"Red team" biowarfare exercises, where we create biological weapons to figure out ways to "defend" against them, is the dumbest idea since sharing needles.
Our brilliant military scientists were doing red team exercises in Fort Detrick when they developed weaponized anthrax. Brilliant! Now we've demonstrated to every biology grad student in the world that it's possible to turn anthrax into a cheap, effective biological weapon, and how to do it.
Now any terrorist with a budget of $100,000 and basic bacteriological skills knows how to bring the U.S. postal system, and most of the U.S., to a halt. Then what do we do? Require photo ID to mail a letter? Autoclave the mail?
Not just Finland. Most of the countries that outrank the US on international tests have unionized school systems.
You can even compare union schools to nonunion schools within the US. Union schools (mostly in the north) outrank nonunion schools (mostly in the south).
In fairness, union school systems aren't entirely to blame. Those places where school systems are unionized tend to have unions across the economy.
The main factor that affects student achievement is family income. Unions give families higher incomes (and job security). So it may be that unionization of the entire society is responsible for higher educational achievement.
Standardized tests correlate more strongly than any other measurement with later academic success, college graduation rates, and later life success.
Not true. According to Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, the one factor that correlates most strongly with achievement on standardized tests is family income. This is the consensus, unchallenged by people who follow the data.
Some standardized tests are validated, like the NAEP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educational_Progress However, the NAEP measures aggregate scores for groups of students (and for small subsets, it isn't valid). It will tell you how well the school system as a whole is doing, but it can't tell how well individual teachers or students are doing. It doesn't have statistical power to evaluate individual teachers and students. That's the best test we have.
The standardized tests that are used for rating teachers are not validated. That's the big argument against them. A science teacher at Stuyvesant high school ran some standardized statistical tests on the NYC teacher tests, and the tests reported literally a random distribution. Principals were complaining that the tests were giving low rankings to teachers that were doing an excellent job, that they wanted to rehire the next year.
Standardized tests are worthless for rating teachers. They're worse than worthless, because they're used to fire perfectly competent people and reward people who are at best skilled at teaching to the test. How would you like to be a principal, and have a system that removed 5% of your teachers at random every year?
You wouldn't imaigne the new developments year in, year out, in Algebra, History, and English are staggering.
Biology, chemistry, physics, electronics....
If your science teacher didn't keep up with new developments, you might not have heard about this amazing new device everybody is using -- it's called the transistor. It may replace vacuum tubes.
Science teachers have to work pretty hard to keep up with the field. I know middle-school science teachers who subscribe to Science. That's pretty heavy reading. Science has many articles about new ways to teach science -- and what the important concepts are.
It looks pretty easy to give a 45-minute class on, say, the immune system. But in order to give a 45-minute class, that teacher has to go through ten times as much information, to pick out the stuff that's important, understandable by students that age, and interesting. Science teachers are educating their kids not for today's science, but for the science of 20 and 40 years from now.
I imagine there are lazy science teachers who don't bother to update their knowledge, and teach the same class over and over again. But I don't know of any evidence that's a problem.
(BTW, you don't seem to understand that history keeps going on. 9/11, the Iraq war, the health care debate, are now history. History teachers have to learn how to teach it. Or would you prefer to have teachers just get up in class and teach their own personal opinions of George W. Bush?)
Do you want to send every medical consumer to medical school? That's how much knowledge they'd need to be informed purchasers in the free marketplace.
Mother fucking bullshit. If you can't make a simple decision about your health without spending four years in college then you are a dumb ass.
You'd need at least the knowledge of a nurse to make informed decisions in the health care marketplace.
Again: you're a moron.
I know quite a bit more about medicine than you do. I was under the impression I was talking to somebody who was reasonably intelligent and might be worth talking to.
Once you start calling people names, that's a definite sign that you have nothing intelligent to say and aren't worth talking to.
There was an article in Science about the Chinese health care system, and they had a photo of people sitting in a room getting infusions of antibiotics for colds and flu. (Antibiotics are useless for colds and flu.) As a result, they were getting epidemics of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
China's a big place. There are some very good doctors. There are also some very bad ones.
Look at areas of medical treatment in which the government is not involved. Sadly there are very few of those, but take for example Lasik surgery. Prices for that drop every single year. Why? Because of natural market pressures. People usually pay for that out of pocket, so they naturally price- and quality shop. Lasik establishments are incented to reduce costs and improve quality. And they do.
Let me answer the LASIK free market fallacy.
