RKBA

Anti-Concepts

by

One often reads that “gun violence” is a unitary concept, as in a recent paper entitled “Trends and Disparities in Firearm Fatalities in the United States, 1990-2021“. Yet once you go beyond the headlines, you quickly realize that (perhaps aside from some gun-related accidents) there are two primary and very different categories: homicides and suicides.

According to the paper, in 2021 the homicide rate was highest among black men age 20-24 (141.8 fatalities/100,000 people) especially in urban areas, and the suicide rate was highest among white non-Hispanic men age 80-84 (45.2 fatalities/100,000 people) especially in rural areas (check out the “heat maps” in the paper). Aside from the fact that men were involved on both counts, young urban black men and old rural white men have very little in common with regard to their activities and their reasons for pulling the trigger.

Because calling members of both categories victims of “gun death” makes as much sense as saying that people who die in floods and people who die in boating accidents are both victims of “water death”, it’s pretty clear that the anti-concept of “gun violence” is meant to serve the agenda of those who want to outlaw firearms, not to provide any useful guidance on how to prevent homicides and suicides.

What are some other good examples of such anti-concepts?

Victory Lap

by

I was happy and relieved at the verdict yesterday in the Rittenhouse trial. Of course you have plenty of ridiculous takes on the trial out there like this:

I have spent an inordinate amount of time following this trial and spent my evenings watching the proceedings. Which reminds me that we need to start having cameras in federal courtrooms, but that is a different subject.

It’s breathtaking how none of the screaming loons like Newsom looked at one minute of these proceedings, looked at not one exhibit of evidence or even bothered to look at all of the video that is out there everywhere. Why are there even sides on the right to defend yourself?

This is a great time to have conversations about prosecutorial misconduct, the Constitution and self defense and instead it is just all rank bullshit. Imagine all of the innocent poor people rotting in jail because they took the deals due to prosecutorial misconduct. Kyle had people setting up defense funds or he would be there too. Especially if there wasn’t video.

The left in this country are absolute trash. I hope Kyle is able to somehow get on with his life and live it in a somewhat normal fashion after this all blows over. Oh and also after he is done suing everyone who called him a white supremacist, murderer, and all the rest. He could start with “Biden” but there is probably lower hanging fruit out there for some quick settlements. I’m sure there are a lot of people scrubbing their social media as I write this, but the internet never forgets. Just ask Nick Sandmann.

Dilèm Aksyon Kolektif nan Matisan

by

Generatim discite cultus

(Learn the culture proper to each after its kind)

— Virgil, Georgics II

Stephen Biddle, Nonstate Warfare: the Military Methods of Guerrillas, Warlords, and Militias (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)

one-to-many entity-relationship symbol superposed over map of Martissant, Haiti

By way of making this more than a merely armchair review, I will be discussing the developing situation of state failure in Haiti, which is providing a personally harrowing example of the phenomena theorized and studied in this book. NB: additional situation reports like the one I quote from below will appear at this OCHA webpage.

I. Increasingly Scale-Free Military Activity in the 21st Century

In this follow-up to 2004’s Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (also from Princeton), Stephen Biddle continues to elucidate the many ramifications of the one-to-many relationship which came to dominate the battlefield between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. Over that century and in the decades that followed, individual-service weapons increased in rate of fire from a (very) few rounds per minute to ~10 rounds per second, in effective range from ~100 to >300 meters, and in accuracy from (optimistically) 10 to 1.5 milliradians. Say 2½ orders of magnitude improvement in RoF, half an order of magnitude in range, and one order of magnitude in accuracy; multiplying these together to create a sort of index of effectiveness, I get an overall change of 4 orders of magnitude, with stark implications for battlefield environments.

Read more

“Twitter Rolls Out New Feature That Auto-Posts ‘Ban Assault Rifles!’ From Your Account Any Time a Mass Shooting Hashtag Starts Trending”

by

Don’t give them ideas:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he was “excited” about the rollout of the new feature.
 
“For at least 2 years now, maybe even longer, America has been faced with the tragedy of mass shootings,” said Dorsey. “While some people waste time considering the feelings of the victims and their families, others do the smart thing and start offering solutions to the problem. Now, the only solution that would have any effect – at least according to all the angry tweets I’ve read on the topic – is a complete ban on assault rifles. The problem is, not everyone is doing all they can to spread that message – like those ‘why don’t we discuss this calmly and study our options’ morons.”

UPDATE: This is satire.