ON FIREARMS, REPORTING OBSCURES THE TRUTH

ON FIREARMS, REPORTING OBSCURES THE TRUTH

 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN GUN CONTROL

There is no subject on which reporting is so consistently poor as firearms. Most reporters are anti-gun; as a result, even when reporting is not overtly biased it is generally so murky as to obscure rather than reveal basic facts. A case in point is this Minneapolis Star Tribune story with the ambiguous headline: “As gun-carrying permits reach historic levels in Minnesota, related crimes remain in check.” Which I guess is another way of saying that crime rates haven’t risen.

The article notes that there are now 200,000 carry permit holders in Minnesota, or around five percent of the adult population. It also points out that 19% of permit holders are women. In Minnesota, as in a number of other states, carry laws have been liberalized by requiring local authorities to issue permits to applicants who are not disqualified by virtue of, e.g., a felony conviction. The result has been a steep increase in the number of permit holders since the law was changed in 2003.

Whether this has been a good thing or a bad thing is what readers of the article want to know, but the Strib reporter isn’t telling:

Opponents had feared that the law would lead to a surge in shootings and gun deaths. But Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension data show that fatalities involving permit holders are rare. In the past five years, there have been five deadly or nonlethal instances of justifiable use of a firearm by permit holders.

“Deadly or nonlethal” would include all firearm usage, so there must have been more than five instances. In any event, all five instances described in the article are cases of self-defense, and none led to charges against the permit holder. Still, the vagueness continues:

The debate over carrying guns has varied little since permit-to-carry laws became the norm more than a decade ago. Both sides can present statistics and reports to prove their points.

Well, not really. When shall-carry legislation was enacted by the Minnesota legislature in 2003, liberals unanimously predicted that it would lead to a bloodbath. Violent crime, they told us, would skyrocket. But it didn’t happen; on the contrary, the incidence of homicide and other violent crimes dropped steadily.

In the five years ending in 2003, the homicide rate in Minnesota averaged 2.6 per 100,000. In the ten years since the law was liberalized, the rate has averaged 2.0 per 100,000, a 23% decline. Moreover, the rate has dropped further as more carry permits have been issued. In the last five years, the rate has averaged only 1.7 per 100,000, a 35% reduction compared with the 1999-2003 average.

This isn’t opinion, it is arithmetic. The liberals were wrong. Yet it is rare to see this basic fact acknowledged in news reports. The Strib says that “both sides can present statistics and reports to prove their points.” We know what the statistics are on the pro-gun side, and they appear to be conclusive. So what can the anti-gun side offer?

Meanwhile, research by the Violence Policy Center in Washington found that individuals with permits to carry handguns in public have been responsible for at least 568 fatal non-self-defense shootings since 2007. Twenty-nine of those incidents were mass shootings (with three or more victims), resulting in the deaths of 139 victims. And since May 2007, at least 17 law enforcement officers have died at the hands of killers with permits to carry.

The calculation to which the reporter refers is here. I have no idea how accurate the Violence Policy Center’s count is, but the “568 fatal non-defense shootings” include 222 suicides. Does the remainder–346 instances from 2007 to the present, if we take the report at face value–constitute a large number or a small number? It works out to 43 incidents per year in a country where, the same article tells us, there are now 13 million permit holders. This is an astonishingly low rate of .0000033, or .33 per 100,000.

The anti-gun case continues with bare assertion rather than argument, let alone data:

When proponents campaigned for the state’s permit-to-carry measure, they argued that being able to carry a loaded gun in public would deter crime, said Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota, a gun safety and education group. She doesn’t buy it, saying permit standards aren’t strong enough because people who have multiple DWIs can receive one.

“People behave differently when they have a gun,” she said. “If you are trying to keep people safe, you don’t make guns easily accessible.”

What about that 35% drop in the homicide rate? No comment.

