Billy Daley had a piece in the Washington Post on April 19th entitled “Heidi Heitkamp betrayed me on gun control.”  The first line was “I want my money back.”  Mr. Daley gave the Heitkamp campaign $2,500.  Now, after Keitkamp voted against the most recent gun legislation, Daley is upset.  I guess when you come from Chicago, the link between a donation and favored legislation is supposed to be clear cut and Heitkamp violated the very important Chicagoan principle of money for votes.

More seriously, I want to focus on one piece of fallacious reasoning coming from Daley that seems to be common in the wake of the gun vote.  Namely, the assertion that fear of the NRA is what drove votes against the legislation despite popular support for gun control.  Daley nicely sums up the argument here:

 Polling has shown that nine in 10 Americans and eight in 10 gun owners support a law to require every buyer to go through a background check on every gun sale. In North Dakota, the support was even higher: 94 percent. Yet in explaining her vote, Heitkamp had the gall to say that she “heard overwhelmingly from the people of North Dakota” and had to listen to them and vote no. It seems more likely that she heard from the gun lobby and chose to listen to it instead.

Daley’s argument is a nonsense.  If the voters in North Dakota were so overwhelmingly in favor of the legislation that was on the table, as Daley asserts, then Heitkamp would have nothing to fear from the NRA.  In fact, it would be the opposite.  She would have to fear that if she did not vote for the legislation then she would be kicked out of office (or her chances of being kicked out would increase).  If you were a politician, would you vote against a bill that 94% of your constituents and your party supported?  The only way it made sense for her to vote against the bill was if, as she stated, her constituents were not in favor of it.

Mayor Bloomberg, in response to the Boston Marathon bombings, has said: “but we live in a complex word where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

Bloomberg here suffers from the same affliction that so often infects the liberal view of the Constitution – namely that it is a “living” document that should be interpreted in line with society’s “needs.”  (This argument is almost always used to bolster the prevailing socially liberal dogma, and is rarely proffered when the liberal viewpoint would likely be defeated.)  It is an arrogant perspective that inherently presumes that the person rendering the decision is capable of both interpreting society’s stance on an issue and, more importantly, is capable of saying what society’s stance should be.  Constitutional interpretation, however, should be just the opposite.  The Constitution is a dead document, meant to protect against the changing times in society.  It is a bulwark of principles that should be an immutable framework.  While society may (and should) change its laws to reflect the will of the people, its bedrock principles should not be subject to changing circumstances, and they most definitely should not be reinterpreted to arrive at a politically desired result.  The hallmark of great Constitutional analysis should be the arrival at a result which is divorced from politics or personal preferences.

If Bloomberg (and others) think the Constitution is wrong on an issue, they are provided with a method of fixing it – an amendment.  However, passing an amendment is hard.  It really does require that society, by and large, agrees on a position.  Therefore, people like Bloomberg find it so much easier to just circumvent and undermine the Constitution by advocating for and nominating judges that will “change their interpretation” to reflect their wishes.  It is an act of intellectual laziness and cowardness.  The prime reason why advocates like Bloomberg don’t go for an amendment is, quite simply, because they don’t have the votes, because society doesn’t agree with them and their failure to secure an amendment reveal that their claim to speak for society is false.

Even if you are on the left, I would hope you don’t buy into the utter ridiculousness of the words coming out of Lawrence O’Donnell’s mouth.  The Weekly Standard has a link to Lawrence O’Donnell claiming the NRA has impeded the investigation of the Boston bombings because it opposes taggants in gun powder (chemicals that act as tracing agents).

It isn’t enough for O’Donnell to disagree with the NRA over gun control, O’Donnell wants to smear the organization regardless of the facts.  On his segment, he comes right out and says “”[t]he NRA is also in the business of helping bombers get away with their crimes.”  That isn’t even stretching an argument.  It is just wrong, and a lie.

“There are new developments tonight in the bombing investigation here in Boston,” said O’Donnell. “But that investigation could be moving faster were it not for the successful lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association. The NRA’s efforts to guarantee that American mass murderers are the best-equipped mass murders in the world is not limited to murderers who use assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The NRA is also in the business of helping bombers get away with their crimes. Gunpowder could be traced by investigators to a buyer at the point of sale if gunpowder contained a taggant, an element that would enable tracing of the purchase of gunpowder. But thanks to the National Rifle Association, identification taggants are required by law only in plastic explosives. The NRA has successfully blocked any requirements for such taggants in gunpowder. So such supremely helpful evidence as taggants are not available to the FBI in this investigation.”

