Anyone talking of “gun deaths” is likely ignorant of how meaningless this measure might be. Managing policy to a measure that muddles the structure of its underlying problems will lead only to disappointment.
Read more "Lies, damned lies, and gun statistics"I’m calling on you — each of you, regardless of your persuasion — to change the way you engage on this issue. What you’ve done in the past hasn’t worked. At all. You need to change your approach in order to get different results, and I don’t mean that you keep saying the same simple and misguided things, only more loudly and obnoxiously than before.
Read more "Your gun control ideas won’t work. This one will."My experience with Argentina goes back nearly two decades to when I spent two years as a Mormon missionary in the Patagonia. I learned that the Argentine people are wonderful, the food is exquisite, the scenery is breathtaking, and the economy is never more than 5 years away from being a complete disaster. While Argentina […]
Read more "It’s time to cry for Argentina (again)"We seem to be living in perilous times. Parts of the United States government are shut down because the House and Senate can’t agree to either fund or defund Obamacare, whose rollout this month has been an unmitigated disaster. This impasse now threatens the looming deadline to raise the debt limit before the Treasury supposedly runs out of […]
Read more "Why default is inevitable"One percent of Americans now earn a greater share of income than at any time since the 1920s, according to this article posted today. The top 1% of income earners, those who earned more than $394,000 last year, accounted for more than 19% of all income reported to the IRS, while the top 10%, or those who earned […]
Read more "The 1%: They’re at it again…"This is the third installment in a series on the gun control issue. In our first episode we examined data that demonstrate a correlation between fewer guns and an increased variance in the homicide rate. In the second we explored game theory as a hypothesis to explain this phenomenon. This time around we’ll look into […]
Read more "Gun Control, Part 3: Back to the Present"In my last post we undertook a cursory analysis of data related to firearm ownership and homicide rates across various jurisdictions. We concluded that strict gun-control laws and reduced firearm ownership are correlated with increased variance in the total homicide rate: In other words, the worst-case scenarios are worse under strict gun-control laws and lower rates […]
Read more "Gun Control, Part 2: Shall we play a game?"Articles like this one began to appear soon after last month’s tragic massacre in Connecticut. The logic embodied in them is straightforward: Guns are designed to kill people, and more guns mean more dead people, therefore fewer guns mean fewer dead people. The reasoning is so patently obvious, in fact, that anyone who argues against common-sense gun […]
Read more "Gun Control: Four Must-See Graphs"
Zach Mortensen 