Dakota and I clearly both got pwned. Can’t argue with a man who’s arguments are “inexpugnable”. (Of course, this simply proves my suspicion that Sony is in Manichean mode on this, but he’s right, his arguments are therefore invincible and unassailable.)

@Dakota, responding to your last statement “avoid places where they could get hurt”. The one thought that does trouble me is what happens when every place has quasi-sensible gun laws? (for the sake of this discussion, let’s say whatever gun laws are in place in South Dakota). There was some evidence back in the 80’s with that little town (in Georgia?) that there was no overall reduction in crime rate; it simply got moved.

-wolfe

Dakota, u got pwnd!

I should have been more specific. The crime rate in South Dakota — particularly violent crime — is extremely low per capita. There’s a causal relationship between this and every household with an adult male having guns:

Bad guys easy victims, not a fight. They avoid places where they could get hurt.

Bad guys like big cities, which almost uniformly disarm their citizenry and make easy victims. They like mugging, raping, and killing people in our neighboring states of Nebraska and Iowa, which disarms its citizenry.

You don’t say.

Oh, don’t worry — I’ve no great desire to visit anywhere that prohibits me from self-protection. That’s why I live in South Dakota, where there’s no crime. :)

And I drive a Ferrari F50.

I was going to respond properly but it would have been far too much ado for nothing. Not like there’s any truth I can possibly convey or wisdom espouse (or have) on the matter that would go even some way towards counting to you or people of similarly stedfast beliefs, albeit erroneous. No truth I can say others haven’t been trumpeting for years with nothing but worsening to show for it.

Besides, I’ve already formally forfeited this argument. Believe whatever nonsense you please.

Do forgive me if I’ve exceeded the bounds of politeness. It comes with the territory with us gun grabbers.

In any case, do leave your guns at home if you should ever decide to come visit. In these parts they actually investigate and if needs be prosecute people who posses firearms, let alone shoot.

sonyad said:

What if, say, some nuknut decided one day they wanted to turn America, and indeed the world via reciprocation, into some massive ashen Columbine, them being paranoid or having a deathwish combined with pathological homicidal tendencies or some such line of thinking?

Oops. Didn’t think about that one now, did we?

Nope, I thought of it. Here’s the deal:

Most such sociopaths commit other acts of violence in addition to the one you’re describing. They don’t just wake up one morning and say, “Gee, I think I’ll nuke the world today.” Rather, they commit a string of sociopathic violent acts culminating in The Big One.

In an armed society, sociopaths tend to be weeded from the gene pool with their first or second act. It’s one thing to rape an unarmed woman: it’s another to rape a woman who’s got a gun in her purse. Sooner or later a rapist will meet a woman who’s will line him up in her sights: probably sooner rather than later.

This is the big misassumption of those who like victim disarmament (the proper name for “gun control”):

The average person isn’t insane and carrying a gun doesn’t make them so. The average person just wants to live their life: carrying a gun simply ensures they won’t be interrupted in that goal.

For some reason, victim disarmers assume that everyone is insane and that owning a gun will make them trigger-happy. I suspect that this is because victim disarmers are themselves a little insane, seeing as how they’d prefer to see a woman raped and strangled with her own pantyhose rather than own a gun. That’s obviously quite an insane position, but it’s nevertheless the position of every victim disarmer.

However, my statement stands: it scales up. Sociopaths get weeded from the gene pool rapidly in an armed society. I cannot imagine that a sociopath would survive to detonate a nuke. Eventually, enough dead sociopaths would serve as a constant reminder to anyone who might try it.

An armed society is not a perfect society: it’s just a whole hell of a lot better than what we have now. And all you need to do to prove it is look to history.

Dakota Smith

Please drop it Wolfe. My view of American gun culture is anything but black and white, irrational and sentimentalist(well maybe just a tad). And you know it.

What you are doing is simply tantamount to bluntly insulting my intelligence not the validity of my inexpugnable argument. As such, I’m unwilling to pursue the subject any further.

This a formal forfeit. Believe what you wish.

What a wonderful world it would be if everything was truly black and white, and obvious. We could abandon logic, reason, and analysis for we’d simply know all the correct answers, as easily as discerning day from night.

Sadly, I do not live in such a world. If you do, I envy you, for it must be very comforting to always know you are right without even having to think about the matter, research facts, or even having to go to the trouble of seeing other perspectives on liberty vs. order.
-wolfe

Principles and morals are supposed to be black and white. Granted laws their nuances they should still inherit mainly from morality and principles watered down with wisdom or at the very least common sense.

