I would be interested in seeing a study that compared two cadres of students - one that chose lesser schools where they were top performers - and another which chose elite schools where they were not at the top of their classes. You could use SAT or ACT scores to build these comparable groups.
How would those two groups perform over the course of their careers?
I suspect the first group would do better - but that’s my (unfounded) conjecture.
Tman
3988
Ken White over at Popehat has what I think is the best article on gun control that I’ve read. Not gun control per se:
Much of our modern American dialogue about gun rights and gun control is like that. We yell, we signal to the like-minded, we circle our wagons, we take shots at opponents. But we don’t change minds. Take a look at the discussion of guns on your Facebook feed right now. Do you think it’s going to build a majority on any issue?
and …
If we had the “reasonable gun control” I keep hearing about, what guns would be limited? I’m arguably not a complete idiot, but I can’t figure it out. I hear “nobody wants to take away all your guns” a lot — which seems demonstrably false — but what guns do gun-control advocates want to take away, or restrict? Most of the time I don’t know and I suspect that the advocates don’t know either.
That’s because there’s a terminology gap. Many people advocating for gun control mangle and misuse descriptive words about guns. No doubt some of them are being deliberately ambiguous, but I think most people just haven’t educated themselves on the meaning of a relatively small array of terms. That’s how you get a debate framed around gibberish like “multi-automatic round weapons” and the like. You get people using “semi-automatic” and “automatic” without knowing what they mean, and you get the term “assault weapon” thrown about as if it means more than whatever we choose to make it mean, which it does not.
Nice, to the point article, on how we must engage in dialogue if anyone hopes to move the needle.
Take a look at the discussion of guns on your Facebook feed right now.
I think I see one political post per month on my Facebook feed. And even that’s too much.
ShivaX
3990
Ken White’s article is very good one. He hits a lot of important points.
Tman
3991
So Ken got an op-ed with this article. And then as he says in his twitter feed:
Then I read the comments
Whooosh
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1213-white-productive-gun-debate-20151213-story.html
And his twitter followers are having fun looking through them.
Somewhere in the dank, musty depths of this thread was the story of the woman who opened fire at a pair of shoplifters who were stealing some items from a Home Depot. Here’s the follow-up:
She was charged with one count of reckless use, handling or discharge of a firearm.
…
Ms. Duva-Rodriguez entered a plea of no contest to the charge on Oct. 26. On Wednesday, she appeared in a Rochester Hills courtroom and was granted 18 months’ probation. Her permit to carry a concealed weapon was revoked until at least 2023.
She didn’t hit anyone, but apparently did manage to nick a tire on the getaway SUV, eventually causing it to become flat. The shoplifters were later peacefully arrested.
Sadly, beyond being convicted of a crime, Duva-Rodriguez has found that opening fire in a crowded parking lot at a pair of unarmed thieves did not meet with the unanimous approval of society at large. This has crushed her spirit:
“I tried to help,” she said. “And I learned my lesson that I will never help anybody again.”
Yes, thank you. Please no more help.
JonRowe
3994
Your privilege to “help” has been revoked until 2023.
Miramon
3995
What? No assault with a deadly weapon? No attempted murder? For a civilian shooting at a shoplifter? That’s insane. She should be in prison for that.
ShivaX
3996
Yeah, I read about that. Somehow she doesn’t get that shoplifting isn’t a felony. Felonies, generally, you can use a weapon to prevent. Depending on where you are, you can possibly use them to protect yourself if you feel there is imminent threat to you. She doesn’t qualify for either, even remotely.
If anything, she’s lucky her aim was off and she didn’t hit them, so she got a much lighter punishment than if she had.
I love how her lesson she takes away is to never help anyone, instead of learn the fucking laws of weapon ownership. I guess being bitter and petty is easier than educating yourself.
ShivaX
3997
She missed and murder would imply malicious intent. It’s negligence for sure, but possibly not felony negligence (since that typically requires someone to actually be hurt). They charged her with the crime that’s on the books for what she did, and likely the judge went easy on her because she plead no contest and no one was actually hurt.
It does make me wonder about the CCW permit requirements of her area though that she evidently never had to learn about when she can use the damned thing. As near as I can tell all you need to do is pass a safety course, which isn’t out of the ordinary. I’d like to see a legal aspect on weapons permits myself. Not shooting yourself or loved ones is all well and a good, but not shooting random people because you can’t be bothered to learn the laws is a big problem as well.
An interesting article in the NYT on Missouri’s gun control laws and the aftermath of weakening them:
In the past decade, Missouri has been a natural experiment in what happens when a state relaxes its gun control laws. For decades, it had one of the nation’s strongest measures to keep guns from dangerous people: a requirement that all handgun buyers get a gun permit by undergoing a background check in person at a sheriff’s office.
But the legislature repealed that in 2007 and approved a flurry of other changes, including, last year, lowering the legal age to carry a concealed gun to 19.
…
Research by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found that in the first six years after the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, the gun homicide rate was 16 percent higher than it was the six years before. During the same period, the national rate declined by 11 percent. After Professor Webster controlled for poverty and other factors that could influence the homicide rate, and took into account homicide rates in other states, the result was slightly higher, rising by 18 percent in Missouri.
