POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

[Drew S.]

Thank you.

My intuition is that the expected value of a gun with respect to personal safety is negative in most places -- i.e., the likelihood of injuring yourself or a loved one is far higher than the likelihood that you will sustain less injury from an attack because of your gun. The only circumstances I can imagine a gun being a net safety positive are in an actual war zone where there's a high likelihood of multiple incidents of personal danger or in a very rural area (as in Alaska, not Tennessee) where bear etc. attacks are sufficiently likely to overwhelm the odds of an accident.

Guns make a certain personality type feel safer, just like TSA checks at airports make a certain personality type feel safer. Marketing is about perception, not reality, so it is easy to sell guns (or push through TSA programs).

Now add the cultural totem status of a gun and it becomes impossible to have a rational policy discussion about them. So I suggest we "debase" the cultural currency of guns by breaking their association with redneck rights of passage, not to get rid of guns, but just so we can have a sane national debate. In effect, we should try to grow Group 1 until it is larger than Group 2. Then an alliance of Group 1 and Group 0 (the gun-neutral / anti-gun electorate) will be successful. Group 1 has earned a seat at the table. That won't make absolutist gun banners (call them Group -1) happy, but like Group 2, they aren't helping anyone anyway.

Good post this. It gets overlooked a lot but I think a lot of the reason behind the NRA being more extreme is a reaction to the anti-gun groups.

 

[Drew S.]

Firstly, are suicides not gun deaths?

Secondly, if I show there is a correlation between murders and gun ownership are you sold on the importance of guns laws?

What are we trying to solve here? Honestly this is one of the big problems I have with the anti-gun crowd. The goal posts are constantly moving around.

 

[Kepler]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Good post this. It gets overlooked a lot but I think a lot of the reason behind the NRA being more extreme is a reaction to the anti-gun groups.

I think it's pure commerce. The more they whip up fear the more product they move.

The days of the NRA behind a gentlemanly sportsman's club are long gone. They move widgets off the shelves. They could just as easily be selling cars or booze.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Plenty. More than 2/3 of all homicides are gun related.

From Factcheck.org:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes statistics on firearm deaths and the death rate, which would be a fairer measure in comparing states of various populations. For 2013, the 10 states with the highest firearm age-adjusted death rates were: Alaska (19.8), Louisiana (19.3), Mississippi (17.8), Alabama (17.6), Arkansas (16.8), Wyoming (16.7), Montana (16.7), Oklahoma (16.5), New Mexico (15.5) and Tennessee (15.4). The 10 states with the highest homicide rates were: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, New Mexico, Missouri and Michigan. That lists includes six states that also have the highest firearm death rates.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, both groups that advocate for strong gun laws, published a scorecard on state gun laws in 2013, giving higher letter grades to states with stronger gun laws. Nine of the 10 states with the highest firearm death rates, according to the CDC, got an “F” for their gun laws, and one of them got a “D-.” Seven of the states with the lowest firearm death rates got a “B” or higher.

That's not entirely true. If you graph gun ownership vs. gun murders there is almost no correlation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by_state (It's an extremely weak correlation, but it's actually negative. Higher gun ownership rates have fewer murders and fewer gun murders, but I wouldn't cite that as a reason for more guns on the street.)

If you compare murders vs. per capita income, there is a much higher, though still fairly low, correlation between poverty and murder rate. (R^2 of 0.0198 for poverty vs. 0.0031 for gun ownership).

The strongest correlation I could find was poverty vs. gun ownership and population density vs. gun ownership. The lower the average income, the higher the gun ownership was (R^2 = 0.1885). The lower the population density, the higher gun ownership (R^2=0.39)

 

[rufus]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Government Sachs Lives Again!

Suckers...

Just remember...Hillary is evil because she is too close to Wall Street Banks like Goldman-Sachs!! Trump is different he is draining the Swamp!!!

Or, as the Trump supporters will rationalize, "who better to know the crooked schemes and how to stop them and clean them up than one of their own?"