I made my living for a few years following LASIK and competitive technologies. I spoke to designers, manufacturers and ophthalmologists, and wrote articles about it.
1. The reason LASIK got cheaper is improved technology. Refractive surgery started out as a manual procedure and became increasingly automated. The procedures got faster, and the skills got lower. They tested different lasers and found the wavelengths that worked best. Once the best procedures were established, it was easy for an ophthalmologist to buy a laser, take a course, set himself up in the LASIK business, and start cutting prices and giving introductory offers.
LASIK wasn't a free market. They had a lot of FDA regulation. The FDA did a lot of their quality control. That's why they didn't wind up like the New England Compounding Center.
2. I also followed cataract surgery. During the same period, the cost of cataract surgery dropped just as much as LASIK, for the same reasons -- better technology. Cataract surgery used to require a large incision with a hospital stay. Now it requires a small incision as an outpatient procedure. The lenses got better.
Cataract surgery is overwhelmingly done under Medicare. As cataract surgery got easier and faster, ophthalmologists were making a killing, doing simple surgery and getting paid for complex surgery. Medicare renegotiated the fees, to bring the price of cataract surgery down so that the ophthalmologists' income went back down to what it used to be. That''s why cataracts cost less. Because the government, efficient and well-managed in this case, negotiated the prices down, the way they do in other countries.
Even so, you would be crazy to shop for eye surgery based on price. You don't want the best price, you want the best doctor, who is least likely to make a mistake. You could lose your eye. The malpractice award, if you get it, won't pay enough to be worth it. You can't look up an eye doctor on Yelp. If the government doesn't establish standards and quality control, you're fucked.
Why? Healthcare was freely available to the poor prior to government involvement in the industry. Doctors would even make housecalls to tenement houses.
In the days when doctors made housecalls to tenement houses, cancer drugs cost $30, not $100,000. The life expectancy at birth was about 50 years, rather than 75 years. And most of the savings in lives came not from doctors' treatments, but by government public health measures like clean water, sanitary sewage, and regulation of often-contaminated products like milk. Government intervention works. The UN eliminated smallpox.
Free markets work, no matter what you say about them. If they didn't, then computers would be ultra expensive and unavailable, while the Post Office would make money.
(1) Computers, like most industries, are a success of both the free marketplace and government support. Gordon Crovitz inadvertently demonstrated that in a Wall Street Journal editorial page column which claimed that the government wasn't responsible for the Internet. He was quickly corrected by the very people he credited with creating the Internet. And yes, they said that Al Gore helped. We should all thank Crovitz for making a fool of himself and educating the public on this issue.
(2) The U.S. Postal Service does make money. You may have missed it, but they're not longer subsidized by the government. They would show a comfortable profit, except that a conservative Congress, in an attempt to discredit the government, required the USPS to adopt accounting principles that nobody else uses. They have to treat their entire pension fund as a liability, which makes them look bad. In the free market, you pay UPS or Fedex $15 to deliver an envelope. Do you think that if you removed the competition of the USPS, UPS and Fedex would lower their prices?
(The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of free-market exceptionalism, was trying for years to develop a delivery system that would be cheaper than the USPS. They failed. The one government service the WSJ didn't want to privatize was the USPS. They'd lose half their circulation. And no, they can't substitute the Internet.)
There is at least 45 years of high-quality research , some of it in randomized controlled trials, on what people do when you give them co-payments. They all come to the same conclusion: People get less unnecessary care, but they also get less necessary care. Co-payments don't even save money. They cost more money in the end.
In the last 15 or 20 years, lots of corporate executives believed your argument, and put their employees into plans with copayments. For those corporations that monitored their results, like IBM, the result was always the same: people with chronic diseases didn't follow their regular maintenance, and wound up in the hospital, costing far more money than the plans saved. Those corporations went back to paying the entire bill.
Atul Gawande discussed that recently in the New Yorker. A company found that employees with asthma were less likely to use the (~$1-200/mo ) drugs for controlling asthma, and as a result had exacerbations and wound up in the emergency room (~$1-2,000).
Patients with high blood pressure don't take their BP medications, and wind up with heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure. Patients with rheumatoid arthritis don't take their expensive wonder drugs, and wind up with heart attacks (people with rheumatoid arthritis are more likely to get heart attacks).
When the Medicare managed care companies imposed a $10-20 copay on mammograms, the rate of mammograms dropped by about 15% (according to Trivedi in the New England Journal of Medicine).
