"The woman said her 2-year-old son walked up behind her Saturday afternoon while she was holding the weapon, and she turned and accidentally fired the gun, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch."
So, let's be clear: Handling a loaded gun? Not on the range, not being assaulted, no need for defense. In the home, "holding a weapon" clearly with her finger inside the trigger guard.
Mom is stupid and negligent. No excuse for it and it is tragic that her son had to suffer this. But, please do note that the gun did not shoot him, his negligent mother did.
But what I wanted to remark on was a comment made to the article:
"Mo guns, mo incidents of accidental shootings. Gun proliferation does not make us safer."
Thought this might be worth sharing.
You see, gun control devotees, when confronted by the data that show that as gun ownership has increased, gun crime (and in particular homicide) has decreased, always say "correlation is not causation." [I have not bothered to post a graph of those data - plenty are available]. So given this is an inverse correlation, indeed we cannot say that more guns "cause" less crime (although a longitudinal pattern gives some sense of the possibility). But let's be clear; because it is an inverse correlation we can, with some degree of certainty, say that increased gun ownership does not lead to increased crime. The data certainly provide more support for the possibility that "mo guns" might make us safer than the converse.
But to the point of this story, the same goes with the relationship between gun ownership levels and accidental deaths among children due to firearms (in the figure above). As can be seen from those data, over the past 30 years, as gun ownership rates have steadily climbed, the rate of firearm-related accidental deaths among children has decreased. No suggestion that increased gun ownership causes increased accidental deaths among children. This is a case of a negligent owner, not an indictment of a class. In fact, just as with this anecdotal evidence, there are many stories of "good guys with guns" saving lives. Gun control advocates do not accept those as proof of concept and neither should anyone in this case.
So, given the easy access to data that show otherwise, why do people - especially people of certain political leanings - cling to these erroneous ideas; that the proliferation of gun ownership has led to more crime and more death? I suspect it is because, in years gone by, a negligent gun-owning mother who shot her son in the hand would not have made the news. Folks in podunk would not have heard about it. Even when such accidents were more prevalent, as the data show, we knew much less about it, heard much less about it. Now such news is more accessible which makes some people think the phenomenon is more prevalent. And, surprise, everyone's hair is on fire.
In psychology we would call this an error in judgment based on the availability heuristic. That is, an error in estimation of prevalence or typicality based on the accessibility or availability of certain information or ideas. If one wants to see the power of such errors, they need look no further than the comments on liberal websites that follow the gleeful reporting of each and every gun-related story. In fact, it is their goal - to make people believe something that is not true.
Dark paradise.
No comments:
Post a Comment