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GELFAND’S WORLD - I used to try to write an April Fools’ Day column. It didn't work out this year, but there are a few things that should have been April Fools’ jokes instead of reality. Some of them aren't pretty.
For the height of shoulda-been-an-April-Fools-joke ugliness, we have the photograph of congressman Andy Ogles and family that was intended to reach out to people -- that is, to a certain kind of people. At this moment, it is horrid beyond belief.
As many of you know already, this is the congressman whose district in Nashville includes the school where the latest mass shooting occurred. In the picture, everyone is jocular, jovial even, as they celebrate the ability to own machines of mass killing. Of course, they will argue that they mean something different, but the real, true meaning is that this congressman feels he has to kiss the butts of the gun-obsessed. In this sense, being a Republican signifies the depth of cowardice.
We next have the figure of the Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, who we will not portray, but simply cite in an online story you can find here. where Kevin says we need to get the facts first, before dealing with gun violence.
McCarthy never fooled anybody into thinking he was brave, but this story is convincing evidence that he is basically stupid. Yes, we understand that Republicans will twist and turn and struggle as they try to find ways of waving away the existence of all those freshly warm dead bodies, but saying that we need to accumulate the facts is a particularly dense approach. Apparently, McCarthy couldn't remember the current party line, which is that we need to confront mental illness and by the way, why isn't Biden dealing with the crisis on the southern border. Maybe Kevin is just losing his memory.
But as long as Kevin McCarthy says we need to get the facts, how about if we consider the facts? In particular, let's look at how the number of guns in the hands of the public will affect the number of shooting deaths. To make this evaluation more credible, let's look at lots of countries -- countries which range from very few guns per capita all the way up to more than one gun per capita on the average.
Gun Deaths vs Gun Ownership By Country
Notice how this graph includes the linear recursion line for the data (some of you will remember this as the least squares fit of a straight line to the data points).
There is a good fit showing a strongly positive relationship between a nation owning more guns and that nation suffering increasing numbers of gunshot deaths.
In looking at these data, a couple of things jumped out at me. It's true that the United States is all by itself out at the end of the curve, both for the number of guns owned and the number of gunshot deaths. But this isn't some weird eccentricity on our part. It's just the demonstrable relationship between guns and gunshot deaths. In other words, we're not really different from other countries. We're just further out the line which defines gunshot deaths.
There is one other point that jumped out at me. For years, the pro-gun people have been reminding us that gun ownership is mandated for Swiss military veterans, and these are a substantial fraction of the Swiss population. It has been left unstated but implicit that somehow the Swiss have managed to deal with gun ownership pretty well. We have been left with the implicit idea that Switzerland is a land full of people named Heidi who graze their cows, and immaculate cities of civilized charm. Not to mention the pristine lakes.
But when you look at the graph, there is Switzerland, right on the line, with a much higher rate of gunshot deaths than most other European nations of similar civilization and culture. The Swiss, it would appear, are no more immune from the mathematical rule of gunshot death than is the United States.
If we look at the graph, it tells us that on the average, for every gun in the hands of the people (averaged per capita), there is one death per year for each one of ten-thousand people. Thus for our three hundred million people, we should expect somewhere around thirty-thousand dead each year due to firearms.
Let's refashion the pro- and anti-gun arguments so that they (to borrow from Speaker McCarthy) fit the facts. We can even fashion the argument in a sort of syllogism:
a) Gun ownership on an individual basis is rarely fatal either to the owner or to another human being; the average is that there is about one gunshot death for every ten thousand guns owned by the people as a whole
b) We don't have to postulate any special reason for any gunshot death. They happen over all human cultures where guns are owned, and they happen with a predictable frequency; for this reason, we shouldn't imagine that we will eventually be able to identify the future murderers, because the only thing they have in common over all those national cultures is that they are humans and that they have possession of a gun. People who try to suggest that we can prevent gunshot deaths while maintaining the current level of guns are fooling themselves or trying to fool others.
c) But knowing what we know about the demonstrated relationship between the number of guns in the hands of the people and the number of gunshot deaths, we can reduce the number of guns in order to reduce the number of gunshot deaths. This may very well be politically difficult, but Australia and New Zealand have shown that it will work when it is tried.
d) To rephrase one of the above arguments, we should treat the number of guns as the independent variable and the number of gunshot deaths as the dependent variable, as opposed to the reverse of this logic as used by the pro-gun side. This explains why their arguments come across as so illogical.
Now How About This is For April Fools Day?
To return to humor: Another picture that would have made a good real-life story but can be presented as something to imagine come April 1:
By the way, the following paragraph was written and submitted before the indictment became public:
And as for the all-time April Fool’s Day joke, I would like to see the Manhattan District Attorney call a press conference for Saturday, April 1...And then announce a parking ticket forgiveness for the following week.
(I think it would have worked)
And as for the really, truly, all-time greatest not-an-April-Fool joke, we have the top commenters on Fox explaining that they didn't really mean what they said on the air about the 2020 elections.
In a close second place, we have the revelation that Fox administrators insisted that their news people stop telling the truth about the election loss (and stop fact checking Trump's statements) in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 elections, because telling the truth was costing them viewership. Imagine if somebody had released that story as an April Fool’s Day joke in 2020.
And last, and pathetically least, we have the mayor's signature on the ordinance that tries to make neighborhood council participants into unpaid servants.
Addendum
In a sad note, I would like to offer tribute to a wonderful scholar by the name of Russell Merritt (1941 - 2023) who passed away earlier this month. Russ was an authority on the history of our movie industry, particularly the part that developed here in southern California. A few years ago, at the peak of his career, he was awarded the highest prize that the silent film community can give at their annual get-together in Pordenone, Italy. He will be missed.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
