Nice analysis but it misses one of the big picture arguments that gun ownership advocates have long made (implicitly or explicitly): widespread civilian gun ownership appears to make genocide considerably less likely.
Very topical with Venezuela in the news. Thanks for the link. Any idea why it’s only available on the archive, and not hosted anymore? Just a paywall thing, or was the essay yanked for some reason?
While I personally agree with this stance, it’s a contentious stance, and one that I’ve never seen anyone yield ground on. Now that I have such a fabulous link, I can avoid writing that article. :) Thanks again.
I do in fact have one “mathematics of unlikely events” article in the blog, which you might get a kick out of. It’s very highly trafficked.
Arguments about “rights” don’t go anywhere, because everyone lies on a different point on the spectrum between “liberty” and “security.” When you enter into gun “rights” discussions, you waste tremendous amounts of ink only to discover that the two interlocutors are at different points on that graph, and neither is going to move, so the conversation was fruitless.
What I’ve tried to focus on with this blog, is a completely different approach. One I don’t think gets any lip service at all in the overall gun discussion, which goes like this:
“Even if you hate guns, and even if you don’t care at all about personal liberty, every policy the Left trots out fails purely because of the math.”
I’ve tried to stick to a laser focus on the efficacy argument, because everyone can disagree with liberty, and everyone can harbor a different level of trust in government, but nobody can argue with math. Math just is.
Browse around here for more of that sort of thing:
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