From a factual perspective, unless O’Donnell is privy to information which I am not regarding the bomb’s composition, he cannot be (knowingly) correct.  As far as I can tell, the reports about the bomb only say that pressure cookers were filled with explosives.  There is no mention of gunpowder being the explosive agent.  Moreover, it is HIGHLY unlikely that gun powder would be used to make a bomb because it is a very weak explosive agent compared to virtually any other explosive.  I will bet that zero gunpowder was used in the bomb.  If that is the case, then it will be easy to see O’Donnell speaks from a position of ignorance.

Perhaps more importantly, however, is O’Donnell’s ridiculous assertion that arguing a policy position automatically makes the advocate responsible for the actions of all those who benefit from that position.  Under this theory, if O’Donnell supports the First Amendment he is actively helping the KKK, if he supports the Fourth Amendment he is actively preventing police from gathering useful evidence and if he supports the Sixth Amendment he is actively helping criminals get off by providing them with attorneys.  I could go on.  It is such an absurd view that if it were presented in a high school class it would deserve an “F” for logic and analysis.

Opinion and commentary in the news have their place.  They can help provide context for a story and they can illuminate the recipient, exposing him to ideas and a point of view which leads to thoughtful reflection.  However, making ridiculous statements that are inaccurate in order to bolster a prejudiced view of the world add nothing to the conversation.  Making illogical arguments that are intellectually vacuous achieves the same result.  Here, O’Donnell has probably done the former and has certainly engaged in the latter.  His viewers are worse off for it.

Irin Carmon hasn’t let her previous column’s logical fallacies prevent her from coming out swinging in her newest piece.  This time, she is alleging there is a conspiracy to promote the Gosnell case by the conservative media.  The only problem with Gosnell’s argument this time is that it directly undercuts the premise of her previous piece, which was that the Gosnell case had been adequately covered by the media.  Meanwhile, the conservative position has been that a biased media, until shamed into it, ignored a huge story that, were the topic anything other than a sacrosanct liberal principle, would have been splashed all over the front pages of the country’s major papers and headlining newscasts.  Rather than go through her article line by line, as I did previously, I have simply re-written one of her paragraphs to change the issue at hand from abortion to gun control.

As Written:

No one who supports the provision of safe abortion care to women excuses any of what Gosnell is accused of, from willfully gruesome conditions to sadistic treatment to infanticide. He is not typical, and there was, and has been, swift renunciation of his facility. But the case provides the ideal opportunity for the right-to-life movement to conflate his abusive clinic with all abortion as it’s widely practiced in the U.S., and to focus on graphic later abortions, conveniently redirecting attention from their desire to ban all abortions for everyone. That desire, by the way, is being enacted into law explicitly in states like Arkansas and North Dakota, and implicitly with laws designed to close abortion clinics in states like Mississippi and Virginia.

Changed:

No one who supports the Second Amendment and the right to own and carry a gun excuses any of what Adam Lanza did, from taking a weapon that wasn’t his to shooting up a school. He is not typical, and there was, and has been, swift renunciation of his actions. But the case provides the ideal opportunity for the pro-gun control movement to conflate his shooting spree with the normal activity of law abiding citizens carrying weapons every day, and to focus on a graphic incident, conveniently redirecting attention from their desire to ban all guns for everyone. That desire, by the way, is being enacted into law explicitly in states like Connecticut, Colorado and New York.

If we did a Lexis search for stories about Newton and Gosnell prior to this week I’m guessing there is a small discrepancy in the coverage.

A staffer at Salon.com, Irin Carmon, has weighed in on the Kermit Gosnell story.  Specifically, she has weighed in to try and refute the idea that the story has not gotten the level of media coverage one would expect for a story this sordid.  Briefly, Dr. Kermit Gosnell is accused of killing newborn babies at his abortion clinic and keeping body parts.  Those arguing that the story has not gotten the coverage it deserves are claiming (I think rightly) that the liberal media has declined to focus on the story because it involves something very negative about an abortion doctor.  Ms. Carmon presents several arguments to attempt to counter these allegations, but in each case she either winds up making the conservatives’ case or striking out in her response altogether.  Let’s take a look at her arguments.

