The Issue is Values, Not System Racism

The Issue is Values, Not Systemic Racism

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Four Fabrications About Firearms

By James D. Agresti
October 19, 2017

According to two recent op-eds published by the New York Times:

• “more guns means more murder.”
• “more guns means less safety.”
• “a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.”
• “gun-owning households were 41 percent more likely to experience a homicide and 244 percent more like[ly] to experience a suicide.”

As detailed below, all of those claims are rooted in misleading or blatantly false evidence. By spreading this misinformation, the Times and the authors of these pieces may deceive people into making decisions that lead to suffering and deaths.

Fabrication # 1: More Guns Means More Murder

To prove his claim that “more guns means more murder,” Times columnist Bret Stephens cites a 2013 paper in the American Journal of Public Health, which found that “states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.”

For two reasons, this study does not support Stephens’ assertion.

First, the excerpt he quoted from the paper—and the paper itself—don’t account for all murders but only for those committed with guns. This is a sure way to measure all negative effects of gun ownership while excluding most positive effects. For example, if a criminal uses a gun to kill a woman, the study accounts for this negative outcome. However, if a woman uses a gun to prevent a would-be murderer from strangling her, the study ignores this positive outcome.

The primary benefit of gun ownership is that it dramatically changes the balance of power between criminals and potential victims. A central fact of criminology is that lawbreakers often attack “soft targets” or “easy prey.” In the words of the textbook Forensic Science: Advanced Investigations, “Very often, a criminal chooses a target based on the vulnerability of the victim.” The academic book The Psychology of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior: Victim and Offender Perspectives says it like this: “Predators, irrespective of their end game, are exceptionally good at identifying the weak members of the herd.”

Firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens transform them into hard targets, which often prevents crime without even firing a shot. This is borne out by a 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons across the U.S., which found that 40% of them had decided not to commit a crime because they “knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun.”

For all of the reasons above, to assess the true effects of gun ownership on murder, one must account for all murders, not just those committed with guns.

Second, Stephens makes a common blunder by confusing association with causation. Even if the study he cited had found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had higher levels of murder, this would not show that “more guns means more murder.” As explained in a textbookabout analyzing data:

Association is not the same as causation. This issue is a persistent problem in empirical analysis in the social sciences. Often the investigator will plot two variables and use the tight relationship obtained to draw absolutely ridiculous or completely erroneous conclusions. Because we so often confuse association and causation, it is extremely easy to be convinced that a tight relationship between two variables means that one is causing the other. This is simply not true.

The reason it’s not true is because there are numerous possible factors that impact homicide rates, and without an experimental study, it is extremely difficult to identify, measure, and account for the effects of all such factors. In fact, the authors of the study in question make this point three times, writing, “we could not determine causation,” “we could not determine causation,” and “it is not possible in a panel study such as ours to determine causality.”

Despite those explicit and repeated warnings in the study, Stephens misrepresents it as though it proves causation. Coming from Stephens, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner and has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, this kind of error belies gross negligence. The fact that association does not prove causation is taught in high school statistics, and the Common Core math standards require students to “distinguish between correlation and causation.”

Fabrication # 2: More Guns Means Less Safety

Stephens also contends that “more guns means less safety.” As proof of this, he writes that “the F.B.I. counted a total of 268 ‘justifiable homicides‘ by private citizens involving firearms in 2015; that is, felons killed in the course of committing a felony. Yet that same year, there were 489 ‘unintentional firearms deaths‘ in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.”

Stephens’ comparison of firearm accidents to justifiable firearm homicides does not prove his point, because it presumes that firearms improve safety only when they are used to kill criminals. As explained in a 300+ page analysis of firearms studies published in 2005 by the National Academies of Science, “effective defensive gun use need not ever lead the perpetrator to be wounded or killed. Rather, to assess the benefits of self-defense, one needs to measure crime and injury averted. The particular outcome of an offender is of little relevance.”

Likewise, a 1995 paper in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology states:

This is also too serious a matter to base conclusions on silly statistics comparing the number of lives taken with guns with the number of criminals killed by victims. Killing a criminal is not a benefit to the victim, but rather a nightmare to be suffered for years afterward.

