After yet another mass public shooting in a gun-free zone, certain people -- and honestly, we all know who -- have taken to castigating those who called for prayer for the victims and their families. "Thoughts and prayers" aren't enough, they argue, and instead our response should be to enact stricter gun-control laws to prevent future tragedies -- something like California's assault weapons ban, for example. One commentator asserted that we should "stop thinking . . . start acting."
Leaving aside the disgusting opportunism and shocking foolishness of explicitly calling for thoughtless action born out of unreasoning fear, and ignoring the fact that most of the gun control measures proposed were already in place in California, it's worthy examining the basic premise -- that reducing the number of guns not owned by the state would reduce crime -- in more detail. It's popped up not only after every report of a shooting (except the Paris attacks, where guns were already banned, rendering the argument silly), and on university campuses as the merits of allowing CHL holders to carry on campus were debated. The US, more than any other developed country, suffers from violent crime; alleviating that problem has value as more than a political prop.
Those calling for gun control were quick with statistics showing, as one article claimed, that more guns led to more deaths.
Convincing, no doubt -- they have graphs! The trouble is, this particular graph is deceiving. Indeed, it could only ever have been intended to deceive. It shows guns per 100 people on the x-axis, and "gun-related deaths per 100,000 people" on the y-axis, and a clear positive correlation between the two. "More guns means more deaths"! Except "deaths" wasn't on either axis, and what was is misleading. The catch-all "gun-related deaths" includes homicides, suicides, and accidental discharges, as well as justifiable homicides -- cases in which someone, either a private citizen or police, used a gun to defend themselves against a threat to their life. That, I would argue, is precisely the point of gun ownership, and yet it is lumped together with homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths when drawing conclusions. It would be possible to break through the deception and look at a more detailed breakdown -- gun homicide and suicide rates do actually increase with gun ownership rates -- but that's not actually the relevant statistic.
It is to be expected that more guns would lead to more gun deaths. That is generally conceded, and irrelevant. It would be far more telling to know how deaths in general change. Unless you have a preference which weapon you're killed with, that's what matters. Homicide rate is particularly interesting -- I've plotted the data myself in the past, but a more recent article from the Crime Prevention Research Center contains a much prettier graph, seen below.
In other words, as far as the data we have is able to show, gun ownership has no significant effect on homicide rates. Someone intent on committing murder will, regardless of what implements are available. Culture and economic factors, clearly, play a larger role in determining homicide rates.
Absent the placebo provided by pointless -- at best -- attempts at gun control, the best option for most of us truly is to keep the victims in our prayers.
The first major Republican presidential primary debate takes place in only three days. In an attempt to avoid hosting a circus, the debate’s sponsor, Fox News, capped the number of participants at ten, to be selected using an aggregate of the five most recent reliable polls - the top ten would be included; the bottom seven left out. The rationale is obvious: with seventeen candidates on stage, some of them with no chance, even in their own minds, of actually winning the presidency, none of the candidates would have time to convey any sort of message. After watching the debate, viewers would be left knowing just as little about the candidates as they did before.
As good as the argument for limiting the field is, there is an argument on the other side. The polls going into the average are generally very imprecise, with large margins of error. When distinguishing between the tenth and eleventh place candidate, a few percentage points could make an enormous difference; if the polling average includes polls with a six-point margin of error, how sure can we be that we really got the top ten?
The answer is that we can't be certain, but we can be reasonably sure, as long as we do the calculation correctly. Taking the weighted average of the polls, accounting for the margin of error of each one (strangely enough, Real Clear Politics, one of the leading sources of aggregate polls, does not do this), it's possible to guess at the actual value with much more precision than any one of the polls going into the analysis, as shown in the graph below (the red line marks the tenth candidate).
It should be clear that, although it's still difficult to make a noticeable difference between the tenth (Christie) and eleventh (Perry) candidates, the margin of error has dropped to 1.95 percentage points - enough that the distinction between one candidate and another, even in the middle of the pack, is not entirely arbitrary. It is, for example, possible to say with almost complete certainty that Cruz, the leading candidate from the lower tier, is polling well ahead of Graham, whereas this wasn't necessarily possible with every poll that went into the analysis.
It should also be noted that the values calculated here don't match those from RCP's averaged polls, and it does change the order: RCP incorrectly has Walker slightly ahead of Bush, whereas in reality the opposite is the case. As long as Fox does its due diligence and avoids falling into elementary errors, we can be reasonably certain that the ten candidates on stage will be the top ten candidates in national polls. Whether those national polls have any meaning at all this early in the contest remains to be seen, but the process, at least, is sound.
Slight of build, his once-dark hair first tinged with gray, then snow white, a Republican representative from the 14th Congressional District - Galveston and its environs - once walked the halls of the Capitol unbowed. Where others followed party loyalty, this man fought so singlemindedly and consistently for his view of limited government and personal liberty that he earned the nickname “Dr. No,” an homage to his medical degree and the frequency with which his convictions brought him into conflict with proposed legislation. Ron Paul was unbreakable, unshakable, and possessed of a kind dogged determination not to yield found more often in myth than reality. The modern libertarian movement that he helped father took the porcupine as an unofficial mascot, but it could just as easily have used a badger in honor of the congressman: it is an animal which, without being remarkable for its size or apparent strength, is, because of its persistence, a formidable adversary.
