If Hillary wins, they better expand Gitmo

[smooth]

Do *YOU* think that gun rights restrictions are effective in reducing crime?

The only position I've held in these discussions is that doing a better job of regulating firearms can have a positive impact on lowering the murder rate and some forms of lethal violence.

[The Dark Side of Will]

You should be ok with background checks because they're not a very invasive way to determine how safe it is for you to own a gun, not because you have nothing to hide.

Should I allow someone to go through my underwear drawer because I have nothing to hide, how about all my financial records? Perhaps you did not mean it as I took it, but far too many infringements of privacy are taking place because the people enacting them are of the belief that if you have nothing to hide, it's reasonable.

Concur...

Looking is wrong because the government doesn't have the authority to look (4th amendment).
The idea that I should be ok with the government looking through my stuff because I haven't done anything "wrong" is a red herring.

[The Dark Side of Will]

For the record, I'm totally on board with helping people at risk, as long as the effort is privately funded and voluntary for all concerned.

If we spend $2,000 dollars per child per year on pre-natal care, home visitation, and occasional check-ups for the severely at-risk youth while they're going through K-12, we not only spend an awfully lot less than we would end up spending sending them to juvi and/or adult prison but it turns out we don't have to do it for very long for most kids. Evidence indicates that we only have to do it for a few years and then those kids go on to become law abiding citizens that pay their taxes and don't draw on the system. The ratio is calculate that for every dollar we spend on them in the early stages of life society "gets back" $10 dollars. Some in taxes but also by reducing those other costs I listed. Now you can get agitated by the idea that we would be concerned about getting any tax money back, but if we spend $2,000 dollars per year in public money on a kid I'm hard pressed to see how one can claim it's "objectionable" to get at least that amount back into the system.

Also, most of the funding for these projects comes from private dollars. The thing that you suspect, that people don't want to support public programs, is not accurate. There are a myriad of reasons why certain politicians don't want to support these kinds of programs but the biggest factor is because people believe, as marhsallnoise erroneously posted above, that severity of punishment is the key to reducing crime and (also as he erroneously posted) that the main reason for our crime problem is due to leniency.

If you'd like to read where deterrence theory comes from it starts with Beccaria and rational choice theory. If you look him up read what he says about severity vs. certainty in terms of effectiveness of punishment. In fact, he has a lot to say about over-punishment and the negative impacts it can have on the law's legitimacy. You can also think back to your childhood and evaluate whether you were concerned how hard your dad was going to spank you or whether he was going to find out whether you did something wrong.

Keep in mind, the main tenet of deterrence theory is that people are rational thinkers. Over 60% of our prison population are suffering from diagnosed severe mental illness. Over three quarters of them are in prison for drugs and/or drug related offenses. Murders, the hot topic in these current threads, are only very rarely calculated offenses. Most of them, in fact almost all of them, are spur of the moment or heat of passion offenses. Murderers are not worried about whether they are going to be sentenced to death or not--most of them are worried about being killed themselves. Other violent criminals aren't worried about how harsh the sentence for their crime might be because only one-tenth of their crimes will be reported and only one-tenth of those reported crimes will be arrested. Once they get arrested, though, chances are they're going to do time in this country.

Our systems so-called "leniency" is a myth. We punish more people for more different crimes than other countries and we put them in prison longer than other countries. We have both the highest incarceration rate *and* the highest levels of violent crime. Research also shows that when we put someone in prison under harsher conditions, and we put them in for longer periods of time, they come out the other end both committing crimes more often than their cohorts who weren't incarcerated *and* they commit more violent crimes than they did before they went in. Our system, as it currently operates, is a double failure. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do and it tends to make the problems it's supposed to resolving worse. You couldn't build a worse system if you tried.

Suffice to say that very few people come out of prison and go on to earn their doctorates in anything, much less criminal justice (about three and a half years for a non-violent drug offense if you didn't catch that) ;) One of the reasons the mod's admonishment to "grow some thicker skin" was amusing. So when I talk to many of the people in here hypothesizing about the value of carrying guns in public for self-defense I do so as someone who has been around guns and violence in the streets, lived among people who were caught for using guns for violence in the streets, and also as an expert on the stats about using guns for violence and self-defense in the streets.

So when I make a comment about not wanting to waste my time with rude comments about me or whatever it's because I literally am one of a few dozen people in the world in human history who can speak about these issues from all those angles at the same time. It's not about being in an ivory tower but more about recognizing that for some people actually interested in these topics it's a rare opportunity for that person to get to pick my brain for the cost of reading a forum thread.

