Sam Harris, author of several best-selling books on secularism and reason, has written the most rational recent piece on guns and violence I've seen: The Riddle of the Gun

Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn’t any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn’t understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want.

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It is reasonable to wish that only virtuous people had guns, but there are now nearly 300 million guns in the United States, and 4 million new ones are sold each year. A well-made gun can remain functional for centuries. Any effective regime of “gun control,” therefore, would require that we remove hundreds of millions of firearms from our streets. As Jeffrey Goldberg points out in The Atlantic, it may no longer be rational to hope that we can solve the problem of gun violence by restricting access to guns—because guns are everywhere, and the only people who will be deterred by stricter laws are precisely those law-abiding citizens who should be able to possess guns for their own protection and who now constitute one of the primary deterrents to violent crime. This is, of course, a familiar “gun nut” talking point. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

Over on Facebook recently, in a comment thread following up on a bizarre NYT op-ed suggesting we abandon the Constitution, the conversion turned (as it often does these days) to firearms politics and to the recent outbreak in mass shootings. In that thread, one person wrote:

Its not hard to reload a handgun quickly...especially if you're shooting from a distance. It's not like there weren't mass shootings when the Brady Bill was around

Note that the Brady Bill is still in effect, so this is an erroneous comment. But the point about reloading a handgun is true: for someone who practices (not me, but a dedicated shootist), changing magazines of a semi-automatic handgun or using a speed loader to reload a revolver is not difficult.

In reply, a friend -- a very smart and talented woman but someone who doesn't know a lot about the topic -- wrote:

Name a mass shooting that took place as you've described - with a guy standing around reloading a handgun. It doesn't happen.

So, replying to the request/challenge that she posted, I spent some time looking up the topic of mass shootings with handguns where the shooter reloaded -- which was educational, but depressing as all hell. It turned out that her comment was also erroneous. I posted what I found.

F.B. Purity is a browser extension that, in its author's words, "helps you to take control of the News Feeds on your Facebook home page. It does this by filtering out the application spam, such as quizzes and games etc, and also the messages such as 'x became a fan of y'". It also allows you to fix FB's broken "Timeline" layout. I don't use it myself -- I use a combination of other browser tools to filter Facebook -- but I have friends that swear by it.

The author of this software reports that he's now been banned from Facebook:

The best overview I've found of the case that gun control laws do not and cannot reduce violence is this article from the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy by Don B. Kates & Gary Mauser: Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence. I don't agree with all of their analysis, but the facts they present are pretty conclusive against the notion that more guns makes for more violence.

While American gun ownership is quite high, Table 1 shows many other developed nations (e.g., Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Denmark) with high rates of gun ownership. These countries, however, have murder rates as low or lower than many developed nations in which gun ownership is much rarer. For example, Luxembourg, where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.

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A second misconception about the relationship between fire‐
arms and violence attributes Europe’s generally low homicide rates to stringent gun control. That attribution cannot be accurate since murder in Europe was at an all‐time low before the gun controls were introduced. For instance, virtually the only English gun control during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the practice that police patrolled without guns. During this period gun control prevailed far less in England or Europe than in certain American states which nevertheless had—and continue to have—murder rates that were and are comparatively very high.

In this connection, two recent studies are pertinent. In 2004,
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation from a review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some original empirical research. It failed to identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, suicide, or gun accidents. The same conclusion was reached in 2003 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s review of then‐extant studies.

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One reason the extent of gun ownership in a society does not
spur the murder rate is that murderers are not spread evenly throughout the population. Analysis of perpetrator studies shows that violent criminals—especially murderers—“almost uniformly have a long history of involvement in criminal behavior.” So it would not appreciably raise violence if all law‐abiding, responsible people had firearms because they are not the ones who rape, rob, or murder. By the same token, violent crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians. As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest,individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use.

Evanston PD photo, via Evanston Now

It's easy to focus our thoughts on things. We have a lot of practice with that in our culture, especially this time of year. "I want a Red Ryder BB gun, and a new iPhone, and a Wii U." When times are good, we think about the things we want. And when times are bad, we think about the things we need and don't have. "I need a decent meal, and medicine, and decent clothes, and a warm, dry, safe place to sleep."

Things are simple. Our relationship with them is pretty one-sided. We are the subjects, they are the objects, always. We can act upon them or with them, but it's always us doing the acting. That makes them a lot easier to model in our minds than people.

So when our actions don't work out the way we want them too, it's easy to blame the things involved. "Dammit, if I had that $1,500 guitar, I'd play better." Or, "Stupid hammer! Why did it miss the nail and hit my thumb!?"