The purpose of having a gun for self-defense is not to kill or hurt criminals but to prevent criminals from killing or hurting others. Hence, in the vast majority of cases where someone uses a gun for self-defense, a bullet is never fired because the would-be assailant retreats when he discovers that his target is armed.

Fabrication # 3: Guns Are Far More Likely to Be Used for Harm Than Self-Defense

Other bogus assertions in these Times editorials come from Michael Shermer, a Ph.D. who teaches a course at Chapman University entitled “Skepticism 101: How to Think Like a Scientist.” According to Shermer, “a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.”

Shermer bases this claim on a 1998 paper in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, which examined “records of all fatal and nonfatal shootings in three U.S. cities” that “occurred in or around a residence.” The study found that “for every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”

Like Stephens, Shermer grossly misrepresents the findings of the study he cites. This study does not measure how often guns are used “for self-defense,” as he claims. Instead, it measures how often they are “used to injure or kill in self-defense.” Hence, it excludes every case where a gun is used for self-defense and the criminal is not shot. Again, this ignores the vast bulk of defensive gun uses and benefits.

This study also suffers from the implicit assumption that everyone who commits suicide with a gun would not take their lives by other means if they didn’t have a gun. That notion is abjectly false. As the 2005 National Academies of Science gun control analysis says, “Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.”

In order to measure what Shermer is driving at with his fake fact, one must compare all of the lives that would be saved if guns did not exist to all of the lives that would be lost. This is very difficult to determine, but the most solid existing data suggests that guns help save far more lives than they cost.

In 2014, roughly 14,249 murders were committed with firearms in the United States, and 586 fatal firearm accidents occurred. Assuming that none of these murders would have taken place if guns were unavailable in the U.S., about 15,000 lives might have been saved.

In comparison, a 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone “almost certainly would have been killed” if they “had not used a gun for protection.” This amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year. And it excludes all “military service, police work, or work as a security guard.”

In sum, these data suggest that civilian usage of guns costs about 15,000 lives per year and saves roughly 162,000 lives per year. Since the latter figure is from the 1990s and is based on people’s subjective views of what would have happened if they did not use a gun, it should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the figure of 162,000 who said they saved a life is only 16% of a much larger number of people in this survey who said they used a gun for defense. Hence, this is not a case where a majority of defensive gun users may have exaggerated the life-saving import of what they did.

Moreover, anti-gun criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang praised this study, which was conducted by pro-gun researchers Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz and published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. In the same journal, Wolfgang wrote:

• “I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country.”
• “Nonetheless, the methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it.”
• “The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology.”

Other credible studies provide evidence that the number of defensive gun uses are substantial.

Anti-gun researcher David McDowall and others conducted a major survey of defensive gun use that was published by the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2000. The authors did not take their survey results to their logical conclusions by using the common practice of weighting them to find what the results would be for a nationally representative survey sample. But when one does this, the results imply that U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 990,000 times per year. This figure accounts only for “clear” cases of defensive gun use and is based upon a weighting calculation designed to minimize defensive gun uses.

Likewise, a 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.

Fabrication # 4: Owning a Gun Increases Your Risk of Homicide and Suicide

Shermer also cites a 2003 paper from the Annals of Emergency Medicine, which he summarizes by saying that it found “gun-owning households were 41 percent more likely to experience a homicide and 244 percent more like[ly] to experience a suicide.” He follows this up by stating, “The Second Amendment protects your right to own a gun, but having one in your home involves a risk-benefit calculation you should seriously consider.”

Like Stephens, Shermer mistakes association for causation. This study, like many others in the social sciences, attempts to divine causation by using statistical techniques to “control” for the effects of certain variables. These techniques, however, cannot objectively rule out the possibility that other factors are at play. This is called “omitted variable bias,” and the study in question directly states that it omits many variables that could bias its results, including “mental illness among subjects or family members and histories of violence, illicit drug and alcohol use, time spent (exposed) at home, and lifestyle factors like gang membership and drug dealing.”