Anyway, back to why these things don't get implemented and tend to get dismantled when they do start to succeed. The main problem is that being perceived as too "soft" on crime is a political career killer. Being "tough" on crime is a political win. You'll also notice that these kinds of solutions are long-term solutions. Things that don't show dividends for decades. Which politicians are going to stick their neck out for programs that are only going to work twenty years from their election? Yeah, pretty much zero. Even then you'd have to contend with the sizable portion of the population that have zero regard for science and research. Witness how my earlier posts citing published research on this topic was received and how that quickly turned into a general disdain for academics. So you can only imagine how little these kinds of studies impact Congressional decision making once they leave the Congressional commissions about crime and move out onto the floor.

I totally agree with an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure.

I totally agree that our current system of enforcement has NOTHING to do with deterrence. The entire concept of the way law is enforced in the western world is founded on the medieval European way of doing things... the trouble is that system was designed to allow the Crown to derive revenue from the enforcement of law, which makes deterrence counter-productive for the objective of deriving revenue. No matter how much its proponents claim to accomplish other things, the system itself is structured for the generation of revenue. This foundation and resulting degree of abusiveness is clearly evident in "minor" areas of the law like traffic enforcement in which the Supreme Court has stripped people of their Constitutional rights.

Obviously, such a system doesn't even pretend to address rehabilitation, restitution to victims, etc.

(By "restitution to victims", I am referring to the medieval Icelandic system in which all law was tort, and the only consequence of crime would be the victim's pursuit of the perpetrator for restitution. The government should *NEVER* get into the game of trying to compensate victims).

It's also painfully obvious that if you take someone harmless... like a MJ dealer and you throw them in the cesspool of society, locked in a cage with monsters, they'll come out more broken and more dangerous than they were when they went in. Couple that with a societal stigma against convicts which keeps that person imprisoned in the most hopeless sector of society, you have a system that's almost specifically designed to break people and turn them into career criminals.


Do *YOU* think that gun rights restrictions are effective in reducing crime?


PS: The fact that you're very pleased with your own background comes through very clearly. It's abrasive when you use it condescendingly as a reason to avoid having a real discussion.

I get that for every 1 person willing to engage in a real and informative discussion, there are 100 internet experts with poorly informed gibraltar-like opinions with whom "discussion" is a waste of time.

[mrsleeve]

Frederic Bastiat would call taking from one person and giving to another "Legal Plunder."

As.

Nice to see I am not the only one to have read "the law" around here

[smooth]

Good point. Jeffrey Reiman wrote a book called the rich get richer and the poor get prison. His argument is essentially we redirect attention toward street crime, even though it's a smidgen of the things that harm us socially and economically, so that while were looking there the wealthy make off with the bag so to speak. Think of Enron or Milikin, for example. Or how we call subway shooters mass or spree murderers when they kill four people but executives who deliberately scrimp on safety that results in deaths aren't regarded as even criminal at all.

[nando]

Precisely. And given that we spend a little over 200 million per year on corrections we could conceivably reduce taxes once we get our prison population down to a manageable level.

200 million isn't all of it - we have a for-profit prison system. the privately owned, incorporated prisons have an incentive to keep those populations high and the profits rolling in.

what's really sick is you can buy stocks in some of these companies and profit off other people being locked up.

[ParsedOut]

I didn't bring my background up until I was asked. I didn't even say much about any of it until you started calling me ignorant and marshallnoise kept calling me stupid...for days. Eventually anyone is going to lay their credentials down in a situation like that if they're relevant. Not to mention I've earned the right to piss a line in the sand when it comes down to it.

Lol, you still can't get over the ignorant comment can you? Hope you can sleep through the night without waking up in a cold sweat.

[smooth]

^ Interesting read, thank you. I still think you're a bit too full of yourself, not an attractive quality (non-homo).

I didn't bring my background up until I was asked. I didn't even say much about any of it until you started calling me ignorant and marshallnoise kept calling me stupid...for days. Eventually anyone is going to lay their credentials down in a situation like that if they're relevant. Not to mention I've earned the right to piss a line in the sand when it comes down to it.

[smooth]

Precisely. And given that we spend a little over 200 million per year on corrections we could conceivably reduce taxes once we get our prison population down to a manageable level.

[The Dark Side of Will]

I'm not sure if your comment regarding "giving back" is in response to the point I made about individuals returning money back into the system so I'll clarify that point.

