People unclear on the concept

The youngest Nobel prize winner ever who is a brave young woman fighting for the right to education despite being shot in a murder attempt:

Of course, we have the village idiots trying to persuade people that a young woman who showed bravery and conviction despite being shot has something to do with allowing guns on campus.  Additionally, this was a young woman who was deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Wow, who is calling whom a twit?

You know who else thought she was a "twit"? The Taliban.

And Afghanistan was as Stateless as you could get under the Taliban.

Trust me, these people aren't the brightest stars in the firmament.

Quote of the Day

Last time, we had someone saying that "We the People" came from the Declaration of Independence.

Once again, the Kroger Facebook page provides a pearl of ignorance:

I'm not sure if this person is saying that all gun owners are stupid or that he is disagreeing with the proposition that all gun owners are stupid.

But, given the grammar and spelling, I'll go with he is saying that all gun owners are stupid.

And he has more than made his point.

Serious ignorance

From Facebook:

I'm not sure if this is serious stupidity or rampant ignorance since pretty much everybody knows it is the US CONSTITUTION that begins "We the people.."

Well, everybody except this idiot.

The Phrase "we the people" is totally absent from the Declaration of Independence.

Which would be something this person would know if he actually read either document, which he obviously hasn't.

Neither has he understood either one for their historic and legal significance. And I am not patient enough to try to educate this person since he is a lost cause for any intellectual pursuit.

I would be pretty sure that things like ablative absolutes would seriously go well beyond this person's intellectual capacity.

Again, why I don't bother with the average gun loon. This clown is pretty typical for the intellectual level of a gunloon.

Of course, Gunloons will more than eagerly foist their ignorance upon one.

Ignorance isn't bliss: it's really fucking annoying.

Quote of the Day

I may have run this one before, but it's pretty right on for the US's cult of ignorance:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

And before your make stupid comments about ME being the ignorant one:  remember that one is not really allowed to give legal advice unless one is a member of the bar.  In fact, it is against the law to put oneself out as a lawyer or engage in the unqualified practise of law.

On the other hand, I have on more than one occasion shown that you have taken things out of context from legal decisions.

But, you know more about the law than I do.

When ignorance is a virtue...

I guess you would hate taxes if you admire ignorance and consider it to be a civic virtue:

Quote of the day:

The thing is, shameless lying and ignorance works surprisingly well as a debate tactic. It’s hard to argue with someone who not only has signaled that he doesn’t care what the truth is but is downright proud of how little he actually knows. Such a person is not amenable to being educated. Once the pretense of really caring one way or another about what is right and what is wrong has been abandoned, all avenue of discourse is shut down.

Source

I heard it on the Internet...

Yeah, yeah.  I don't really like memes, but this is pretty good for those who lack critical thinking skills.

Should I trust some bozo on the internet whose qualifications I don't know?
Or should I trust someone whose knowledge I trust

Better yet, why should I believe something that I have fact checked and found to be wrong?

That's not intellectually honest.

The Gun Violence Debate in the US runs on ignorance

I've already mentioned that the federal funding for gun violence research has been cut since the facts have an "anti-gun" bias and the Tiahrt Amendment protects the  illegal firearms trade, which means that the debate has been running on literal science fiction (not to mention the work of Lott and Kleck which is figurative science fiction).  "Fat Tony" Scalia produced a judicial "opinion" that was pure sophistry hiding ignorance of the facts.

The real point here is that even statistics are suffering in this battle to stack the deck.  Thus, The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.

To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.

But, are the data which is coming from official sources even accurate in this matter?  Slate magazine tried to find out the facts, but like concrete data as to how many concealed carry permit holders actually go bad and who REALLY relies on the "get away with murder" laws, anything that has to be turned up needs to be done manually.

The feature was meant to be a provocation of sorts: We knew that those rows of figures, each one attached to a name, piling atop one another every day, made for an arresting visual, one that might trouble even the most ardent gun-rights supporter.

But as time went by and the interactive was discussed, questioned, and cited, this provocation also became a kind of experiment. How many deaths were being reported on, and how many were falling through the cracks? Why was it that no single source was collecting this data in real time? In other words, we wanted to know if an interactive like this can actually be valuable as something besides a provocation—whether crowdsourcing can produce real-time data and whether that data is useful and complete. (Hoping people might use our data for their own research purposes, we made it available as a downloadable file.)

A year after Newtown, the 11,400-plus human figures on that list remain a chilling reminder of the toll guns take on Americans every day. And the answers to our questions have started to become clear. Some people did use our data, for both interesting visualizations and public programs (sometimes, alas, without reading it carefully first). But we’ve also learned some tough lessons about how hard it is to track death by gun in America. The overwhelming likelihood is that our interactive missed more than half of the gun deaths in the past 12 months. The main reason there is no single source collecting this data in real time is surely because it is an enormous, daunting task—one that we only made a small dent in, with the help of devoted volunteers.

The statistics which are slowly, painstakingly assembled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from death certificates, find that about 32,000 people are killed by guns in America each year.  Unfortunately, the CDC's data in addition to possibly being incomplete is not published in a timely fashion.  For example, the most recent year for which preliminary data is available is 2011 and the CDC's "exact" number was 32,163. Slate also found that some gun deaths fell through the cracks.  Additionally, Slate used everyone who was killed by a gun (e.g. Tamerlan Tsarnaev), which caused an uproar from the right.

Slate also found that:

Suicides, it turns out, are this project’s enormous blind spot. Most every homicide makes the local paper, even if in large cities these stories are sometimes relegated to a mere news brief. Accidental shootings are usually reported upon, as are shootings by law enforcement and incidents in which civilians kill in self-defense. But suicides are mostly invisible. And the fact is that suicides make up 60 percent or more of all deaths by gun in America. In our interactive, misleadingly, only about 10 percent of recorded deaths were deemed suicides by our crowdsourced categorizers.

Slate has a companion piece to this The Missing 20,000 Gun Deaths. Suicide accounts for the bulk of gun deaths, which is a fact I know annoys you greatly.   On the other hand, the data also shows that owning a firearm is far more dangerous to the owner.

Ultimately, the lack of information filters down to researchers. Though most scientists Slate talked to said that they’d always found individual police departments forthcoming and helpful.  There is widespread frustration that data isn’t systematically available in a more timely manner for people doing the research. “I don’t know why we don’t have rapid case accounts,” said Harvard’s Cathy Barber. “It’s crazy that we are using 2010 data.”

The real bottom line is that we cannot have a serious discussion about this topic without accurate information.  The information which has been fueling the debate is pretty much wrong whether it is that the Second Amendment relates to private arms or studies that show more guns is the reason there is less crime.  Indeed, it doesn't help your side of the argument if the "facts" you provide are bullshit, or just plain non-existent.

It's time the debate started using facts rather than wishful thinking.