Stopping Power

He sang a song as on he rode 
His guns hung at his hips
He rode into a cattle town
A smile upon his lips
He stopped and walked into a bar
And laid his money down
But his mother's words echoed again

Don't take your guns to town son 
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town

                                Johnny Cash 1958

          If you’ve read some of my blogs, you know my belief that anyone can quickly figure out the correct answers to the important questions we face in life (health/diet, finance, government, raising children, etc.).  All the information is now at our fingertips, we just have to sift through the non-evidenced based garbage to get the right answer. The problem is ideology, which causes the garbage to be written in the first place, and why so many people have difficulty sifting though it to get to the impartial evidence.

  Which brings me to guns.  One of my primary motivating factors in life is protecting my family from harm.  You would think it would be a simple task to examine the objective evidence to determine if owning a gun helped or hindered.  You would be wrong.  The problem is the articles tend to be hopelessly biased, one way or the other.  Gun ownership is like the ideological bellwether of our time.  Nothing is more of a hot button issue, and nothing produces more opinionated, partial articles.

Even if the writer is trying to write objectively, political correctness and multiple variables make it difficult to get a straight answer.  For example, comparing other countries to America is not so helpful when the demographics are different.  Facebook and the news don’t exactly help either.  Whenever there is a mass killing, I am bombarded by very loud, very visceral reactions on both sides.  Most of the articles posted are designed not to get to the truth, but to arrive at the author’s hoped for conclusion.

So my usual strategy of dumping my ideology and seeing where the evidence takes me doesn’t really work here.  At least not yet.  If I were to stick with my ideology the answer would be easy.  Of course I would own a gun.  I hate just about all government, and owning a gun is the quintessential symbol opposing government overreach and tyranny.  My whole libertarian political philosophy is of freedom, and guns are also a symbol of that.  And guns are just damn cool.

But none of that protects my family.  So at the end of the day I had to make a call based on the best sifting of the objective evidence that I could do, even if I don’t feel as firm in my conclusion as I normally do.

My call was to get a gun.

As best as I could gather, the deterrent affect of showing or using a gun outweighs the tiny risk of your family getting shot, either by accident or the perpetrator.  I find, Your Honor, that the media in study after study is shown to be overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, and under reports the times where the perpetrator is deterred.  I further find, Judge, that people greatly overestimate the risk of certain dangers (like children getting shot from a gun in the house) while underestimating the risk of other dangers (like children swimming).

So there it is.  I got one.  Okay, maybe more than one.  I don’t want to go down, but if I do go down I’d rather be on my feet than my knees.  With hopefully everyone else safe.

Have a good night everyone.

JR