For minor mishaps, we usually realize how silly that is, and recant. "Ok, maybe I need to practice my scales more than I need a new guitar." Or, "Oh, I see, I need to swing the hammer differently."

But when people's lives go very, very wrong, we seem to have a stronger impulse to blame the things involved. "Heroin ruined her life," rather than "She ruined her life with heroin." Or "He was killed by a 9mm handgun," rather than "He was killed by a person who used a 9mm handgun."

It's interesting that there seems to be a bias the other way when objects are used towards a good outcome. There -- if we talk about these incidents at all, which we rarely do compared to the more dramatic bad outcomes -- we credit people. "She defended herself against the rapist with a 9mm handgun," not "A 9mm handgun defended her against the rapist." Or, "Doctors eased her pain with drugs," not "Drugs eased her pain."

So we blame things when events go awry, and we don't balance that out by crediting things when events go well. This biases our thinking, and in our minds things often become the source of our woes.

So we declare war on these things. Photos like the one above, showing our police capturing the evil things, have become standard news features. They're evidence of our "success" in the War on Drugs and the War on Guns, and never mind whether capturing those evil thing actually makes a difference in people's lives or not. (After decades of drug prohibition, some estimates say that ten percent of Baltimore residents are heroin addicts, though that probably conflates use, abuse, and addiction; and gun seizures and gun control laws don't prevent violence, while the U.S. murder rate actually declined 50% from 1991 to 2010, a time when most states liberalized CCW laws.)

In the wake of last week's horrific slaughter, we can sadly expect politicians and pundits to focus on the things involved, the guns, rather than the killer. We'll get proposals for more laws against things...laws that take people to enforce them, people who could more effectively prevent violence by spending their time supervising dangerous people than in engaging in another War on Things.

El Reg reports on the humans behind Google's search results: Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web

It's widely believed that Google search results are produced entirely by computer algorithms - in large part because Google would like this to be widely believed. But in fact a little-known group of home-worker humans plays a large part in the Google process. The way these raters go about their work has always been a mystery. Now, The Register has seen a copy of the guidelines Google issues to them.

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It's amazing how the image Google likes to promote - and politicians believe - one of high tech boffinry and magical algorithms, contrasts with the reality. Outsourced home workers are keeping the machine running. Glamorous, it isn't.

To complete this weeks' trifecta of bizarre animal stories: following dogs who drive cars and parrots who drive robotic buggies, the "Not Exactly Rocket Science" blog at Discover reports on catfish that temporarily strand themselves on land to hunt pigeons:

As the River Tarn winds through the city of Albi, it contains a small gravel island where pigeons gather to clean and bathe. And patrolling the island are European catfish—1 to 1.5 metres long, and the largest freshwater fish on the continent. These particular catfish have taken to lunging out of the water, grabbing a pigeon, and then wriggling back into the water to swallow their prey.

Following on the news of car-driving dogs, The Guardian's GrrlScientist brings us Pepper, the buggy-driving African grey parrot:

Proving that robots aren't just for people any longer, African grey parrot, Pepper, has learned to drive a robot that was specially designed for him. Pepper, whose wings are clipped to preventing him from flying around his humans' house and destroying their things, now manipulates the joystick on his riding robot to guide it to where ever he wishes to go.

From the "Are You Sure This Isn't A Hoax?" department (and it seems to be real): the SPCA of Auckland, New Zealand is teaching dogs to drive a specially modified Mini Cooper Countryman.

AOL News quotes the SPCA's CEO:

"Sometimes people think because they're getting an animal that's been abandoned, that somehow it's a second-class animal," SPCA Auckland CEO Christine Kalin told the New Zealand Herald. "Driving a car actively demonstrates to potential rescue dog adopters that you can teach an old dog new tricks."

Kalin added that the canines' achievements behind the wheel shows "just how much potential all dogs from the SPCA have as family pets."

All the new drivers are shelter dogs: Monty, an 18-month Giant Schnauzer, was given to the SPCA when he became too much for his owner to handle. Ginny, a 1-year-old whippets cross, was rescued from an abusive home. Porter, a 10-month old Beardie cross, was abandoned on the streets.

Baltimore activist James MacArthur is live-tweeting and webcasting his standoff with SWAT team over . He says he's being silenced for whistleblowing, and is broadcasting his phone conservation with police at his blog:

http://www.baltimorespectator.com/

https://twitter.com/BaltoSpectator

I don't know this guy from a hole in the ground; he may be a nutcase or he may be genuine. But its important to witness BCPD's actions. And it seems clear that the cops have escalated a simple warrant for failure to appear into a situation with potential for great violence. As an institution, the BCPD is not trustworthy.

If nothing else, listening to this is an amazing insight into a how a crisis situation goes.