Argument 1:

Carmon’s first argument is that the story has not been ignored.  To buttress her argument, she provides six examples of stories covering the incident.  Those stories came from therealitycheck.org, thegrio.com, Philly Now, Philadelphia Weekly, The Nation and CBS News.  All of the stories were from when the charges were first brought to light in January of 2011. None were reports about the trial underway, where many gruesome details have emerged.

With the exception of ABC News, none of the cited articles is from the mainstream media.  They are local news stories or were produced by feminists who cover these types of issues.  Carmon even says that she “can’t speak for big news organizations like CNN and the networks.”  But this is precisely the point the conservatives are making.  Nobody cares if this story is covered locally or by the industry which it affects.  That a doctor could murder 8 people in a city and not get at least local coverage would be beyond absurd.

Argument 2:

Carmon’s second argument is that there are many other stories which are ignored that are much more important.  That may be the case, but it is a complete non sequitur to argue that just because more important stories (in her opinion) get ignored that this story is not being ignored because of a liberal bias.  The relevant issue is that stories of this type generally garner huge amounts of media coverage, regardless of triviality.  Therefore, we should expect to see this instance also garner huge media attention.  It’s as if the only papers that had covered the Newton shooting was the local rag and a few gun magazines or if OJ’s trial was only mentioned in the American Bar Association’s magazine.

Argument 3:

Carmon points to stories she feels are more important, such as health disparities in the system and vulnerabilities of the poor and the marginalized and says that these stories aren’t given “wall-to-wall, trial-level coverage.”  This has to be the most amusing of all of her arguments because she actually refutes her own point by her choice of words.  Yes, she is correct that the stories she thinks are important are not given the “wall-to-wall, trial-level coverage,” but isn’t that precisely because they aren’t trials?  In this case, we are actually talking about a trial.  Therefore we should expect to see “wall-to-wall, trial-level coverage.”  It’s a tautology!  Carmon may be right that it is wrong that these types of trials get more coverage than what she views as much larger issues, but that in no way refutes the conservative argument that this particular trial is not getting the coverage it should, given the basic parameters of how such stories are covered today.

Argument 4:

Argument 4 is an argument for something, but it does nothing to support Ms. Carmon’s thesis that media coverage has been sparse.  Carmon points out that Virginia has passed a new law which requires abortion clinics to meet building codes as if they were hospitals with, she alleges, the intent of restricting abortions.  She next points out that Pennsylvania passed a similar law.  She then observes that after Pennsylvania’s law was passed the number of abortion clinics went from 22 to 13.  Finally, she concludes with the analysis that that is what drove the women whose babies were murdered to seek out Dr. Gosnell.

Let’s just give Ms. Carmon the benefit of the doubt and assume what she says is true.  So what?  Does that somehow take away from the newsworthiness of the story?  This is a doctor who murdered infants on a routine basis.  The fact that the law may be unfair and that women should have more options in no way detracts from the particulars of this case, nor does it excuse the doctor’s behavior.  Moreover, it most certainly is a complete non-answer to the charge that the media has under-covered the story.

Conclusion

Is it too much to ask that journalists to put aside their personal feelings and biases when analyzing a story?  This was an opinion piece, but that doesn’t excuse the shoddy reasoning behind it.  Not one of Carmon’s arguments even comes close backing up her central thesis – that social conservatives are wrong in believing the story has been under-covered.  Instead, there is polemicization against the conservatives and in favor of more freely available abortions.  I don’t have a problem with that – Ms. Carmon should feel free to advocate for her position.  However, if that is what she is going to do she should make that the subject of her column.  Instead, she has allowed her feelings to cloud her judgment to such a degree that she cannot analytically confront any aspect of the abortion debate without turning it into an attack on those who disagree.  In the case of the narrow question of whether the media has under-covered the story, the answer to me seems to be “yes”, given that it was (1) infants slaughtered, (2) by a doctor in (3) a gruesome manner.  There may be good arguments as to why this is not enough to justify more coverage, but Ms. Carmon has failed to proffer even one.