Is this really the state of facts with current US legislation? For example, and just a blind stab in the dark here, law 109-92?

Money
The Economics Of Prostitution
Michael Noer, 02.14.06, 12:00 PM ET

Wife or whore?

The choice is that simple. At least according to economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, it is.

The two well-respected economists created a minor stir in academic circles a few years back when they published “A Theory of Prostitution” in the Journal of Political Economy. The paper was remarkable not only for being accepted by a major journal but also because it considered wives and whores as economic “goods” that can be substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.

Economists have been equating money and marriage ever since Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker published his seminal paper “A Theory of Marriage” in two parts in 1973 and 1974–also, not coincidentally, in the Journal of Political Economy.

Becker used market analysis to tackle the questions of whom, when and why we marry. His conclusions? Mate selection is a market, and marriages occur only if they are profitable for both parties involved.

Becker allowed nonmonetary elements, like romantic love and companionship, to be entered into courtship’s profit and loss statement. And children, in particular, were important. “Sexual gratification, cleaning, feeding and other services can be purchased, but not children: Both the man and the woman are required to produce their own children and perhaps to raise them,” he wrote.

But back to whores: Edlund and Korn admit that spouses and streetwalkers aren’t exactly alike. Wives, in truth, are superior to whores in the economist’s sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises–like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries. But the implication remains that wives and whores are–if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi–something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.

As with Becker, a key differentiator in Edlund and Korn’s model is reproductive sex. Wives can offer it, whores can not.

To be fair, Edlund and Korn were merely building an admittedly grossly simplified model of human behavior in an attempt to answer a nagging question: Why do hookers make so much money? Prostitution is, seemingly, a low-skill but high-pay profession with few upfront costs, micro-miniskirts and stiletto heels aside.

Yet according to data assembled from a wide variety of times and places, ranging from mid-15th-century France to Malaysia of the late 1990s, prostitutes make more money–in some cases, a lot more money–than do working girls who, well, work for a living. This held true even for places where prostitution is legal and relatively safe. In short, streetwalkers aren’t necessarily being paid more for their increased risk of going to jail or the hospital.

Notwithstanding Jerry Hall’s quip when she was married to Mick Jagger, about being “a maid in the living room and a whore in the bedroom,” one normally cannot be both a wife and a whore. “Combine this with the fact that marriage can be an important source of income for women, and it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone-marriage market earnings,” Edlund and Korn conclude.

Ouch.

Another zinger: “This begs the question of why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably will be low-cost providers, considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage).” Guys, nothing says “Happy Valentine’s Day” more than “low-cost provider.”

Of course, it’s easy to pour cold water on some of the assumptions made in Edlund and Korn’s mathematical model. But these so-called “stylized facts” are supposed to predict human behavior; they don’t necessarily pretend to mirror it.

In particular, the assumption that there is no “third way” between wife and whore is problematic, if not outright offensive: “The third alternative, working in a regular job but not marrying, can be ruled out, since we assume that the only downside of marriage for a woman is the forgone opportunity for prostitution.”

Be sure to let all your married friends know what they’re missing.

Also, the emphasis on the utility of children is puzzling. In most Western democracies, fertility rates have plummeted as wealth has increased. Empirically, men not only buy fewer whores as they get richer, but they have fewer children.

Still, the economic analysis of marriage explains one age-old phenomenon: gold digging.

“In particular, does our analysis justify the popular belief that more beautiful, charming and talented women tend to marry wealthier and more successful men?” wrote Becker. His answer: “A positive sorting of nonmarket traits with nonhuman wealth always, and with earnings power, usually, maximizes commodity output over all marriages.”

In other words, yes, supermodels do prefer aging billionaires. And Gary Becker proved it mathematically decades before The Donald married Melania.

Maybe this deserves to be in Politik or on my (or Sonys!) blog. I’m sure neither he nor I will let the thread get excessively hijacked though. -w

@Sony, you again are misreading what I say. I don’t support the NRA party line. I have said this to you a number of times, and cited specific examples. I’m not a member either, nor have I ever been. (I have attended a few NRA-sponsored events, just as I’ve attended at least two gun-control-sponsored events).

I’ve also (notwithstanding ‘emotionalism and irrationality’) attempted to convey the rational basis for my point of view. See my first and second and third responses to your initial PM’s to me on this subject. Read the above post again.