Firearms are not the only topic on which our news media would rather obfuscate facts than explicate them, but they are an obvious example of that phenomenon.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/08/on-firearms-reporting-obscures-the-truth.php

THE SOCIALIST DREAM WILL NEVER DIE

 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ECONOMY, SOCIALISM

Not long ago I was listening to one of Russ Roberts’s archived “EconTalk” podcasts with the great Thomas Sowell (and if you don’t listen to EconTalk you’re missing one of the top podcast artists of our time—subscribe for free here), and was completely stunned by something Sowell said. When he was assigned Friedrich Hayek’s seminal essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” as a graduate student, he didn’t get it. Sowell found it too abstract and dense. Russ Roberts, another fine Chicago-school economist, said he had the same reaction to it the first time he read it, and, moreover, that Vernon Smith (a Nobel Prize winner) also found the essay opaque at first reading.

I was staggered by this, as I’ve always found that essay to be lucid and intuitively compelling. I typically find a way to have students read it in every class I teach if I can possibly find an excuse. A special panel of eminent economists included Hayek’s essay in a list of the 20 most significant and influential articles published in the 100-year history of the American Economic Review, the premier journal in the field. But if really smart and sound people like Sowell, Roberts, and Smith find the essay initially dense, then perhaps I need to rethink how to convey the logic of markets, because it may be more difficult than I thought.

Fresh evidence of the broader problem comes from the latest edition of The New Republic, which carries an article entitled—I kid you not—“What If Stalin Had Computers?” The nub of the article is that if only Stalin had had today’s computing power, he could have made the Soviet command economy work. Just what the world needs: ways to make Stalinism more effective. But apparently The New Republic is back to its old pro-Stalinism of the late 1940s. Good to know.

The article is mostly a longish review essay of a new book, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, which appears to be trying to capitalize (heh) on the wave of enthusiasm for Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, this Mason fellow is a reporter for Britain’s Channel 4.) And here comes the central idea:

The book really comes into its own when Mason addresses the possibilities of contemporary planning. He does not go as far as to endorse “cyber Stalinism” but at the very least poses its thesis: What if the problem with the Soviet Union was that it was too early? What if our computer processing power and behavioral data are developed enough now that central planning could outperform the market when it comes to the distribution of goods and services?

So we’re back to the old line that “The Soviets just need more time to make Communism work!” Hayek developed the phrase “the fatal conceit” to describe the view that government planners, sufficiently armed with enough data and power, could outperform the marketplace and deliver superior economic performance. Hillary Clinton clearly believes she knows better than investors how long capital should be invested with her recent proposal to tax capital gains at different rates depending on the time horizon. (But hey—she turned $1,000 into $100,000 through trading cattle futures, so she’s obviously an economic genius.)

I recall reading one of the last interviews Hayek ever gave shortly before his death in 1992 inForbes (sadly I can’t seem to find it now), where he was asked whether the information revolution and supercomputing didn’t change things, and make possible more effective centralized economic planning. Hayek said no—no matter how big and fast computers get, and how complete the data gathering, no centralized process can ever hope to match the uncoordinated actions of the constantly changing marketplace. Go re-read “The Use of Knowledge in Society” slowly and repeatedly until you get it.

At the end of the day, of course, the socialist impulse is not really rooted in reason or epistemology, but in envy and the desire for authoritarian control. That’s why we’ll never be rid of these people, no matter how many Venezeulas and Cubas you pile up.

And just in case you need a reminder on Hayek:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/08/the-socialist-dream-will-never-die.php

AP U.S. HISTORY — REPORTS FROM THE FRONT LINES

AP U.S. HISTORY — REPORTS FROM THE FRONT LINES

 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN EDUCATION, HISTORY, LEFTISM

I’ve written frequently about the College Board’s efforts to indoctrinate high school studentswith a left-wing narrative of American history, via its framework for teaching AP U.S. History. What’s been missing from my reports is the views of those on the front line — the teachers upon whom the College Board’s framework has been imposed.

Stanley Kurtz fills this gap with reports from two stellar history teachers, Elizabeth Althamand Marc Anderson.

Altham describes the pressure under which the College Board places her to discard her teaching techniques and the deeply-held beliefs that animate them, or risk her students’ performance on the exam. Her critique extends to the new AP European History framework which, she says, presents religion as something to evolve away from, presenting a Thomist point of view as immature in comparison to a skeptical secularism.

Anderson provides a look inside the College Board’s training program for AP U.S. History teachers which, he says, exalts Howard Zinn’s Marxist take on American history and primes teachers to blame America for the problems of the world, while overlooking its influence for the good.

