Meanwhile, I thought I'd bring up
this article. Since my original article, written by a psychologist, didn't gel.
Oh, neat. Guess I'll uh, tackle this one.
First, quickly gotta get this out of the way, but when looking for the credibility of an argument, 'ere's a few things.
- First and foremost, there are three types of arguments, generally. Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.
- Ethos: Argument from personal credibility/accomplishment. Generally speaking, when you have someone making an argument, you generally do want to look at their credibility. A psychologist making commentary about psychology is, by default, more credible than some random fucktard on the Internet (hi mom!), but credibility alone doesn't win an argument. There are totally credibly verified scientists who spent several years in post secondary education, who still reject basic facts like climate change, or evolution, against the vast majority of the scientific community and scientific consensus. Ethos, under no circumstances, trumps logos.
- Pathos: Argument of emotion. This is basically how persuasive an argument is. If you have two equally valid positions (ex: ideologies), the one with the more compelling pathos generally wins. Moralistic points are almost always pathos arguments.
- Logos: Argument of reason. Logos is essentially an argument based on facts--logic, and reason. Something which can be, clearly, visibly deduced and known. If I drop a feather and a hammer at the same time, measure the speed at which both drop, and then take said numbers and present them to prove which drops faster? That's a logos argument. Many pathos arguments are draped in a logos disguise.
Now, why am I going over argument types? Because a lot of arguments--both pro and anti gun control--tend to be
pathos pretending to be logos. From the article in the quote above...
Propaganda said:
The most revealing fact in the gun-control controversy is that among all of the criminologists who have ever changed their opinion on gun control, EVERY LAST ONE has moved from a position supporting gun control to the side skeptical of gun control and not the other way around... NOT EVEN ONE! Think about the significance of that one simple fact.
Not even one, huh?
Five minutes on Google proved that assertion wrong. This isn't a logical argument; this is assuming the thought patterns of every single person in a single profession. That's a pathos argument! It's meant to emotionally sway you by saying that "everyone with credibility says X!" But... That's basically
never true in any case, no matter how fundamentally true the fact may be.
A logos argument
uses facts, and studies, and numbers. It does not make chest-beating assumptions.
Ridiculous Challenge said:
I challenge any of my readers to provide even one single example of any criminologist who has had his work, skeptical of gun control, published in a respected professional journal and then later published works supporting it. Such evidence does not exist. That's because the more they learn, the more obvious it becomes that gun control has never worked anywhere that it has been tried.
People rarely change from their positions once they gain them. The same silly argument could be made of people who support gun control. "It has never worked anywhere that it has been tried." The number of overall suicides in Australia dropped by double digit percentage points after the gun buy back. The number of gun-related homicides dropped almost entirely off the face of the map. Most countries with gun control have a far lower homicide rate than the United States of America. Now you can make an argument that the second amendment obviously doesn't work because the homicide rate in the US is higher than anywhere else in the first world where gun ownership
isn't a right.
All of that in the above paragraph is an example of assertion. Australia's homicide rate with other weapons increased when the firearm homicide rate decreased, and armed robbery is still a thing. Yet, by simply carefully choosing my words, I'm able to assert facts that--while technically true--distort the real picture.
This is pathos 101, this is propaganda 101. Just say the facts you're most comfortable with to make the argument you want, rather than what might necessarily be true. Like "every criminologist has changed their mind on gun control" suddenly turned into "give me proof that a criminologist who doesn't support gun control changed their minds." Hmm... Fuckin' wonder why that happened.
SOURCES! NEAT!
So the majority of these claims about criminologists is placed on
this study. Which is neat and all, except, it's all telephone interviewed self-reporting... Oh...
Hahahaha fucking why said:
Interviews were monitored at random by survey supervisors. All interviews in which an alleged DGU was reported by the R were validated by supervisors with call-backs, along with a 20% random sample of all other interviews. Of all eligible residential telephone numbers called where a person rather than an answering machine answered, 61% resulted in a completed interview. Interviewing was carried out from February through April of 1993.
Which results in pretty hilarious shit like this.
A near 50% deceit rate said:
Some of the earlier gun surveys asked the DGU question only of Rs who reported owning a gun. The cost of this limitation is evident from the first two rows of
Table 4.
Nearly 40% of the people reporting a DGU did not report personally owning a gun at the time of the interview. They either used someone else's gun, got rid of the gun since the DGU incident, or inaccurately denied personally owning a gun. About a quarter of the defenders reported that they did not even have a gun in their household at the time of the interview. Another possibility is that many gun owners were falsely denying their ownership of the "incriminating evidence" of their DGU.
That's a fucking absurd rate of self-reporting error. This is why telephone self-reporting studies
don't work. This is exactly the same method that produced the 1-in-5 (which turned into 1-in-4) "women are raped on campus" number. Which, again, is patently fucking absurd.
Again, this didn't take me long to find. I'm just reading the shit this man is spewing. Oh, speaking of the author, I decided to look up his twitter account...
JESUS FUCK!
This man is fucking mental. "Will Obama retire to Hawaii or seek political Asylum in Iran." "Who says a wall won't work? China made one."
#1: Obama's as Christian as it gets.
#2: You know how effective the great wall was at stopping the mongols? They fucking walked around it. The Great Wall was probably even less effective than the Maginot Line.
So to Conclude this shindig
I'm not your enemy. Hilariously enough, or perhaps sadly enough, I likely share more views with this man than I do most of his opponents. And, to give credit where it's due, not all the numbers he's citing are wrong. (Like the accidental injuries/deaths numbers aren't wrong.)
However, that being said, he makes ludicrous assumptions, and when you look at his political views, he's as biased as it gets. If he leaned any further to the right, he would break his ankles. His arguments are based more on propaganda and cherrypicking of data that he likes than actual facts and reason. For fucks sake, one of the reports he cites is from
1979--That's 37 years ago! That data is completely irrelevant and does not take into account numerous different reasons for the rise in gun violence.
And I have wasted two hours of my life on this disappointing sack of shit. Now I'm going to go get myself some booze, and have some fun writing stuff. I mean, if you want to look up numbers and start drawing conclusions,
try justice statistics. Violent crime has consistently been on the decrease. It gives you a whole boatfuckload of reasons why, none of which depend on faulty telephone self-reporting.
Oh, right, and if anyone wants to peer into the veil of propagandist madness,
knock yourselves out. Some of the shit this guy says is fucking legendarily bad.