Furthermore, this study is a “case control” study, and as the above-cited National Academies of Science report explains, case control studies cannot determine “causal mechanisms.” This is because gun “ownership is not a random decision,” and “homicide victims may possess firearms precisely because they are likely to be victimized.” In other words, the study may actually show a reverse causation in which vulnerability to murder causes people to buy guns.

Summary

Journalism standards give commentators “wide latitude” to express their views, but this is not a license to butcher the truth. In the words of New York Times deputy editorial page editor Trish Hall, “the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.” Yet, these two Timesop-eds do just that.

By spreading these fabrications, the Times editors, Stephens, and Shermer can cause tremendous harm. They may, for example, convince people who will use a gun to save their own lives or the lives of others from ever getting a gun. Their falsehoods may also convince voters to elect politicians who will appoint judges that effectively repeal the Second Amendment. Stephens actually calls for that in his op-ed. In turn, this could have widespread ripple effects on murder and other crimes.

In the realm of public policy, false information can have deadly consequences. This is not just a problem for the gun control side of this debate but for the gun rights side also. When people place their viewpoints over the truth, they value their biases more than the well-being and very lives of themselves and others.

7 Habits of Chronically Unhappy People [REPOST]

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  Tamara Star Creator of the 40-day personal reboot for women, Founder TStar Recruiting, Best Selling Author

I often teach about happiness and what has become exceedingly clear is this: There are seven qualities chronically unhappy people have mastered.

According to Psychology Today, University of California researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky states: "40 percent of our capacity for happiness is within our power to change."

If this is true and it is, there's hope for us all. There are billions of people on our planet and clearly some are truly happy. The rest of us bounce back and forth between happiness and unhappiness depending on the day.

Throughout the years, I've learned there are certain traits and habits chronically unhappy people seem to have mastered. But before diving in with you, let me preface this and say: we all have bad days, even weeks when we fall down in all seven areas.

The difference between a happy and unhappy life is how often and how long we stay there. Here are the 7 qualities of chronically unhappy people. 

1. Your default belief is that life is hard. Happy people know life can be hard and tend to bounce through hard times with an attitude of curiosity versus victimhood. They take responsibility for how they got themselves into a mess, and focus on getting themselves out of it as soon as possible.

Perseverance towards problem-solving versus complaining over circumstances is a symptom of a happy person. Unhappy people see themselves as victims of life and stay stuck in the "look what happened to me" attitude versus finding a way through and out the other side.

2. You believe most people can't be trusted. I won't argue that healthy discernment is important, but most happy people are trusting of their fellow man. They believe in the good in people, versus assuming everyone is out to get them. Generally open and friendly towards people they meet, happy people foster a sense of community around themselves and meet new people with an open heart.

Unhappy people are distrustful of most people they meet and assume that strangers can't be trusted. Unfortunately this behavior slowly starts to close the door on any connection outside of an inner-circle and thwarts all chances of meeting new friends.

3. You concentrate on what's wrong in this world versus what's right. There's plenty wrong with this world, no arguments here, yet unhappy people turn a blind eye to what's actually right in this world and instead focus on what's wrong. You can spot them a mile away, they'll be the ones complaining and responding to any positive attributes of our world with "yeah but".

Happy people are aware of global issues, but balance their concern with also seeing what's right. I like to call this keeping both eyes open. Unhappy people tend to close one eye towards anything good in this world in fear they might be distracted from what's wrong. Happy people keep it in perspective. They know our world has problems and they also keep an eye on what's right.

4. You compare yourself to others and harbor jealousy. Unhappy people believe someone else's good fortune steals from their own. They believe there's not enough goodness to go around and constantly compare yours against theirs. This leads to jealousy and resentment.

Happy people know that your good luck and circumstance are merely signs of what they too can aspire to achieve. Happy people believe they carry a unique blueprint that can't be duplicated or stolen from -- by anyone on the planet. They believe in unlimited possibilities and don't get bogged down by thinking one person's good fortune limits their possible outcome in life.

