Skip to main content

Knee-Jerk Gun Control Legislation

Many people insist on gun control legislation any time there is a shooting. It is politically hard to sell and as a life-saving measure it is a waste of time and resources. Time, resources, political capital and energy spent on a fruitless effort to control a significant minority of the population could instead be productively used to actually save lives. 

When we get news of a random mass shooting, it is as good a time as any to oppose senseless death. It is not such a good time to make rules for hundreds of millions of people. Maybe things should change, but not by angry actions in the heat of the moment. This is not the time to design public policy.

More than five thousand people die in the United States every day. If you save just one percent of those people, you save the lives of fifty people. You save not just fifty people today, but fifty people every single day -- more than ten thousand people a year. 

We already know things that will both save lives and make life better. Those things are supported by sensible evidence. 

Consider this: "Historically, every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance. Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 [annually] pay with their lives." -- Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, staff physician and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

If you fight to get absolute no-brainer fixes like Universal Health Care you will save lives.

When it comes right down to it, it seems that people don't really want to help. It is every man for himself. They can help, but in practice they just won't.

The Second Amendment allows the people at the bottom to be armed against despotic oppression from the top. Gun control would be fine if done at a local level such that people could gain back control of their government if needed.


It is weird how invasive and tyrannical the U.S. Federal government has become. I think it would be a very bad idea to disarm while central government continues to expand its control. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The system cannot execute the specified program

It always annoys me no end when I get messages like the following: "The system cannot execute the specified program." I got the above error from Windows XP when I tried to execute a program I use all the time. The message is hugely aggravating because it says the obvious without giving any actionable information. If you have such a problem and you are executing from a deep directory structure that may be your problem. It was in my case. Looking on the web with that phrase brought up a bunch of arcane stuff that did not apply to me. It mostly brought up long threads (as these things tend to do) which follow this pattern: 'Q' is the guy with the problem asking for help 'A' can be any number of people who jump in to 'help'. Q: I got this error "The system cannot execute the specified program." when I tried to ... [long list of things tried] A: What program were you running, what operating system, where is the program? What type of
1 comment
Read more

Crucial SSD BIOS update

Executive summary: If Crucial Storage Executive can't see your Crucial drive, you may be able to fix that by re-running as Administrator.  Windows 10 continues to be a nightmare. The latest update has caused my machine to go wonky and it was suggested that, for reasons unknown, my SSD boot drive needed a BIOS update.  The drive in question is a Crucial MX500 CT500MX500 S SD1 and the BIOS update is from M3CR020 to M3CR023.  I initially attempted to burn and boot from a DVD ROM, but that came back with an error:  "could not find kernel image boot/vmlinuz64" You would think that something whose sole purpose is to boot into one program could get that right. That is, you would think that this very basic thing would have been tested prior to release. Sigh. No doubt there is a tortured route to get that thing to boot, but for me there was an easier way. You would think that Crucial would have offered that up first rather than the burnable image, but not in my case.  I then insta
1 comment
Read more

When code writes code, what do developers do?

When code writes code, what do developers do? As we head further into a future where things are automated, people’s last refuge will be curation in a bright future or serving others in a dark future. Curation devolves into saying what you want and iterating through a few rounds of “not that.” As a programmer, I always found automated programming tools laughable. We are still mostly there, but ML/AI is changing that. At one point, many people sagely nodded their heads and said computers would *never* beat a human at chess. Never. I disagreed. I thought that it was ***inevitable*** that they ***would*** beat humans ‘hands down.’ That is well behind us now. It is only a matter of time until all human ‘jobs’ will be doable by machines. Each one, including being a companion. As of now, the bottleneck is energy and knowledge. I think we will crack fusion, but if we do not, we can still harvest billions of times what we use now from the sun in space. The knowledge is increasing rapidly.
Post a Comment
Read more