The Naked (Lunch) and the Dead

December 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Glenn Reynolds has a USA Today op-ed  scorning gun control laws (and really scorning people who want gun control).  Here’s the lede:

“After a shooting spree,” author William Burroughs once said, “they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.” Burroughs continued: “I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”

Reynolds is a law professor and presumably knows a lot about the law and maybe a lot about guns, but apparently he doesn’t know a lot about Burroughs.  If he did, he might not have given the naked lunchman pride of place in his argument. 

As TBogg at FiredogLake reminds us, Burroughs is not exactly the poster child for loose gun laws.  In fact, he is prime anecdotal evidence for why having easy access to guns might not be such a great idea. 

When Burroughs was living in Mexico in 1951, he shot his wife in the forehead. He was playing a game they called “William Tell.” He was, of course, drunk.

At first the killer declared that in the said gathering, after there had been a great consumption of gin, he tried to demonstrate his magnificent marksmanship, emulating William Tell, and to that end he placed a glass of liquor upon the head of his wife, and aiming over the glass, at a distance of two meters, he fired, but as a consequence and result of the state of drunkenness in which he found himself, he missed the shot lamentably and injured the forehead of his wife with a bullet.

That’s one version.  In a second version, given after Burroughs’s lawyer arrived on the scene, Burroughs “claimed he misfired while showing the gun to a friend he was trying to sell it to.”

After two weeks in jail, Burroughs was released on bail and eventually went back to the US.  Mexico tried him in absentia.  He was convicted and given a two-year suspended sentence.

It is believed Bill’s wealthy parents dispensed thousands of dollars in legal fees and bribes to Mexican authorities. [More details are here.]

As for the Norman Mailer allusion in the title of this post, it’s a good thing he only had a knife and not a gun.

Game Over - Guns Win

December 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s still too early to know what went on in the Newton CT elementary school shooting.  Right now, the report is that 25 are dead, at least 18 of them children. 

I’m waiting for the reaction of the “gun rights” activists – if only third grade teachers (and maybe third graders too) carried guns in class every day, lives would be saved.

They’re right.  Weaponized teachers and students might have killed the shooter before he had killed so many.

Let’s face it, the logic of the gun lobby has won – not just in court but in everyday life.  If you create a world where every person, no matter how angry or demented, can easily get a gun  it makes sense for everyone to be armed, the deadlier the weapon the better.  And we have created that world.

So spare me the “terrible, terrible tragedy” version.  How many terrible, terrible tragedies do we need before we see that starting decades ago, we began setting the stage for this drama?  Why are we surprised each month, each week, when the scenario is played out?

How did we get to this world where there are so many guns around that it’s a fairly simple matter to buy one, legally or illegally, or steal one (as in the Oregon mall shooting earlier this week). 

Blame the NRA?  I do not know the history or the research on this, but a Marxist voice in my left ear is whispering, “Follow the money.”  The NRA is merely the ideological superstructure built on the economic substructure of the the gun industry.  It’s not the NRA that produces, sells, and makes a handsome profit from the millions of guns. 

You can’t sell, of course, if nobody wants to buy.  But gun economics may be a variant of Say’s law: supply creates its own demand.  If you increase the supply  of  guns –  especially if they fall into the hands of robbers, drug, dealers, and other bad guys –  the more you will increase the demand from people who want guns for protection.  The more guns that are out there, the less effective will be any attempts to restrict them. 

There are now hundreds of millions of guns in circulation.  Even if public opinion shifted to overwhelming support for gun control, even if laws were passed, attempts keep guns out of the hands of people with bad motives would be futile.  That might have worked a few decades ago.  Not any more. 

The gun people have won.  They always knew that guns were deadly and dangerous.  That’s why they want them for protection – guns are far more effective than knives or other weapons.  The gun people have also known that a relatively few people use them to commit horrible slaughter.  But to the gun rights absolutists,  these are acceptable losses. 