Henry Aaron, of Brookings, has a column today in which he purports to demonstrate that federal spending isn’t a problem.  His method is to pose four true or false questions, assert that most people would answer “true” to one or more of them, and then explain why all are false, thereby showing how ill-informed people are.  If Aaron is going to write a column where he proclaims other peoples’ ignorance, then he ought to make sure that his own analysis isn’t flawed.  The first question he poses is: “[t]he federal government is spending a larger share of national income than at any time since World War II – true or false?”  His answer is as follows:

Let’s start with government spending. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Government will spend 21.7 percent of GDP next year under current policy. Were the U.S. economy operating at capacity, that share would be less than 20.6 percent, because output would be higher and spending for such items as unemployment insurance would be lower. For the preceding three decades government spending averaged 21.1 percent of national output. In brief, the numbers flatly contradict the assertion that spending is “out of control.”

Taking his numbers at face value, Aaron puts forth two facts in his response:

1. Over the last three decades, average spending was 21.1% of GDP; and

2. Next year, under current policies, the government will spend 21.7% of GDP.

The only logical conclusion, based on these numbers, is that the response to his first question is “true.”  To arrive at his “false” conclusion, Aaron has to insert a counterfactual – that spending would be 20.6% of GDP if the U.S. economy was operating at full capacity.  This is a ridiculous argument.  One could just as easily say that spending would only be 10% of GDP if the economy grew by a factor of two.  That may be a true statement, but it is certainly irrelevant to answering the question of whether actual spending next year will be higher or lower than the thirty year average.  The answer to that question, as Aaron so succinctly demonstrates above, is “true.”

Chuck Thompson at the New Republic has a piece on the case before the Supreme Court regarding the voting rights act.  Its basic conclusion is that there is no way to prove that the South is more racist than the North.  The legal implication of that is clear – provisions of the Voting Rights Act that were designed to keep overly-racist states from using their power to suppress the vote of minorities can no longer be justified.  So far, so good.  However, in a turn at the end, Thompson (author of Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession”) implies that the VRA should be kept around just so we as a country can show we disapprove of racism:

The argument here isn’t that that the North doesn’t have its own voting problems, or its own dubious pols, or even, in the case of New York’s Dov Hikind, pols who pose for dubious pictures. But so long as Southern officials like McConnell insist on clinging to their symbols of oppression, and so long as the majority of voters keep electing guys like him to some of the highest offices in their state governments, they’re going to have to live with being seen as the Michael Jordan of racism, even if they hung up that jersey long ago. And, like every other superstar who keeps begging for the limelight—by bringing cases to the Supreme Court or stoking Confederate nostalgia with bumper stickers and t-shirts—they’re going to have to get used to the fact that rest of the country can’t help but feeling a need to keep an eye on them. In that regard, the Voting Rights Act is a symbol, too.

Finding ways to show our disapproval of racism is good.  However, willfully trampling on states’ and citizens’ rights in the absence of a compelling Constitutional reason for doing so is not.  The law should never be used to deny the privileges and rights that all Americans are equally entitled to exercise without a clear and compelling justification, which must be grounded in a Constitutional imperative.  Merely showing that we, as a country, disapprove of the views of rascists in no way rises to that level.

Here is a perfect example of the environmental-political complex.  Put enough incentives in the tax code and hand out enough public cash and you can find tons of Fortune 500 companies coming to the trough and lining up to protect subsidies that have no business existing at all.

There is a piece in Time today by Andrew J. Rotherham titled “A Sportsman’s Viewpoint: We Need a Moderate Alternative to the NRA.”  In it, the author argues that the NRA doesn’t adequately serve the hunting and sporting community because it focuses on preventing gun restrictions on weapons that are not sporting-oriented.  That may be true, but it misses the point, completely.  Even on the left, there is a great deal of support for hunters to be able to possess hunting rifles and shotguns for sporting purposes.  None of the major gun control groups advocate for denying citizens the ability to possess such weapons.  The issue at bar is whether the Second Amendment protects the right of citizens to arm themselves for the purposes of self-defense.  That is the right which the gun control crowd seeks to quash.  Quite simply, the organization that Rotherham envisions doesn’t exist precisely because there is no major opposition to its (theoretical) activities.