Correlation may not equate to causality, etc., and the rest of the article goes on to note that some states that tightened gun laws didn’t see a corresponding decrease (over the national average) in gun-related deaths. But that in 1995 Connecticut enacted a law similar to the one Missouri repealed, and gun homicides declined by 40 percent in the next decade, far outstripping the (precipitous) national decline elsewhere.
The rest of the article has less hard data, but talks about the political situation in Missouri, underground gun-running between states (and why that makes gathering data difficult), and the relative paucity of studies like this one. It’s long, but a good read.
The NBA is going to run some ads against gun violence during their usual Christmas slate of games.
At first I thought this was a perfect match and I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t been done earlier. There are, umm, obvious racial connections between per-capita victims/perpetrators of gun violence and the majority of NBA basketball players.
Then I learned it was a Bloomberg joint, and the ad itself fails to make any kind of appeal toward inner city communities about ending violence from within. It doesn’t outright call for gun control – I’ll leave the funniest lines as an exercise for budding conspiracy theorists – but there’s not a lot of juice here in any case.
Oh well.
Alstein
4000
A lot of NBA players are big into gun rights- many of them carry out of fear. The NBA has tried to crack down on that after the Gilbert Arenas incident.
So as of today, Texas has an “open carry” law across the state:
The change directly affects only a small fraction of Texans — 925,000 men and women with active state-issued licenses to carry a concealed firearm, close to 4 percent of the state’s 27.4 million residents. Only those with a concealed-handgun permit are allowed to open carry, and all of them must submit their fingerprints and pass a criminal background check.
I guess I need some help here – was it previously illegal to openly carry a pistol? Texas (and apparently most other states) have no problems with a civilian carrying a rifle pretty much anywhere:
Texas has no prohibition on the open carrying of rifles, shotguns and other long guns, a right that gun owners have taken advantage of in recent years by showing up at open-carry rallies and other events with loaded AR-15s and other military-style rifles strapped across their backs.
…which seems appropriate given the popularity of hunting.
I suppose I thought that possessing/wearing a legally-purchased weapon was OK in most public places as long as the bearer didn’t try and conceal it, but is that typically not the case for pistols? Is it only legal to use a pistol on your own property or a shooting range?
ShivaX
4002
It varies wildly depending on the state.
In Texas the law was likely written for hunters, so that going hunting wasn’t a pain the ass if someone saw you with a shotgun or whatever. Pistols aren’t typically hunting weapons, so they needed to be concealed. In almost every case of concealed = legal, open carry = illegal what happens is : you’re carrying concealed. Some one sees your weapon (it prints under clothing, your coat/jacket moves and they see it, whatever), you have now broken the law and can be arrested or fined.
Obviously there are exceptions to this like personal property and shooting ranges, but that’s the gist of the origin of open carry in most places. Then it got sort of hijacked by loonies who want to go to Walmart with AR-15s at combat-ready. Somehow those loonies won in Texas and got open carry for pistols as well, I guess the logic of “I can’t open carry a pistol, but walking around with my AR-15 is fine? Well lets show people how stupid that is” worked out in the end for them, though it IS Texas so I’m sure it wasn’t a huge stretch that it came about.
olaf
4003
The vast majority (45 of 50) of states permit open carry of a handgun. Texas too, now, though you need a concealed carry permit to open carry a pistol, which entails a background check, fingerprinting and a class.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a very misleading headline on the executive order the President is cooking up (or has cooked up?), saying that it would require a FFL for any sales at all (which would be a tremendously, flagrantly illegal requirement). Here’s a summary of what we’re actually getting:
[ul]
[li][New regulations will] clarify that it doesn’t matter where you conduct your business—from a store, at gun shows, or over the Internet: If you’re in the business of selling firearms, you must get a license and conduct background checks. (Fishbreath says: As far as I can tell, this doesn’t actually do anything, except potentially crowd out the occasional private seller renting a table at a gun show. I can only think of one or two people at the dozen or so gun shows I’ve been to who weren’t obviously licensed dealers.)[/li][li]Require background checks for people trying to buy some of the most dangerous weapons and other items through a trust or corporation. (Fishbreath says: NFA items could be purchased through a trust, which got around the deeper background check requirement. Now, every trustee must submit fingerprints and other information, which seems reasonable to me. In exchange, NFA items no longer require the explicit signoff of the local chief law enforcement officer; you just have to notify them now.)[/li][li]Potential progress on making mental health information available to the NICS system. (Fishbreath says: I’m in favor of this, but it’ll have to be done cautiously to avoid trampling all over HIPAA. My wife is in the mental health field, and they take patient privacy super-seriously.)[/li][li]Hire more ATF agents, and task more FBI agents to tracking and combating online gun trafficking.[/li][/ul]
I have to say, it’s a lot less onerous than I was expecting, and with the possible exception of the first item—it’s possible that the administration might try to define ‘in the business of’ in an over-broad fashion—I’m not really strongly against any of the provisions, and the removal of the CLEO signoff requirement for NFA items is a decent bone, too.
(What I’d really like to see is a removal of suppressors from the NFA altogether, but that would take legislative action, and I doubt it would get the President’s signature if it crossed his desk either way.)
Wrong thread. This one is about legislation.
Good thing the White House has medics on staff, with that kind of burn.
Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy says it’s even less meaningful—just a restatement of existing laws.
