{"id":8145,"date":"2012-12-21T23:14:04","date_gmt":"2012-12-21T23:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=8145"},"modified":"2012-12-21T23:14:04","modified_gmt":"2012-12-21T23:14:04","slug":"umm-we-didnt-mean-that-kind-of-gun-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/umm-we-didnt-mean-that-kind-of-gun-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Umm . . . we didn’t mean THAT kind of gun control"},"content":{"rendered":"

You gotta love the NRA.\u00a0 Anyone who was expecting Vice President Wayne LaPierre <\/a>to break the NRA\u2019s week-long silence after the Newtown massacre with an olive branch and some sensible proposals regarding better background checks, say, or restrictions on high-capacity ammo clips didn\u2019t know his man.\u00a0 The idea of putting an armed guard in every elementary school in the country strikes me as utter lunacy (sadly, lunacy already embraced by 20 percent of elementary schools and one third of all public schools generally, reports the New York Times<\/a>).\u00a0 But no one is more responsible for laying the predicate for LaPierre\u2019s proposal than the gun control Left.\u00a0\u00a0 The Left (including the media: see, especially, NPR) has been hawking the notion that the Newtown school shootings represent a widespread threat in order to advance its own agenda.\u00a0 It can not now protest that LaPierre\u2019s idea is a ludicrous overreaction to an extraordinarily rare, horrific event with no precedent.\u00a0 (And in fact some gun control advocates have decided that there is more advantage to be had in backing the schools-need-armed-guards idea <\/a>than in demolishing it.)\u00a0 So now both sides are staring at each other across a common false conceit, even as more school districts have already begun arming up and police departments have announced plans to patrol schools <\/a>in another eruption of probability-free thinking.\u00a0 For the moment, there may in fact be an elevated risk of copy cat attacks from the unhinged.\u00a0 But that increased risk is over a baseline that is extremely low to begin with.\u00a0 Perhaps there is no cost to such reflexive overreaction.\u00a0 But in fact there always is a cost, since public resources are finite.\u00a0 Money spent putting an armed guard in every school could be better spent targetted by risk.\u00a0 There are many inner city neighborhoods and schools that could<\/em> do with more police presence, for example, because their residents face a non-negligble chance of getting shot: The per capita shooting rate in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for instance , is a whopping 81 times higher than in Brooklyn\u2019s Bay Ridge neighborhood.\u00a0 Spreading police intervention equally across all neighborhoods in New York, regardless of their crime rate, would be a waste of resources–one that the New York Police Department\u2019s Compstat system <\/a>thankfully prevents.\u00a0 In the present instance, however, we seemed doomed to an irrational, if inevitable,\u00a0response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You gotta love the NRA.\u00a0 Anyone who was expecting Vice President Wayne LaPierre to break the NRA\u2019s week-long silence after the Newtown massacre with an olive branch and some sensible proposals regarding better background checks, say, or restrictions on high-capacity … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8145"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8148,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8145\/revisions\/8148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}