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Thursday, May 02, 2013

What Is An "Acceptable Statistic"?




When I write of gun incidents and say that such things may be "acceptable statistics", I do not mean that they are "acceptable events".

We have accepted guns like we have accepted automobiles.
Every year, people are killed by cars. Many deaths could have been avoided by reducing speed limits, or by building safer cars. However, such actions would impinge on our sense of god-given rights or would increase the cost of driving.

Therefore, we do not make things as good as we could, and we settle for a level of acceptable deaths.
These deaths are the "acceptable statistics"; they are acceptable because we do not intend to change things any time soon.

So it is with guns.
I realized this a few months ago, and it surprised me: there will not be meaningful gun control laws because we have accepted the notion of a Weaponized Society. Even the defeated gun law lacked any depth of purpose: it was a charade for a nation of dopes to give themselves the illusion they could do something of value... and even we could not accomplish it.


We fear a government that would take our guns. We must protect ourselves against our own democratically elected Government.

We fear terrorists and people who are violently affected by our foreign policies, so we must curtail our civil rights and give more power to the Government and its police and military agencies.

By giving Government more power, we increase our fear of a government that would take our guns.....

and so on, and so on, in this vicious circle.

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