It's calculated that each murder costs the state about 1 million dollars.

It's also calculated that building a prison costs about $100,000 dollars per cell and then $30,000 dollars per year to house each prisoner.

After incarceration, it costs additional tens of thousands of dollars per year to supervise previously incarcerated people.

Of the previously incarcerated people who can manage to find jobs once they're out, they end up in lower paying jobs than they would have had if they didn't have a criminal record.

Because of these reasons a prisoner only uses resources and inputs very little, if any, both during and after incarceration.

It's difficult to calculate the cost of crime to individual persons, but regardless of monetary amount street crime is an exorbitant toll on each person impacted, both directly and indirectly. Street crime costs society a fraction as much as white collar crime and corporate malfeasance but that's for a different thread.

So those are the rough costs of crime.

Thanks very much! I'll read the rest when I have more time.

I was wondering if you were talking about increased tax revenue from a more productive member of society as "giving back", but you were actually talking about cost reductions in the prison system.

[ParsedOut]

^ Interesting read, thank you. I still think you're a bit too full of yourself, not an attractive quality (non-homo).

[smooth]

Sounds great. Thank you for taking the adult approach and explaining your views.

I echo that it would be fantastic if billionaires interested in bettering society (Buffet & Gates, for example, not just Bloomberg) would substantially support programs like this.
My opinion is that the don't because the government is running these programs (they literally can't give to support government run programs).
I strongly suspect that the giving back would be much more pronounced if these intervention programs were run by non-profits.

After all, people don't "give" taxes (and I think that calling tax revenue "giving back" is pretty... arrogant? Not even sure what to call it other than objectionable)

Soooo... Why the focus on gun rights restrictions?

I'm not sure if your comment regarding "giving back" is in response to the point I made about individuals returning money back into the system so I'll clarify that point.

It's calculated that each murder costs the state about 1 million dollars.

It's also calculated that building a prison costs about $100,000 dollars per cell and then $30,000 dollars per year to house each prisoner.

After incarceration, it costs additional tens of thousands of dollars per year to supervise previously incarcerated people.

Of the previously incarcerated people who can manage to find jobs once they're out, they end up in lower paying jobs than they would have had if they didn't have a criminal record.

Because of these reasons a prisoner only uses resources and inputs very little, if any, both during and after incarceration.

It's difficult to calculate the cost of crime to individual persons, but regardless of monetary amount street crime is an exorbitant toll on each person impacted, both directly and indirectly. Street crime costs society a fraction as much as white collar crime and corporate malfeasance but that's for a different thread.

So those are the rough costs of crime.


If we spend $2,000 dollars per child per year on pre-natal care, home visitation, and occasional check-ups for the severely at-risk youth while they're going through K-12, we not only spend an awfully lot less than we would end up spending sending them to juvi and/or adult prison but it turns out we don't have to do it for very long for most kids. Evidence indicates that we only have to do it for a few years and then those kids go on to become law abiding citizens that pay their taxes and don't draw on the system. The ratio is calculate that for every dollar we spend on them in the early stages of life society "gets back" $10 dollars. Some in taxes but also by reducing those other costs I listed. Now you can get agitated by the idea that we would be concerned about getting any tax money back, but if we spend $2,000 dollars per year in public money on a kid I'm hard pressed to see how one can claim it's "objectionable" to get at least that amount back into the system.

Also, most of the funding for these projects comes from private dollars. The thing that you suspect, that people don't want to support public programs, is not accurate. There are a myriad of reasons why certain politicians don't want to support these kinds of programs but the biggest factor is because people believe, as marhsallnoise erroneously posted above, that severity of punishment is the key to reducing crime and (also as he erroneously posted) that the main reason for our crime problem is due to leniency.

If you'd like to read where deterrence theory comes from it starts with Beccaria and rational choice theory. If you look him up read what he says about severity vs. certainty in terms of effectiveness of punishment. In fact, he has a lot to say about over-punishment and the negative impacts it can have on the law's legitimacy. You can also think back to your childhood and evaluate whether you were concerned how hard your dad was going to spank you or whether he was going to find out whether you did something wrong.

Keep in mind, the main tenet of deterrence theory is that people are rational thinkers. Over 60% of our prison population are suffering from diagnosed severe mental illness. Over three quarters of them are in prison for drugs and/or drug related offenses. Murders, the hot topic in these current threads, are only very rarely calculated offenses. Most of them, in fact almost all of them, are spur of the moment or heat of passion offenses. Murderers are not worried about whether they are going to be sentenced to death or not--most of them are worried about being killed themselves. Other violent criminals aren't worried about how harsh the sentence for their crime might be because only one-tenth of their crimes will be reported and only one-tenth of those reported crimes will be arrested. Once they get arrested, though, chances are they're going to do time in this country.