5. You strive to control your life. There's a difference between control and striving to achieve our goals. Happy people take steps daily to achieve their goals, but realize in the end, there's very little control over what life throws their way.

Unhappy people tend to micromanage in effort to control all outcomes and fall apart in dramatic display when life throws a wrench in their plan. Happy people can be just as focused, yet still have the ability to go with the flow and not melt down when life delivers a curve-ball.

The key here is to be goal-oriented and focused, but allow room for letting sh*t happen without falling apart when the best laid plans go awry- because they will. Going with the flow is what happy people have as plan B.

6. You consider your future with worry and fear. There's only so much rent space between your ears. Unhappy people fill their thoughts with what could go wrong versus what might go right.

Happy people take on a healthy dose of delusion and allow themselves to daydream about what they'd like to have life unfold for them. Unhappy people fill that head space with constant worry and fear.

Happy people experience fear and worry, but make an important distinction between feeling it and living it. When fear or worry crosses a happy person's mind, they'll ask themselves if there's an action they can be taken to prevent their fear or worry from happening (there's responsibility again) and they take it. If not, they realize they're spinning in fear and they lay it down.

7. You fill your conversations with gossip and complaints. Unhappy people like to live in the past. What's happened to them and life's hardships are their conversation of choice. When they run out of things to say, they'll turn to other people's lives and gossip.

Happy people live in the now and dream about the future. You can feel their positive vibe from across the room. They're excited about something they're working on, grateful for what they have and dreaming about the possibilities of life.

Obviously none of us are perfect. We're all going to swim in negative waters once in a while, but what matters is how long we stay there and how quickly we work to get ourselves out. Practicing positive habits daily is what sets happy people apart from unhappy people, not doing everything perfectly. 

Walk, fall down, get back up again, repeat. It's in the getting back up again where all the difference resides.

Post adapted with permission Daily Transformations photo via Unsplash by Volkan Olmez

A Simple Statement of Faith

I grabbed this from John Piper's Blog.  I love the simplicity of it; the Good News is, after-all, pretty simple. It's all of us who make it more complicated by adding our preference, opinion, and doctrine to God's pure message of freedom through the blood of Christ. We are indeed justified by Faith and not by works. And here is the story of God on which our faith stands. 

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1) God created us for his glory.

“Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:6–7). God made all of us in his own image so that we would image forth, or reflect, his character and moral beauty.

2) Every human should live for God’s glory.

“Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The way to live for the glory of God is to love him (Matthew 22:37), trust him (Romans 4:20), be thankful to him (Psalm 50:23), and obey him (Matthew 5:16). When we do these things, we image forth God’s glory.

3) We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him . . . and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Romans 1:21, 23). None of us has loved or trusted or thanked or obeyed God as we ought.

4) We all deserve eternal punishment.

“The wages of sin is (eternal) death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Those who do not obey the Lord Jesus “will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).

5) In his great mercy, God sent forth his only Son Jesus Christ to provide for sinners the way of eternal life.

“God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

6) Eternal life is a free gift to all who will trust in Christ as Lord and Savior.

“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

[repost] 10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be

Below is a really great post by Tim Hoch. Very challenging. I'm guilty of several of these; really guilty. It's good to challenge ourselves and get our head straight. For me I have to continuously do each of these: draw near to God (James 4:8), take every thought captive (2 Cor. 10:5), and forgive as the Lord forgives me (Col. 3:13). Without these three I never come close to avoiding the following 10 pitfalls. And, as he states, these sure do make life harder than it has to be.

10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be [repost]

Tim Hoch

1. You ascribe intent.

Another driver cut you off. Your friend never texted you back. Your co-worker went to lunch without you. Everyone can find a reason to be offended on a steady basis. So what caused you to be offended? You assigned bad intent to these otherwise innocuous actions. You took it as a personal affront, a slap in the face.

Happy people do not do this. They don’t take things personally. They don’t ascribe intent to the unintentional actions of others.

2. You’re the star of your own movie.

It is little wonder that you believe the world revolves around you. After all, you have been at the very center of every experience you have ever had.

You are the star of your own movie. You wrote the script. You know how you want it to unfold. You even know how you want it to end.