Political considerations, without fail, took a back seat to matters of conviction. Ron Paul was not afraid to be the only voice of dissent, and not afraid to call out the leaders in his own party when they strayed from his vision of conservative orthodoxy. His bills - whether or not they represented positions taken by the majority of his own party - died quiet deaths in committee, the clearest possible signal that party leaders intended to neutralize him. None of it mattered to the grandfatherly congressman, who would fight any battle. He was the politician the cynics tell you doesn’t exist, who will not engage in the dishonesty and underhandedness rampant in politics; Jefferson Smith, but shorter. His commitment to principle drew grudging respect from his enemies, even as they worked to sabotage him.
The cynics, however, are usually right. Ron Paul was an anomaly in American politics; his allies few and far between. With his retirement after yet another unsuccessful presidential run in 2012, politics lost a truly unique figure. For a time, it appeared that his son, Rand, might fill that void. Swept into the Senate in 2010 on a wave of conservative opposition to far-reaching regulation and subsidization of health insurance, freshman Senator Paul began as his father had. He was the in the first wave of so-called “Tea Party” senators, the first breach in the dam of political orthodoxy enforced by corporate interests in the major parties, and he lived up to that mission.
For a time - but Rand Paul was not his father. He would fight, but he did not share his father’s resignation to being neutralized. Where Ron Paul was content to do nothing at all before doing something he believed to be wrong, Rand Paul was not. From the beginning, even as he made party leaders uncomfortable, his sights were set on bigger goals. Compromise and political maneuvering were second nature to Senator Paul, just as they were anathema to Representative Paul. Senator Paul began more socially conservative than his father, recognizing that the 14th Amendment gave Congress the authority to ban abortion, and he pledged to fight for that as well as for his father’s goal of stripping the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction (allowing states to make their own laws). He attached personhood amendments to appropriations bills, reintroduced his father’s bill stripping Supreme Court jurisdiction, and held the line as bravely and as staunchly as his father had . . . for a time. As time went on and he realized that the young voters whose votes he was courting did not agree, however, Senator Paul did something his father never had: he backed down. His rhetoric grew quiet, his proposals shifted from personhood to the half-measures “pro-life” politicians content their constituents with, and he called for a “truce” on all social issues. Senator Paul was not his father.
It wasn’t just on social issues that the inherited obstinacy had crumbled. Even at the beginning of his campaign, all of the future senator’s positions were moderated to be more palatable to the traditional conservatives his father had never quite won over. Non-interventionism, but not the radical non-interventionism of Representative Paul. States’ rights, but returned to the political mainstream. Balance the budget, but in five years - not now. Once elected, Senator Paul began to bend back. Conservatives, he now saw, weren’t his ideal constituency. Instead, he began to move back toward the young libertarians who had supported his father. Social issues were unimportant to them - or they disagreed with Senator Paul’s stance - so social issues were unimportant to Senator Paul. Privacy and pot were important to young libertarians, so privacy and pot were important to Senator Paul. Where his father had worked to change minds, the younger Paul changed his emphasis.
This was nothing out of the ordinary. Unlike his father, Rand was going to play the game just like everybody else, and play it well. The reasoning was clear: Ron had a dedicated following that wasn’t quite large enough to win a national election. If a more palatable version who could keep that following while making deeper inroads into both the political mainstream and the libertarian movement, a President Paul would be well within reach. The reasoning was clear, but there was a mistake: Ron Paul had earned the respect of supporters and enemies alike precisely because he did not bend with the political wind. He didn’t pander, and when he took a position you could know that it represented his convictions, that he would fight for it. The same couldn’t be said for Rand. An endorsement from Ron Paul was a guarantee that Ron Paul believed he’d found the best man for the job - high praise indeed. Rand Paul, in contrast, chose to endorse his fellow Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, in his primary battle against a conservative challenger. Even before Paul’s staff admitted that the move was driven by political calculations (looking forward to the 2016 presidential election), no one believed that Rand Paul believed that McConnell, as bitter an opponent of conservatives as you’ll find in the Republican Party, was the best man for the job, only that Paul knew that McConnell exerted tremendous control over both the Kentucky GOP and the Senate.
Without the traits that made his father great, Rand is only another senator. A reasonably good one, and one whose policy positions appear more in agreement with most conservatives than his father’s, but one who embraced politics as usual. Representative Paul was more than his positions, Senator Paul, less. The father’s mantle fell to the ground, not to the son, and voters saw: where his father had a dedicated group of supporters who could break fundraising records despite their candidate sitting far back in the polls, the younger Paul has been in the middle of the pack of 2016 contenders in both fundraising and polling. Appropriately, Ted Cruz, the man whose disregard for “the way things have always been done” most closely matched Ron Paul’s, has carried on the tradition of building a band of zealous supporters whose passion and fundraising outpaces their numbers (although, in part on the strength of having called out Republican leadership in a style very reminiscent of the elder Paul’s willingness to take on any fight, polling numbers have begun to catch up with fundraising). It is Cruz and Representative Justin Amash and a few others who picked up the standard of opposition to politics as usual, while Paul found himself changed by the system, rather than changing it. The reckless courage that marked the Paul name is gone; the glory is departed - Ichabod!