Minimizing Mass Murders

Tuesday 18 December 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

Get rid of the media, not guns. The Telegraph:

But in general, when we think of US firearm violence, we don’t think of domestic shootings or robberies-gone-wrong, even though they make up far, far more of the steady background crackle of gunfire in the States. We think of the high-profile but low-incidence cases of a lone, disturbed man or teenage boy walking into a school or college or place of work and opening fire on strangers.

The reason we think of that is the psychological shortcut called the “availability heuristic”, which I’ve written about before. When asked how likely something is to happen, we don’t answer with our knowledge of statistics: instead, we substitute the answer to a much easier question, “How easily can I think of an example?”. With school shootings, or terror attacks, we can of course think very easily of examples, because they are awful and thus memorable, and because, of course, they are saturated across the news. Just as with terror attacks, the social response to mass killings – metal detectors in school doorways, class in-the-event-of-a-shooting drills, like fire drills, for children – is disproportionate to the actual risk, and in a sick way represents a victory for the murderers.

It’s probably a good idea to rid ourselves of the legacy media as a general principle anyways.

2012-12-18  »  madlibertarianguy