Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: A regular guy...

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2017/10/05/las-vegas/
 
 
"Las Vegas"
 
from Peter Radford
 
So we go through it all again.
 
We go through the constant call for payers. The incessant search for 
reasons; the outpouring of emotion; the interviews; the graphics; the 
enumeration of mayhem; the grief of families; the interviews with 
experts; and the silence of the voices lost.
 
There are never, however, efforts to deal with the problem.
 
America is obsessed with guns. It adores them It worships them. It is 
sick with guns.
 
Blame it on the foolishness of the second amendment. Or, more pointedly, 
blame it on the truly stupid interpretation of that foolish amendment.
 
And blame it on a nation that clings stubbornly to the illusion that a 
few men a couple of hundred years ago would endorse the twisted version 
of their vision that the second amendment has become. They surely would 
not. They would move on, just as America today refuses to move on. The 
need for a well-armed militia is hardly relevant in today’s world. It is 
an artifact of history. Our contemporary problem is not the need for a 
militia, it is our need to rein in the gun lobbyists and the gun makers 
who peddle death.
 
Economics has a concept called “revealed preference”. Like it or not we 
can apply it to yesterday’s sickening violence. Because preferences are 
inscrutable to analysts — they are hidden within the minds of consumers 
— economists are forced to rely on what people actually purchase in 
order to define them. The assumption being that consumers reveal their 
preferences in their purchasing behavior. That there may be a million 
other causes for why people act as they do, but economists zero in own 
what they can measure. The immeasurable is ignored.
 
So: whenever there is a mass shooting in America, and 2017 has seen over 
two hundred so far [yes over two hundred]! voters reveal their 
preferences in their action or inaction with respect to guns. More 
specifically, legislators do. And the reviews are in: America is 
indifferent to gun violence.
 
This looks as if it contradicts the outpourings on the day of a 
massacre. But leave it a day or two. Listen for the reaction. Watch for 
the determination to clamp down on guns. Look for any evidence at all 
that the country wants to prevent future mayhem. Wait. You will be 
waiting for a very long time. America adores its guns more than it 
detests the violence. Revealed preference suggests that all the angst is 
just smoke. The real preference is for continued violence. No one 
actually does anything to restrict the flow of weaponry onto the streets.
 
So:
 
* America has 29.7 murders using guns per million people. Switzerland is 
a distant second at 7.7.
* There have been over 1,500 mass murders since the infamous Sandy Hook 
massacre [about one per day]
* Americans own over 42% of the non-military guns in the world, despite 
having only 4.5% of the world population.
* States with stricter gun laws have fewer gun related deaths.
 
And even after a massacre the public doesn’t cry for gun control. Indeed 
the percentage of voters opposing gun control has edged up in recent 
years [perhaps due to white supremacists and their fear of a black man 
in the White House]?
So, don’t allow all this teary-eyed melodrama fool you: America will 
still love its guns tomorrow. America will remain the most 
violence-riddled  and violence-addicted of the advanced nations.
 
And there will be more massacres.
 
One more thing, if you think I am being callous or worse, remember this: 
after the Las Vegas slaughter survivors asked whether the shooter had 
been Muslim or a “regular guy”. Had he been Muslim we would have plunged 
down the terrorist rabbit hole and there would have been immediate calls 
for retribution and/or reaction, but he was a “regular guy”. So there is 
no need to react. After all, we all know that nothing can be done about 
a regular guy who owns an arsenal of offensive weaponry. No, nothing can 
be done about that. We all simply have to live with it.
 
Or die.
-- 
Namib
---
Die Arbeiter haben kein Vaterland (Karl Marx)

Il giorno venerdì 6 ottobre 2017 12:30:53 UTC+2, Namib ha scritto:
 
uff
 
lo ripeto anche a te : puoi stare tranquillo, perchè alla lunga
il vostro risibile punto di vista prevarrà.