Our systems so-called "leniency" is a myth. We punish more people for more different crimes than other countries and we put them in prison longer than other countries. We have both the highest incarceration rate *and* the highest levels of violent crime. Research also shows that when we put someone in prison under harsher conditions, and we put them in for longer periods of time, they come out the other end both committing crimes more often than their cohorts who weren't incarcerated *and* they commit more violent crimes than they did before they went in. Our system, as it currently operates, is a double failure. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do and it tends to make the problems it's supposed to resolving worse. You couldn't build a worse system if you tried.

Suffice to say that very few people come out of prison and go on to earn their doctorates in anything, much less criminal justice (about three and a half years for a non-violent drug offense if you didn't catch that) ;) One of the reasons the mod's admonishment to "grow some thicker skin" was amusing. So when I talk to many of the people in here hypothesizing about the value of carrying guns in public for self-defense I do so as someone who has been around guns and violence in the streets, lived among people who were caught for using guns for violence in the streets, and also as an expert on the stats about using guns for violence and self-defense in the streets.

So when I make a comment about not wanting to waste my time with rude comments about me or whatever it's because I literally am one of a few dozen people in the world in human history who can speak about these issues from all those angles at the same time. It's not about being in an ivory tower but more about recognizing that for some people actually interested in these topics it's a rare opportunity for that person to get to pick my brain for the cost of reading a forum thread.

Anyway, back to why these things don't get implemented and tend to get dismantled when they do start to succeed. The main problem is that being perceived as too "soft" on crime is a political career killer. Being "tough" on crime is a political win. You'll also notice that these kinds of solutions are long-term solutions. Things that don't show dividends for decades. Which politicians are going to stick their neck out for programs that are only going to work twenty years from their election? Yeah, pretty much zero. Even then you'd have to contend with the sizable portion of the population that have zero regard for science and research. Witness how my earlier posts citing published research on this topic was received and how that quickly turned into a general disdain for academics. So you can only imagine how little these kinds of studies impact Congressional decision making once they leave the Congressional commissions about crime and move out onto the floor.

[gtdragon980]

You should be ok with background checks because they're not a very invasive way to determine how safe it is for you to own a gun, not because you have nothing to hide.

Should I allow someone to go through my underwear drawer because I have nothing to hide, how about all my financial records? Perhaps you did not mean it as I took it, but far too many infringements of privacy are taking place because the people enacting them are of the belief that if you have nothing to hide, it's reasonable.

Good point, I didn't think of it that way when I posted that.

[marshallnoise]

Not speaking for smooth, but it's part of the protectionist mindset of the left. Take away all dangerous things because the gobment will take care of you, you're not responsible enough to take care of yourself.

I'll go you one better:

Phony Altruism
Bastiat also saw through the phony "philanthropy" of the socialists who constantly proposed helping this or that person or group by plundering the wealth of other innocent members of society through the aegis of the state. All such schemes are based on "legal plunder, organized injustice."

Like today's neo-conservatives, nineteenth-century socialists branded classical liberals with the name "individualist," implying that classical liberals are opposed to fraternity, community, and association. But, as Bastiat astutely pointed out, he (like other classical liberals) was only opposed to forced associations, and was an advocate of genuine, voluntary communities and associations. "[E]very time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists [mistakenly] conclude that we object to its being done at all."

[marshallnoise]

Sounds great. Thank you for taking the adult approach and explaining your views.

I echo that it would be fantastic if billionaires interested in bettering society (Buffet & Gates, for example, not just Bloomberg) would substantially support programs like this.
My opinion is that the don't because the government is running these programs (they literally can't give to support government run programs).
I strongly suspect that the giving back would be much more pronounced if these intervention programs were run by non-profits.

After all, people don't "give" taxes (and I think that calling tax revenue "giving back" is pretty... arrogant? Not even sure what to call it other than objectionable)

Soooo... Why the focus on gun rights restrictions?

Frederic Bastiat would call taking from one person and giving to another "Legal Plunder."

As for the focus on gun rights restrictions, the answer is obvious: Two birds, one stone. If you can disarm the public as well as give the imagery that criminals have less access, why not?

I realize you weren't asking me.