Altham and Anderson agree that the changes to the College Board’s AP U.S. History framework, adopted under pressure, have not allayed their concerns.

The classroom and the training programs for AP U.S. History teachers constitute the front lines in the left’s battle to indoctrinate America’s high school students. But we shouldn’t forget about another important front — the rooms where teachers and professors hired by the College Board grade the AP U.S. History exams.

A reader has sent me a first-hand account of what’s transpiring there. He prefers to remain anonymous because the College Board has warned its graders not to talk to the media or to post on social media, and has already fired one grader for posting comments on Facebook.

Our reader’s focus is not on the College Board’s ideological bias, though he agrees it is manifest. His focus on the lowering of grading standards. (At the end of his account, I’ll suggest that the two may be related).

Our reader reports:

I think your post and the scholars letter [criticizing the AP U.S. History framework] if anything greatly understate the extent of the problems with the new exam. There is obvious left of center bias that the letter noted. That comes not only from the exam itself, but also the instructional materials [the College Board] provides to teachers. But there is an even deeper bias going on.

[The College Board] makes money by having students take exams. It is a rather corrupt bargain. School administrators make their schools look good by claiming “X % of our students take AP exams.” [The College Board] makes money by having more students take exams. Taxpayers foot the bill.

Thus a huge number of students take the exams without any reasonable chance of passing. I would say that 75% of students in past years should never have taken the US History exam. But that’s not good for business.

Over the past few years, [The College Board] has subtly pressured graders to increase student scores. This year the pressure is no longer subtle. Graders have been told to “give students the benefit of the doubt” and “set the bar very low.” (Those are actual quotes.)

But that’s not all. The whole structure of the exam’s scoring has been changed specifically, I believe, to increase scores. The old exam, for all its flaws (and NAS notwithstanding, there was always a lot of political bias toward the left) tested content and it was surprisingly rigorous by today’s standards of education. That’s why so few actually passed the exam.

So what they have done is largely eliminate content knowledge as a criteria for grading. For example, we are instructed to look for a thesis in student essay. An essay with a thesis gets a point and one without gets a zero (on a scale of 0-7). The problem is that is doesn’t matter what the thesis is, as long as there is a thesis.

Likewise with the use of documents. Students are given a set of documents and need to analyze the documents in an essay they write in 40 minutes. We are told to give the student 1 point if they use 4 of 6 documents and three points if they analyze most of the documents. Again, it doesn’t matter at all that the use is correct.

In short, being factually correct, understanding the context of the documents, etc., isn’t being graded (though some of us are violating that injunction). The exam has gone from a history exam to an exam that tests pedagogy, from “does this student know something about U.S. history?” to “does this student know how to take a test?”

No one should kid themselves that the old AP US History exam was unbiased. None of the essay questions over the past several years focused on the big questions of American history that would have met the approval of the [scholars’] letter signers. But what’s happened is that the exam used to be biased but content focused. Now it is biased but extremely weak on content.

As our reader says, the College Board has a financial incentive to generate good scores on the AP U.S. History exam. I suspect that it also has an ideological incentive.

Students likely will be better disposed to the leftist narrative of U.S. History they ingest if the end product is a good grade on the exam and some college credits. And more students will subject themselves to indoctrination if it holds the promise of these rewards.

I’ve always thought that this dynamic helps explain grade inflation at America’s colleges and universities. Is it just a coincidence that the inflation tends to be most pronounced in departments were leftism is most triumphant — e.g. Black studies, Women’s studies, English Literature, etc? I don’t think so.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/08/ap-u-s-history-reports-from-the-front-lines.php

Making The World Make Sense

Making The World Make Sense

 posted by John Schroeder

Victor David Hanson’s National Review piece from early last week says something that pretty much everybody knows, but is often not said as bluntly as VDH puts it – Obama just flat out does not know how the world works.  Hanson’s thesis:

The common bond among the various elements of the failed Obama foreign policy — from reset with Putin to concessions to the Iranians — is a misreading of human nature. [emphasis added]

What about human nature is it that Hanson thinks Obama misreads?

…the autocratic accentuation of the human tendency to interpret concession and empathy not as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but rather as weakness to be exploited or as a confession of culpability worthy of contempt.