 

[St. Clown]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Government Sachs Lives Again!

Suckers...

Just remember...Hillary is evil because she is too close to Wall Street Banks like Goldman-Sachs!! Trump is different he is draining the Swamp!!!

Hey, it's like GWB said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...[blank stare]... we won't get fooled again."

Wait, Who said that?

 

[Kepler]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Hey, it's like GWB said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...[blank stare]... we won't get fooled again."

Wait, Who said that?

Pete Townsend?

 

[Handyman]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Somebody here taught me how to finally stop worrying and love that Trump is going to screw over his own rural white voters. That person said those people -- the people we call "deluded" in What's the Matter with Kansas? -- simply have different values.

When I was young and dinosaurs named Trottier and Potvin roamed the Earth, my graduate school research was in distributive justice: what people think of as "fair" and how they measure it. One of the key findings in that field is that not all people rank order outcomes the same way, even within a culture or even within tight knit communities. The poster who lit up my neurons said that Trump voters don't actually care that they're poor or even that they're highly likely to remain poor. They just don't want anybody "jumping the line" economically. For example, some people who are in the 80th percentile economically prefer to remain in the 80th percentile as long as their neighbors below them don't jump them in position, rather than to rise to the 79th percentile if their neighbors rise to the 75th. The former is "fairer" to them. The latter is an outrage. This gets worse as the people who jump them are less like them racially, religiously, etc.

If that is true then there is nothing irrational about poor Trump voters or poor Republican voters in general, but that's just an afterthought. The important point is then it is no service to those people to work for policies that improve their lives -- that's not what they want. Liberals should recalibrate policy with respect to those people to stop accommodating outcomes which those people don't see as fair. Essentially: it is better to leave them be and concentrate on other populations that share our distributive justice values.

One of the biggest problems for liberal policy is because we are trying to help nearly everybody, the natural internal contradictions and rivalries between subgroups become our problem. This is an opportunity to disregard some of those conflicts by no longer considering rural whites as a shareholder. If they wind up benefiting from our programs, so be it, but don't make it a priority.

Stop holding the train for a guy who doesn't even want to board.

Its the truth. If they want to screw themselves over then let them.

I was reading what our new Goldman Overlord was saying...he wants to cut taxes, especially capital gains and corporate. He also wants to fix our infrastructure. So less revenue coming in but supposedly more money going out...party of fiscal responsibility my butt!

 

[Handyman]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Or, as the Trump supporters will rationalize, "who better to know the crooked schemes and how to stop them and clean them up than one of their own?"

Nah they will just blame Obama...

 

[rufus]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Its the truth. If they want to screw themselves over then let them.

I was reading what our new Goldman Overlord was saying...he wants to cut taxes, especially capital gains and corporate. He also wants to fix our infrastructure. So less revenue coming in but supposedly more money going out...party of fiscal responsibility my butt!

It's not more money going out, really. It's tax credits and other incentives to private industry to undertake public infrastructure projects.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

This is my favorite Wikipedia firearms page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_firearms

I didn't think anything of it until I got to Tennessee.

 

[5mn_Major]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

That's not entirely true. If you graph gun ownership vs. gun murders there is almost no correlation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by_state (It's an extremely weak correlation, but it's actually negative. Higher gun ownership rates have fewer murders and fewer gun murders, but I wouldn't cite that as a reason for more guns on the street.)

If you compare murders vs. per capita income, there is a much higher, though still fairly low, correlation between poverty and murder rate. (R^2 of 0.0198 for poverty vs. 0.0031 for gun ownership).

The strongest correlation I could find was poverty vs. gun ownership and population density vs. gun ownership. The lower the average income, the higher the gun ownership was (R^2 = 0.1885). The lower the population density, the higher gun ownership (R^2=0.39)

Like the facts...not sure about your outcome. Here's why.

