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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.

The South isn't notably more hoplophilic than e.g. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, or Alaska. Those all have loose gun laws.

Indeed, the South has LOWER gun ownership rates than those named states.

And yet those states are significantly less violent than the national average, let alone the South.

So if you're trying to claim a correlation I would bet you can find a stronger one than that.

This is kind of the glaring issue in the U.S., where homicide rates simply do not follow from gun ownership rates on a state-by-state basis. And violence is, of course, concentrated in cities. So in practice, gun control laws punish suburbs and rural areas for urbanites' bad behavior.

Quite unfair, no?

No. You're going to have to spell it out for me. The number of times of a tragic misunderstanding, accident, or interpersonal dispute involving a fire extinguisher led to severe injury or death is functionally zero. If your fire extinguisher had a greater chance of exploding and killing you than it did of stopping a fire, keeping one in your kitchen would be dumb.

The point is that because an event is rare that doesn't mean that a precaution against it is unjustified.

I suspect that house fires are actually rarer than most violent crime these days. The rate of deaths due to fire is certainly on the decline

And yet, the impact of a fire, if it happens, is massive enough that the risk probably shouldn't be ignored. Clipping the tail risk is a good idea.

You wouldn't dismiss somebody as a paranoid wacko for keeping fire-suppression tools around should the need arise, even if the odds are infinitesimal.

But it is seemingly easy to say that a guy who keeps a gun around is being paranoid, without even grappling with the actual risk imposed if you do happen to be victimized by a criminal.

So mitigating the risks of harm due to fire = keeping a fire extinguisher around.

Mitigating the risk of harm due to crime = ?

Thinking stochastically, there are steps you can take to minimize the risk of crime/fire happening, but given how much damage can be done, and given the fact that you can never get the risk down to zero, what steps is it reasonable to take?

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