I am gaining the impression that you view the world in a digital fashion. All is one or zero. Light or Dark. Right or Wrong, and nothing in between. This would at least explain why a logical person such as yourself would approach a topic in this seemingly highly emotional fashion.

I must either repudiate the NRA and all its works, or I must logically (despite what I say) support their ‘party line’.

Suffice to say, the world is analog. It is not Manichean.

Some of what the NRA proposes is bad; some is good. I support what I think is good, and oppose what I think is bad. I am for any constitutional gun legislation that will reduce violent crime, the murder rate, etc., without resulting in significant harm to innocents, and to constitutional freedoms. I oppose gun-control laws designed to make liberal people feel good, punish innocent citizens, and reward criminals.

Guns don’t kill people; people do. Look at the recent case in SF with the car-jihadist. Look at the Taber, Alberta case of school shootings. Didn’t hear about it? Funny that. Yes, in Liberal Canada with heavy-duty gun control laws, someone did a Columbine.

In fact Gamil Gharbi could arguably be said to be the grandfather of Columbines. A Muslim Algerian-Canadian, he shot up a college in Montreal killing many women. (His guns were acquired by his wife. Irony.) Years before Columbine. And Canada had controls on all the acquired guns, generally much, much stricter controls than are present in the US.

There are crazy and evil people who will do crazy and evil things with cars, knives, books, bombs (that they make from books), and, yes, guns.

I don’t know why you don’t grasp this point, I really don’t.

To you, it seems to all comes down to the ‘evil’ NRA and it’s ‘malicious’ disciples. I hope you can persuade me I’m wrong in that.

If I’m not, good luck with that world view.

Considerable respect to you when you’re right; respect to you when we disagree rationally; and sad headshaking when you don’t seem to make sense or respond rationally.

Best,
-wolfe

Emotionalism and irrationality? When you’ll pry them out of my dead, cold larynx or typing fingers, maybe.

What so ever contradicts the infallible and impervious NRA party line must be apoplectic in the brain, is it?

@Dakota. Fascinating. I agree entirely with your post on Star Trek (I hadn’t mentally considered to the fact that you’re a little older than I; hence there was little choice in TV SF. Also, possibly for me it’s more the ‘crackhead’ ‘we surrender unconditionally’ ST:TNG that defines the show).

Agree with most of the rest of what you say on weapons, though I’m not so sure I concur fully. “More guns, less crime. It scales up from any weapon you might choose, from a closed fist to fission bombs.”. Sadly no, because people can be crazed irrational actors. Libertarianism, I think, assumes too much rationality.

I’m for gun control if it’s self-propelled. (sadly, ugh, I think I’m quoting Buchanan there. Barf.). I still agree.

“I just don’t buy this notion that having unlimited posessions would make a society socialist.” Concur entirely. Land, as you note, is a key.

And Kevin Warwick? Uh… no, I really don’t think his stuff is that revolutionary. It almost strikes me as silly, sorry.

But the rest? Very interesting. Might try and respond more at length later, but just back from travel and a bit tired.

-wolfe

@Sony Yeah, I pointed out Lott’s sock-puppetry tendencies a while back to you, as you may recall. Sad. As for his work being pseudo-science, no. It’s generally reasonably peer-reviewed, and because of that, some problems have been exposed. Comparing to alchemy is just… out there. I’m not sure whether you’re doing that just to be silly, or if (sadly) you actually believe that. If it’s the latter, spend a few years and do a good university degree in the hard sciences, and learn about how peer review works, and what differentiates reasonable (though incorrect) arguments from lunacy. His work, in fact, is largely correct, but might better be summarized as “more guns, same crime”.

Why you have a sudden keenness to talk about someone I’ve already mildly debunked (in comments to you) in such an exaggerated fashion is unclear to me, unless you really do wish to fight a strawman. I guess that’s fun, but it’s not very productive or educational.

As I’ve said (privately), Gary Kleck is a somewhat stronger researcher in this field (and with a strong left-wing bias, suggesting his relatively pro-gun conclusions are not due to political bias).

As for the NRA being all gung-ho about illegal arms-sales (ditto arms manufacturers), this is a very strange view not supported by any available evidence I’ve seen. Again, this is another strawman. Fun, I guess, but kind of childish and tedious.

