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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
You may be a math guy.  But you are not an engineering guy.  When we design a system or anything else, we don’t only look at the statistics and compare across statistical families.  We look at risk.  Which is probability (what you are talking about) multiplied by impact (how catastrophic is it).  In the case of mass shootings, the impact is very high.  The dead victims of course, but also the emotional upheaval, the loss of a perceived sense of security, the tearing apart of communities, etc.  Kids dying for no reason at all tends to provide a sense of trauma that you don’t seem to be able to appreciate.  
 [/quote]

Aha, a good and intelligent reply!!  Thank you!!

What you’re touching on here is the concept of utilitarianism, of which I’m a fan. There is *absolutely* significant disutility when children are killed versus adults. Or, when people are killed at random versus doing something where “they should’ve known better”.

In my mind, though, there are a couple problems with using utilitarianism to formulate policy.

The first is irrationality. We don’t have to look far to find people who become so emotionally distraught over something that it becomes akin to a mental illness. Like being afraid to go into the water because you watched Jaws. Or my acquaintance who gets a case of the vapors when she hears a siren.  At some point that becomes Robert Nozick’s “utility monster” thought experiment, but with public policy being driven by the most easily-scared / neurotic members of society.

The other issue is measuring that disutility, which is impossible.  And you’d have to measure the positive utility on the flip side of the discussion. Another acquaintance uses a wheel chair but stays very active. If he goes someplace isolated, like a self-storage facility, he may find much emotional comfort if he carries a pistol, even though he will probably never use it. In a utilitarian sense, he *has* already used the un-fired pistol, because it gave him the freedom of movement in a condition when he can no longer physically fight someone.

Now take those perceptions (both rational and irrational) and multiply by hundreds of millions of people.  The only way to proceed is how we do, in a representative democracy where we vote though our ballots, our activism, and our financial contributions via purchases and donations. Anything other than that is NOT true liberalism. It’s illiberalism, which I cannot stand, and it’s why I feel so many of my fellow self-proclaimed liberals have gone off the rails. We’re on the wrong side of this one issue. We weren’t so much in the 1960s, but things shifted to becoming the party of neurotic, narcissistic old biddies.

Which is why I started off by saying this is no longer a serious discussion. It’s resolved.  Those tens of thousands of Gen-Z high school trap shooters are flummoxed by the likes of the fat suburban woman — the one who has “AR” related panic attacks, but is actually going to die from her diet, and who doesn’t know the difference between a shotgun and a rifle.  All they know is that someone so confused can’t be trusted to propose common sense gun control. In fact, they find her use of the term “common sense” to be rather ironic.  [/quote]

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