Paranoia

3 posts
Civil Rights

Argumentum ad Metum

Garen Wintemute is at it again. For those of you just joining us, he’s a doctor at the University of California Davis Center who made his mark turning the gun-control debate from a political issue into one of perceived public health back in the early 1990’s.

This week, he published a study entitled Inside Gun Shows: What goes on When Everybody Thinks Nobody’s Watching. He was assisted by the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, which received $175,000 from the Joyce Foundation (pdf) this year for “Gun Violence” research.

As is to be expected, the “research” here consists almost entirely of take-my-word-for-it anecdotes.  The recovering academic in me took immediate notice of the fact that there are very few citations or statistics presented, and that many of those are self-referential (1).

Civil Rights

Things we don’t discuss

2 comments

I’ve been subject to some truly absurd lines of conversation over the last few months, some of which are truly troubling.

Yesterday, I was approached by a meek middle-aged sort. He asked me, without preamble, “which handgun calibers will pierce body armor?”

There’s no way I’m answering that, and he seemed a bit miffed when I told him so. Tough. You don’t go asking strangers that kind of thing out of the blue. It’s rude, and it’s dangerous.

Let’s get a couple of things straight. The Revolution is not on our doorstep, and frankly, if you’re asking stupid questions like that, you’re not going to be fighting it anyway.