If you have actually evidence (instead of ad-hominem rhetoric), I’d be very interested in seeing it. (Please, no links to websites written by criminals that shriek about “right-to-murder” laws though). And no crazed people that want to federally register every book-dealer in the country, which is what the site you last sent appeared to want to do.

I don’t like the idea of book sales being federally regulated, and that’s what careful analysis of the so-called “gun show loophole” arguments would require. (The fact that the people arguing this are being dishonest has little to do with this; you still have to examine where their arguments lead).

The basic situation at present is simple: you deal illegally in guns, you lose your Federal dealer’s license, and ultimately you go to jail. True, private sales can avoid federal legislation, and I suppose you could argue that all private sales should be federally regulated, but, as with government regulation of booksales, most American’s aren’t a huge fan of such an approach.

@Sony: The idea of compulsory military service for firearms (or anything)? On the whole, a bad idea for the US. I think it’s a great idea for Switzerland and Israel though. For the US, in the opinion of most Americans, a large standing army is not a good thing for a free state. The Cold War US forces were very much an aberration in US history, as are even the present (smaller, leaner) forces. The drafted US Army was not, overall, a terribly good Army.

The one plus is obvious: it would ensure people were better-trained in firearms use and more disciplined. The disadvantages are legion, but at their head would surely be that the State would be much, much more powerful.

I can see how people that know absolutely nothing about US history or engage in wilful ignorance might think this is a good idea.

As for your other suggestions — combatting straw purchasers by limiting to one gun a month and mandatory reporting of theft, I’m not convinced that those are bad ideas, though they may or may not be constitutional, and the former is anti-freedom.

None of these would have material impacts on corporate profits, and I sadly suspect none of these would have a material impact on crime rates, though I’d be delighted to be wrong.

As I’ve repeatedly privately stated, gun-control measures that will have a material impact on violent gun felonies (including unreported crimes) are worth looking at; ones that don’t (or will even result in innocent people dying) are not.

If one is adamantly for governmental control over individual freedom (or the libertarian converse) I could see why one would rationally disagree with my position, but the former approach is disturbing indeed, and the source of a great deal of death over the 20th century.

I’m not sure why so many view this issue with such extreme emotionalism and irrationality.

-wolfe

What a cracking good joke this is. Jolly good laughs all round!

On your latest post, Dakota. Yes, I too believe there is lots of pseudoscience out there. I think an analogy to the time of the dawn of chemistry in the countenance of alchemy is an appropriate one. There’s lots theoretical work difficult, if even possibly to substantiate with physical experiments or applications(kind of like John Lott’s allegations).

Even more pseudoresearch. I’ve always wondered how some historians proudly boast being able to accurately recite on what day, at what hour and minute in that day King Jacob took a dump as well where he took it, how long it took him to take it, the colour, consistency, quantity and to some extent even the chemical composition of that dump.

Scientists are arguing pettily, almost childishly over the number of ‘parallel universes’ and such all the while seemingly ignoring obvious, quite likely very beneficial research fields positively screaming for further inquiry.

While they ponder whether it’s 10, 11 or 10.(3) the number of parallel universes that be, other people are actually trying to get a fusion reactor working and, astoundingly, benefit mankind through the applicative fruits of their intellectual labour for a change.

I doubt anyone able to prove or even disprove the wrong numbers of parallel universes any time soon. Even more doubtful anyone should care remotely enough to be bothered to attempt it.

As long as we’re going to be getting into these offensive wars from now on, I’d love to see a military draft, irregardless of gun ownership. That way before we invade the next country premptively, our leaders will be sending their own children into battle.

I don’t even want to talk gun control. As long as the US is being usurped by neo-feminist interests and a budding police state, man’s skill with arms will be all that holds us back from bondage to an Oprah watching bunch of morons who would try to lock you up for how you think and feel rather than what you DO.

However, I sense there would be an interesting side effect of universal military service. Might make the Joshes and Stefs of the world a little more rock hard manly and alot less femdrone products. Give a man a gun, get him in shape, give him a cause and you’d be surprised how it changes him positively. I know from experience.

Or measures such as maximum limitation of purchase rate of an individual to one gun per month to battle straw purchases. Imagine what such inane laws would do to Corporate Colt’s coffers or availability of firearms on the street.

It would seem the NRA lobbying first makes sure to cater to the legality and availability of arms to criminals and is only thereafter concerned with the legal market.

They even oppose such trifle regulating as mandatory declaration of firearm theft or loss within 48 hours for fear of inconveniencing gun owners and (re)sellers.