Joe Nocera’s column today is about the Newtown, CT. massacre.  Entitled “Let’s Get M.A.D.D. About Guns,” it argues that just as M.A.D.D. (and its subsequent policies) were made possible by the anger that resulted over a drunk driving incident, so too should changes to the gun laws be implemented as the result of deep anger over the Connecticut shooting.  Unfortunately, Nocera’s argument is an appeal to emotion over analysis, precisely the opposite of what is needed.

Nocera starts out by citing M.A.D.D.’s origins – a response to a drunk driving incident.  He then goes over its achievements: increasing the drinking age to 21, increased penalties for drunk driving and changing the perception of drunk driving as a bad behavior to be frowned upon to a dangerous activity that should be stigmatized.  He then mentions how M.A.D.D. was successful because it was able to put a “human face” on the tragedy.  He wishes to extend this concept to guns.  That is fine, as long as the analysis behind the emotion is grounded in analytical thinking, but Nocera shows that he has no interest in moving past the emotional part of the argument.

To begin, Nocera addresses one argument of the pro-gun side as follows: “One absurd argument some gun extremists are already making is that, instead of tightening gun laws, we should go in the other direction, and start packing heat. That way, you see, we can mow down the bad guy before he gets us.”

Leaving the derogatory and dismissive tone aside, there is nothing in Nocera’s column that debunks this claim.  He merely calls it absurd.  The examples he does give in his column are either logical fallacies or anecdotal episodes that provide no true insight into whether gun control works as it is structured or could work if structured differently.

First, Nocera looks to Australia as an analogous case.  He says that in 1996, after a man killed 35 people, Australia tightened its gun laws and, since then, it has had no mass killings.  While that is certainly a true fact, it tells us precisely nothing about the effectiveness of gun control.  Nocera has showed correlation, but has given no evidence of causation.  Furthermore, looking at a Wikipedia entry for mass killers in Oceania, it looks as if there have only been 8 mass killings, in total, since 1915.  There simply aren’t enough data points to form a conclusion.  Moreover, based on the very limited data points that do exist, Nocera’s argument is debunked on its face.  From 1996 to 2012 is 16 years.  After a mass shooting in 1919, Australia did not see another mass shooter until 1959, 40 years later.  It was 15 years from the 1959 shooting to the next one in 1974 and 13 years from 1974 to the next one in 1987.  The bottom line is that these events are rare in both relative and absolute terms, and thus a span of 16 years without a mass shooting is evidence of nothing.

Second, Nocera cites his friend, a hedge fund manager who used to live in Johannesburg, as proof that guns somehow did not contribute to safety.  He offers no statistics and no analysis.  Nocera merely states “guns didn’t make anybody safer” and quotes his friend who says “[e]veryone knew someone who had family or friends who had experienced gun violence.”  Nocera also mentions that in 2004 the gun laws changed and became stricter.  What he doesn’t bother to mention is that the murder rate did not change in an appreciable manner thereafter.

South Africa was a particularly odd choice for Nocera to use, considering it one of the most dangerous places in the world.  While the murder rate there has fallen in recent years, it has also fallen in the United States in places where guns are highly prevalent.  Moreover, South Africa still has a very high rate of gun ownership on a global level (17^th), with roughly 12.7 firearms per 100 people and nearly 6,000,000 guns in total.  Furthermore, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as of 2010 South Africa was 16^th on the list of the murders per capita at 31.8 per 1,000 people, with 15,940 murders in total.  For comparison, the United States was 108^th at 4.2 murders per 1,000 people with 12,996 murders in total.

If I were to use Nocera’s fallacious correlation logic, based on the numbers above, I would conclude that more guns necessarily means less crime, since the rate of gun ownership in the U.S. is far higher than in South Africa (88.8 per 100 people as of 2007), yet the murder rate per 1,000 is far less.  Obviously, the mere existence of these relationships proves no such thing, but Nocera’s one piece of analytical analysis in his column uses this flawed logic because he is looking for a statistical reason to justify his emotional reaction, without caring whether that emotional reaction may be misplaced.

Nocera makes the mistake that so many people make when looking at an issue that is personal and emotional to them – he substitutes emotion, outrage and anger for statistics, analysis and reasoning.