Postby jwocky » Thu Dec 10, 2015 2:03 pm
The problem is not only whether to ban guns or not, the problem is also a general with solving complex problems. Lets do a little thinking example:
Do me a favour, imagine a piece of package twain, about a foot long. Now, both ends of it look obvious the same and if you want to roll it up, you can do it from either end, it doesn't make a difference.
Now imagine a garden hose. On one end, you have the spray vent on the other a connector to a faucet or some other kind of water outlet. Since the ends are different, it makes a difference on which side you start to roll it up. If you start on the vent side, the vent is inside your coil and you are screwed next time, you want to use it. Or not? Because if you start on the connector side the connector is inside and you would need that one to connect the hose to a water outlet. So what to do? To solve this problem, there are those nifty hose coil cars for the garden which keep the connector inside, connected onto the axle and then to a connector on the little cart thing, thus you can connect the whole thing to the water outlet and still get the vent end of your hose, pull out as much hose as you want and all is good.
Now, what does that have to do with gun control (or any other problem)? Very simple, any not trivial but also not too complex problem is a string of smaller sub-problems and the order in which one tries to solves them matters for the overall result. However, real complex problems come seldom alone. Which means, they are part of a network of problems that influence each other and in which options to solve any of the given sub-problems have lan impact on the neighbouring network nodes. That is, when things get really iffy. However, to understand such networking problems gives us the opportunity to understand, whether an alleged "silver bullet" has side effects, whether can even work or whether we need to attack sub-problems in a different order. Or, in some cases, whether the sub-problem people scream about is really the main problem or whether it's maybe just a symptom for something else, another group of sub-problems not even noticed yet.
In my last post, I mentioned, that a ban of legal guns would cause an increase in prices and create a black market plus smugglers because the increased prices lift weapons in the range of goods worth to smuggle even it would be criminal. That's the dark side of economics 101. Now, some claim that gun bans would be the "silver bullet", but we can mathematically prove, it isn't. Only that math scares people more than guns do. Because if you split the problem in it's sub-nodes (I can't do it here so you have to do it at home on a piece of paper because I can't draw a network in this forum), you will find, you have in the core a demand and supply problem. Thus, if you want to reduce the number of guns in circulation, you have to eliminate the nodes that produce the demand and then, the supply side will solve itself because there is no profit in it anymore.
Since one of the main arguments of the pro-gun side is, they need weapons for self-protection, you have to take this argument seriously, because it is one of the attractors increasing demand. So why think people they need something to protect themselves? Because a big number of weapons is in the hands of dangerous people. Terrorists, career criminals, people like that. Means, you can't decrease the demand as long as people think, they need their arms but that leads to the black market argument. If you instead go first for those dangerous people, you have one of those attractors out of the game and afterwards, you can reduce the number of legal weapons because you have decreased the risk of a profitable black market.
Now, this was, because it has in a forum to be, very simplified. There are more nodes (for example, since public authorities are technically not able to keep their role as protector of an unarmed population, the trust is broken and the perceived need for weapons increased) and many of them have underlying network structure by themselves (for example lack of pre-emotive measures by police authorities, lack of problem detection, response times) which each having more nodes behind them (response time for example is a function of available resources, location of those resources and in some areas even the weather at a given time). And so it goes on and one. So, to return to the garden hose example, you have a whole net of garden hoses and have to find the points where you can start to coil the mess up. Mathematics has, for example in form of network analysis, game theory, attract-detractor-balance-models, and a lot more, already invented the tools, we would need, however, since those tools always come up with solutions, that appear neither as loud and colourful nor voter-convincing, there is never a political will to go that way. Nice smooth solutions never create media hype and there for no voter potential. So, if you want to lead this discussion here, you have a choice:
Option 1: You follow the hype, bubble buzzlines and promote ideology. That doesn't solve the problem but uses it as a voter trap, but it helps politicians you like for entirely different reasons (or you just followed the buzzlines without studying the problem, but then, you are kind fo out of the game yourself because obviously you are than oen of the guys in the voter trap, not a contributing factor)
Option 2: You analyse the underlying factors and come up with an order of nodes to attack inside of the restricting parameters (for example limited resources). That gives you a solution but you will need to make politicians follow this solution and because it is rather hard work than media hype, you will find the need to spice it up to make it attractive for politicians to be attracted to it. And since survival is the biggest of all attractors, we talk here about another grass roots movement, you have to fire up.
Everything outside of those two options will not work and it just some kind of hot air thing in which people regurgitate the same old buzzlines and solve nothing. We can of course ban automatic assault rifles because those two nutheads in San Bernadino used some of those, but first, when their neighbor bought them, they were still half automatic collector pieces, they were refurbished by the terrorists to function on full-auto again (thus, they wouldn't be even banned as the current drafts for gun ban are written), second, the male attakcer was involved alread almost two years ago in another plot that went unnoticed because it never came to the operational phase. Third, other attackers, for example the Boston Bombers, the Times Square Bomber, and the Underwear Bomber didn't even use that kind of weaponry, they went already the way to substitute bullets for explosives. So a gun ban will do nothing in that kind of cases, but the gun ban debate will draw attention away from the node-network that actually increased the probability of that kind of attack.
I can go on and on with examples, my desk and my databases are full of them. Ever heard of the Petit family? The Mongo-murders? Or, to bring up something especially exotic, the California-Astrology-Murders? After running those and some hundred more through the mill of analyzing, what do you get? Basically, that every perpetrator showed signs long before the gory and bloody deeds were committed. There have been a lot if warning sings beforehand, but nobody noticed them. So out problem is not gun banning, our problem is early detection. And that is a social thing.
Free speech can never be achieved by dictatorial measures!