First, the data comes from two different sources: your wiki article is FBI and Factcheck and most other top ten violence rankings is CDC. The difference between the two sources is as follows:

Both have similar definitions for what constitutes homicide
FBI reporting is optional and is based strictly on police reports
CDC reporting is mandatory and is based on death certificates
CDC is the source of most gun violence analyses out there

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ntmh.pdf

Second, the wiki data is dated - 2010. The following CDC data is from 2014:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/Homicide.htm

It appears there is in fact a correlation between homicides and gun ownership/laws.

 

[burd]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Hey, it's like GWB said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...[blank stare]... we won't get fooled again."

Wait, Who said that?

That quote reminds me of what an odd triumvirate of disaster that was. Dubya, with his guy-I'd-like-to-have-a-beer-with demeanor, Rumsfeld, the guy who wanted to modernize our military, and Mr. Cheney, who in 1992 so wisely identified all the reasons why invading Iraq was a bad idea.

edit: OK, less odd when you factor in oil profits and government contracts.

 

[Kepler]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

I was reading what our new Goldman Overlord was saying...he wants to cut taxes, especially capital gains and corporate. He also wants to fix our infrastructure. So less revenue coming in but supposedly more money going out...party of fiscal responsibility my butt!

This could work out well for me, personally, ironically. We need to protect education and inner city programs and fight voter suppression, and we should work to move the distortion of the tax code from benefiting the 1% down to benefiting the educated managerial class. We should still try (we'll fail with this government but lay the groundwork for the future) to raise estate and top marginal rates as high as we can, but if Ryan et al. want to cut taxes on people making $200k - $500k, let them. That's the sweetspot for highly educated, socially liberal stakeholders. Direct as much of that infrastructure graft to the cities, particularly on the coasts (i.e., just where Trump would want to put it anyway).

Don't dream it. Be it.

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

This is my favorite Wikipedia firearms page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_firearms

I didn't think anything of it until I got to Tennessee.

Shouldn't Utah's be whatever they used at Mountain Meadows?

 

[Kepler]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

Shouldn't Utah's be whatever they used at Mountain Meadows?

Or the bows and arrows the American Indians showed to Jesus.

BTW, did they crucify Jesus too, or does that part of the story have a happier ending? I mean, if both the Jews and the Indians hate you, maybe it's not them, it's you. Just sayin'.

Edit: he beamed up. So, learned a thing or two about missionary work in 600 years.

The Nephites look like a youth soccer team from Burbank. There's even a ginger.

 

[jerphisch]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

What are we trying to solve here? Honestly this is one of the big problems I have with the anti-gun crowd. The goal posts are constantly moving around.

Less people being shot, that simple.
Edit: This includes suicides, it is still people being shot! If you look at Australia this is where the biggest impact of their law has been.

That's not entirely true. If you graph gun ownership vs. gun murders there is almost no correlation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by_state (It's an extremely weak correlation, but it's actually negative. Higher gun ownership rates have fewer murders and fewer gun murders, but I wouldn't cite that as a reason for more guns on the street.)

One of the links I posted for Kepler is a study that shows as gun ownership increases your chances of being shot by a stranger remain constant, but your odds of being shot by a known person increase. I'll take their analysis that controls for many variables over yours that closely examines Wikipedia

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

BTW, did they crucify Jesus too, or does that part of the story have a happier ending? I mean, if both the Jews and the Indians hate you, maybe it's not them, it's you. Just sayin'.

I haven't gotten that far in the Book of Mormon yet. Only about 529 pages to go.

I'm taking one for the team.

 

[rufus]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

This what it looks like when you cut off your own balls.

http://a5.img.talkingpointsmemo.com/image/upload/w_652/omywdcvfdfxx7o7ttmht.jpg

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again

This what it looks like when you cut off your own balls.

http://a5.img.talkingpointsmemo.com/image/upload/w_652/omywdcvfdfxx7o7ttmht.jpg

Man, does he look miserable.

Seriously, he looks like he's being force-fed a sh*t sandwich in that photo.

EDIT: I wonder if they're drinking Trump Ice