to imply (implausibly) that fear and pity are being treated as analogues to pollution or disease, and that the artist's aim should therefore be to give people a platform for the expression of these emotions. There's something compelling about this, to be sure, since pity and fear involve negative judgments, and insofar as they are harbored without avenues of expression, can develop into forms of psychological trauma. That said, I suspect that this, falling quickly on the heels of a discussion of the value of imitation for learning, implies no more than that aim of tragedy is to teach people the proper expression of pity and fear, not simply by provoking (or eliciting) those emotions from their audience, but by giving them an example of how such events should be met. In this case, the primary emphasis of the catharsis here might just be the development of human empathy. I, at least, like that reading better.
Anyhow, we're discussing the work today at my little group, and though I've had to work myself into it, I'm now rather looking forward to it.
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