Hanson draw a distinction between the “Enlightened mind” which believes that concession and empathy will bring better behavior and the “medieval mind” which understands that somethings simply have to be met with force.  Hanson notes that the tendency to exploit civility as weakness is resident in all of us to one extent or the other.  VDH has a heck of a point here, and provides copious historical evidence.

But I see this phenomena in different terms – theological terms.

In theological terms what Hanson is talking about here is what Catholics would call “original sin” and Calvinists would call “Total Depravity.”  The Apostle Paul put it this way:

…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,…

If we are left unchecked, we are all going to do bad things.  It is just that simple.  Those bad things come in many forms.  VDH cites many of the bad actors in history and bad acts on the world and diplomatic stage.  In a different area the latest video on Planned Parenthood and its practices regarding “abortion product” cannot be described as anything short of evil.  The tone of the Planned Parenthood speakers in this video make it plain that the deeper we sink into our tendency to evil the more hardened we come to the evil we do, and therefore the more capable we become of doing greater evil.

That is how the world works – we are in a constant battle against evil.  The best of us battle the evil in ourselves and work desperately not to inflict it on the world, while at the same time protecting ourselves from the evil in others.  Some fail to see the evil in themselves but do see it in others.  Sadly such people are capable of great evil in trying to deal with what they see as the evil in others.  Some fail to see the evil in themselves or in others and therefore leave themselves open for great pain and destruction at the hands of the evil in others.

Of course, those that do battle the evil in themselves try to protect themselves from the evil in others first by trying to get the other to see their own evil and battle it in themselves.  But that does not always work and it is at that point that more strident measures are called for – all we can do is our best not to do evil while being strident.

It would be easy to declare this divide between those that see the evil in themselves and those that do not as a secular versus religious divide.  But alas it is not.  I know far too many religious expressions that see the evil in the other, but fail to see the evil in themselves.  I have seen much evil done in the name of God under these circumstances.

Obama’s failure to see the evil in the other, for such is what leads to the assumption that if you treat them well, they will respond with kindness, starts with his failure to see the evil in himself.  And as a nation, our willingness to go along with the seeming madness of this administration represents our own failure to see the evil ourselves.

The only way to stop evil, whether it is the evil of an atomic Iran, the evil of a corpse creating and selling Planned Parenthood, or the evil of the driver that cut you off and nearly killed you  on the freeway, is to begin with seeing the evil in ourselves.  This is the fundamental starting point of the Christian worldview.

Whether it be the Sacrament of the Confessional in the Catholic Church, the corporate confessional prayer of traditional Protestantism or the accountability of a small group in Evangelicalism – hold fast to that which enables you to see the evil in yourself.  Such is the only thing that can actually end evil in the world.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/making-the-world-make-sense/#more-28494

OBAMA: LOOK HOW CRAZY THE REPUBLICANS ARE!

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN BARACK OBAMA, DEMOCRATS, LIBERALS

Barack Obama returned from his latest vacation yesterday, and promptly announced that Republicans are “crazies.” The Democrats continued the theme with a fundraising email they sent out earlier this afternoon, ostensibly from the President:

John —

A few days ago, the leading candidate to be the other side’s presidential nominee claimed that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was — somehow — unconstitutional.

He is referring to Donald Trump. This was a popular meme on left-wing web sites last week. The headline was often repeated: Trump claims 14th Amendment is unconstitutional! But of course Trump said no such thing. What Trump did say wasn’t crazy at all; in fact, I think it was correct. Trump says he doesn’t think the 14th Amendment requires that children of illegal aliens born in the United States be citizens. I agree. An 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that arguably interpreted the amendment that way should be revisited, much as the Supreme Court revisited prior law under the 14th Amendment when it declared gay marriage a constitutional right.

Trump said further that he doesn’t favor a constitutional amendment to reverse that old Supreme Court case, but rather litigation. Once again I agree. Trump is correct that the constitutional amendment process is hopeless on any controversial topic. But Congress could pass a law defining citizenship in a way that excludes anchor babies. That law would be tested in court. Eventually the Supreme Court would have an opportunity to either overrule or distinguish Wong Kim Ark. (In Wong Kim Ark, the parents were legal residents. The Court could easily hold that that case does not apply to children whose parents reside in the U.S. illegally.) So Obama is wrong: not only did Trump not make the absurd claim that the 14th Amendment is unconstitutional, his comments on the anchor baby issue were both legally correct and in line with public opinion.