Unfortunately you forgot to give your script to anyone else. As a result, people are unaware of the role they are supposed to play. Then, when they screw up their lines, or fail to fall in love with you or don’t give you a promotion, your movie is ruined.

Lose your script. Let someone else star once in awhile. Welcome new characters. Embrace plot twists.

3. You fast forward to apocalypse.

I have a bad habit of fast forwarding everything to its worst possible outcome and being pleasantly surprised when the result is marginally better than utter disaster or jail time. My mind unnecessarily wrestles with events that aren’t even remotely likely. My sore throat is cancer. My lost driver’s license fell into the hands of an al-Qaeda operative who will wipe out my savings account.

Negativity only breeds more negativity. It is a happiness riptide. It will carry you away from shore and if you don’t swim away from it, will pull you under.

4. You have unrealistic and/or uncommunicated expectations.

Among their many shortcomings of your family and friends is the harsh reality that they cannot read your mind or anticipate your whims.

Did your boyfriend forget the six and a half month anniversary of your first movie date? Did your girlfriend refuse to call at an appointed hour? Did your friend fail to fawn over your tribal tattoo?

Unmet expectations will be at the root of most of your unhappiness in life. Minimize your expectations, maximize your joy.

5. You are waiting for a sign.

I have a friend who won’t make a decision without receiving a “sign.” I suppose she is waiting on a trumpeted announcement from God. She is constantly paralyzed by a divinity that is either heavily obscured or frustratingly tardy. I’m not disavowing that fate or a higher power plays a role in our lives. I’m just saying that it is better to help shape fate than be governed by it.

6. You don’t take risks.

Two words: Live boldly. Every single time you are offered a choice that involves greater risk, take it. You will lose on many of them but when you add them up at the end of your life you’ll be glad you did. 

7. You constantly compare your life to others.

A few years ago I was invited to a nice party at a big warehouse downtown. I was enjoying the smooth jazz, box wine and crustless sandwiches. What more could a guy want? Later in the evening I noticed a steady parade of well-heeled people slide past and disappear into another room. I peeked and saw a large party with beautiful revelers dancing and carrying on like Bacchus. Suddenly my gig wasn’t as fun as it had been all because it didn’t appear to measure up to the party next door- a party I didn’t even know existed until just moments before.

I do this frequently. Those people are having more fun. Mary has a bigger boat. Craig gets all the lucky breaks. Ted has more money. John is better looking.

Stop it.

Always remember what Teddy Roosevelt said: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

8. You let other people steal from you.

If you had a million dollars in cash under your mattress, you would check it regularly and take precautions to insure it is safe. The one possession you have that is more important than money is time. But you don’t do anything to protect it. In fact you willingly give it to thieves. Selfish people, egotistical people, negative people, people who won’t shut up. Treat your time like Fort Knox. Guard it closely and give it only to those who deserve and respect it.

9. You can’t/won’t let go.

These are getting a little harder aren’t they? That’s because sometimes you have to work at happiness. Some hurdles are too difficult to clear by simply adjusting your point of view or adopting a positive mindset.

Do you need to forgive someone? Do you need to turn your back on a failed relationship? Do you need to come to terms with the death of a loved one?

Life is full of loss. But, in a sense, real happiness would not be possible without it.  It helps us appreciate and savor the things that really matter. It helps us grow. It can help us help others grow.

Closure is a word for people who have never really suffered. There’s no such thing. Just try to “manage” your loss. Put it in perspective. You will always have some regret and doubt about your loss. You may always second guess yourself. If only you had said this, or tried that.

You’re not alone. Find someone who understands and talk to that person. Reach out for support. If all else fails, try #10 below.

10. You don’t give back.

One way to deal with loss is to immerse yourself in doing good. Volunteer. Get involved in life.

It doesn’t even have to be a big, structured thing. Say a kind word. Encourage someone. Pay a visit to someone who is alone. Get away from your self-absorption.

When it comes down to it, there are two types of people in this world. There are givers and there are takers. Givers are happy. Takers are miserable. What are you?