If the the NRA, and other gun lovers  thought that this loss of life were not acceptable, they would have taken a different position on proposed laws.  The innocent victims are just so much  collateral damage in the noble battle for freedom (and profits). 

I wonder if the gun lovers will talk about their wonderful freedom to the parents in Newtown, Connecticut.

(An earlier post on policy and acceptable risks is here.)

Surveys — Questions and Answers

December 10, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Neil Caren at Scatterplot  lifts up the rock that is the New Family Structure Study (NFSS) – the basis of Mark Regnerus’s controversial research on children of gay parents – and discovers some strange creatures wriggling about underneath: 

. . .   85 people reported living at least four months with their “mother’s girlfriend/partner.” However—and this is where it gets tricky—a different question (S8) asked, “Did you ever live with your mother while she was in a romantic relationship with another woman?” Eight people who reported in the calendar that they lived with their mother’s girlfriend answered no to this question.

So ten percent of the people who said they lived with the mother’s girlfriend also said on a different question that they did not live with the mother’s girlfriend.
                   
We all rely on surveys – pollsters, social scientists, market researchers, government agencies, businesses. We try to make our questions straightforward.  But the question we ask is not always the question people answer.  And people’s answers – about what they think and what they did – are influenced by external factors we might not have considered.  Especially if the survey is a one-off (unlike the GSS and other surveys with frequently asked questions),  we have to be cautious about taking the results at face value.

(Previous posts on this problem are here and here.)

All Happy Family Christmas Letters Are Alike

December 9, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Facebook friend asked about the origins of the Christmas letter – you know, those cheerful year-end summaries that seem to have been written by some omniscient third person telling you about everyone in the family.  Her question made me wonder about other aspects of this custom, not just when it arose.  Where did it start (socially more than geographically)?  What  has been the pattern of diffusion?  What are the demographics? 

I imagine that soon Hallmark will be selling a convenient standard-form version where all you have to do is fill in a few blanks, sort of like Mad Libs. 

In case you are unfamiliar with the genre, here is one I got recently.

It seems like only yesterday that we were mailing out last year’s Christmas letter, but here we are a year later, once again sharing with our friends what the Loman family has been up to.

Willy had the car fixed, and it’s running just fine. Truth be told, Linda would prefer him to work closer to home, but you can’t keep a salesman off the road. We’re glad to be all together at home for the holidays, even if Christmas here in Brooklyn is different from what it is where most of you are. I long to hear those traditional carols. Hap jokes that the song he hears most in the yule season here is “We’re doing our Christmas shopping at Robert Hall this year.” Hap and Biff – they do bring such joy to our world. 

We’re looking forward to the new year to bring us some new developments. America is the land of opportunity, and the Loman men are looking to make the most of it. Willy, ever the dreamer, has some really promising ideas, and his boss Howard is taking a keen interest. Willy might even give Bernard (our neighbor Charley’s boy) a break and bring him in to take care of some of the legal details. 

Biff has big plans too, and he has the patience to wait for the right person to open the door. Modest Biff doesn’t want us to say so, but being a star athlete and good-looking doesn’t hurt either when you’re trying to lure the venture capitalists. 

We also stop and remember those who are no longer with us to celebrate the holiday. We can never forget Willy’s brother, Uncle Ben, who walked into the jungle at seventeen, and when he walked out, by God he had rice. (We still quote Uncle Ben’s words of wisdom – with great rice comes great responsibility. )

But we also remember the good times. I think I heard the boys chuckling again about the time Biff went to Boston as a surprise to Willy who was there on a sales trip and had no idea Biff was coming. Oh, those pranksters. They’re just irrepressible. 

We hope all is well with our friends in this special season. We’re glad that the Christmas holiday gives us a moment away from the everyday busy-ness and allows us to think about the important areas of life where attention must be paid.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

The Lomans

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Coming Soon

• Season’s Greetings from Jason, Medea, and the Boys
• The Portnoy Family Holiday Letter
• The Gambino Family Christmas Offering (You Can’t Refuse)
• and others