Another frontrunner just released a health care plan that would actually take coverage away from millions of Americans and make it harder for folks to buy health insurance.

That would be Scott Walker’s plan to repeal Obamacare and replace with more conservative, market-oriented measures. Obamacare has taken coverage away from millions of Americans, but it is highly doubtful that Walker’s plan would do the same. In any event, Obamacare has been unpopular from the day it was passed, and there is nothing crazy about wanting to repeal it or replace it with something better.

Several Republicans have even lined up behind the idea that some children who are born in this country don’t deserve the right to be American citizens.

Anchor babies again! Obama attempts a twofer; whoever wrote the email must assume that readers won’t know that the Trump reference was to the same issue. Obama’s formulation of the issue leaves out a key fact, of course: we are talking about children who are the offspring of illegal immigrants. Not only is resistance to anchor babies not crazy, it is the majority view among Americans, and has been for a long time, as in this 2011 survey where 61% said they do not believe that children born to women who are here illegally should automatically be citizens.

The Obama email continues in the same vein:

These ideas all sound ridiculous, but don’t be fooled, John. These aren’t slips of the tongue from tired candidates at the end of a long campaign. These are the actual policy positions of Republicans who think they should be our next president — and there’s nothing silly about that.

It’s probably too much to expect either factual accuracy or temperate language in fundraising emails. But it isn’t just fundraising: the Democrats have mostly ceased debating issues at any higher level than misrepresentation and name-calling. Those who have studied climate science enough to understand the weakness of the alarmists’ claims are “deniers.” Those who have read the nuclear agreement with Iran and conclude that it makes our security weaker are “crazies,” as Obama called them yesterday. And those who are unhappy about our immigration situation, both legal and illegal–a substantial majority of Americans–are nativists, bigots, racists and so on. Maybe there are arguments lurking somewhere behind the lies and the name-calling, but I haven’t heard one for a long time. The Democrats should try it sometime.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/08/obama-look-how-crazy-the-republicans-are.php

THE FACTS DON’T MATTER, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS GUN CONTROL

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN GUN CONTROL, SECOND AMENDMENT

The White House didn’t wait an hour before using the murders committed by Vester Flanagan in Virginia as an excuse to push for gun control. Josh Earnest began his press conference with this soliloquy:

The precise details of that incident continue to be under investigation.

At the time Earnest was speaking, little was known about the murderer, and nothing about how he acquired the firearm used to commit the murders. But the facts make no difference, so why wait for them?

But as you’ve heard me say in the past: This is another example of gun violence that has becoming all-too-common in communities large and small.

Violent crime, and homicide in particular, has been cut by approximately half since the mid-1990s, a time that coincides with liberalized gun laws in many states and more widespread ownership of handguns. Why do gun control advocates never acknowledge these basic facts?

And while there is no piece of legislation that can end all violence in this country, there are some common sense things that only Congress can do that we know will have a tangible impact on reducing gun violence in this country.

Liberals are always calling for “common sense” gun control measures. But what are they? Josh Earnest isn’t telling us. And since we don’t know what these laws are, how do we “know [they] will have a tangible impact on reducing gun violence”?

And Congress could take those steps…

What steps?

…in a way that will not infringe on the Constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans. And the president has long advocated Congress taking those steps, and the president continues to feel they should do so.

The president has long advocated that Congress ban cosmetically scary semiautomatic rifles, which are almost never used to commit crimes and were not used in this instance. What else do Barack Obama and Josh Earnest have in mind? Don’t hold your breath waiting for any constructive ideas. This is all just political opportunism.

Here is the video:

One thing we have learned is that some murders are important and others aren’t. White policeman kills black person: important! Black person kills white policeman: unimportant. White lunatic kills black people in South Carolina: important! Gay black lunatic kills white people in Virginia: something tells me this one is going in the “unimportant” column. It doesn’t advance the narrative. Except, of course, the gun control narrative.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/08/the-facts-dont-matter-the-answer-is-always-gun-control.php