One of the things you left out of your calculations is the cost of running a complicated health insurance system, which creates internal free-market incentives (like the Soviet system used to do).
When you pay for health care through insurance companies, as compared to having the government pay for everything directly through taxes, the insurance companies take 15c of your dollar, for profits and administrative expenses. Your doctor gets 85c, and pays 15c of that for managing the insurance company payments, so the doctor is left with 65c of your dollar.
As the Canadians and Brits often tell us, their government-run health care system is so much more efficient than ours, that they pay less in taxes than we do in premiums, and they have no copayments.
One of the problems with your argument is that people can't make informed decisions about their health care. I go into a doctor's office and he tells me he needs to x-ray my knee. What am I going to do -- spend my 15-minute visit having him explain to me why I need an x-ray? Search Google to find out? Shop around for a cheaper x-ray? What if he says, "We have to rule out Paget's disease?" What do I know about Paget's disease? Enough to risk my life? No, I have to take his word for it. (The insurance company paid ~$1,000 for the x-ray.)
The only way to cut out waste in the health care system is not with free-market consumer decisions based on choice, but with medical experts like triage nurses deciding on a case-by-case basis whether I need to see a doctor, and with other doctors reviewing their treatments to make sure they were appropriate. That's how the Canadian and British systems do it successfully.
Education? Do you think the Chinese chemists and American pharmacists didn't have enough education?
Do you want to send every medical consumer to medical school? That's how much knowledge they'd need to be informed purchasers in the free marketplace.
You'd need at least the knowledge of a nurse to make informed decisions in the health care marketplace. That's at least two thousand hours of classes.
One critical assumption of the free market is that people can make informed decisions. Most patients can't make informed decisions. That's why the free market doesn't work in health care. Whatever problems government regulations has, without it people would (and used to) get ripped off.
Another case in point. One of my students' father was trained as an M.D. in China. The family emigrated to the U.S. and the father had to go through medical school all over just to prove he knew what he was doing. The only thing that improved in med school was his English. Were he, and hundreds of thousands other fully capable practitioners, able to come here and just hang out their shingle, you'd see health care costs plummet. But no. The medical profession protects its own from competition by convincing everyone they know best by limiting the number of doctors and med students.
Healthcare would be a hell of a lot cheaper if the government stayed the hell out of it.
You made a good point, but this isn't it.
China is a big place. They have some of the best scientists and doctors in the world. They also have some of the worst. We need someone to figure out which category a Chinese doctor falls into, before we turn him loose on a public that can't tell the difference.
HARSH TREATMENT In China, Brain Surgery Is Pushed on the Mentally Ill Irreversible Procedures Rarely Done Elsewhere; A Mother's Regrets By NICHOLAS ZAMISKA Wall Street Journal November 2, 2007
NANJING, China -- Mi Zhantao, a poor 25-year-old living with his parents outside this provincial capital in eastern China, was battling depression and had trouble socializing. Doctors said he had schizophrenia. They recommended brain surgery.
Mr. Mi's family spent about $4,800 -- the equivalent of four years' income, and more than their life savings -- on the operation, at No. 454 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army in Nanjing. The highly controversial procedure involved drilling tiny holes in the young man's skull, inserting a 7½-inch-long needle and burning small areas of brain tissue thought to be causing his problems.
The surgeon, who operated on Mr. Mi the day he met him, says he has performed nearly 1,000 such procedures, mostly for schizophrenia, but also for illnesses ranging from depression to epilepsy, since the hospital started offering the operation in 2004.
Mr. Mi's parents say the surgery did nothing but leave their son with a partially limp right arm and slurred speech. He continues to be depressed and withdrawn, his mother says. Wang Yifang, the surgeon, says he checked the medical records and, as far as he knows, the patient left the hospital uninjured.
Mr. Mi's mother, Kong Lingxia, 50, says she'll regret the decision for the rest of her life. "I feel so angry," she says. "But I'm really angry at myself. How could I let this happen?"
Chinese pharmacists in the US have generally escaped regulation, under the "dietary supplement" laws, and when the New York City health department investigated some of them, they were selling medicines that were adulterated with lead, Viagra -- you name it. The Chinese pharmaceutical industry sells source material to US companies, but the FDA can't go to China and investigate the manufacturers. As a result, there have been several incidents of people getting sick and dying because Chinese products, whose manufacture the government stayed the hell out of, turned out to be contaminated or deliberately adulterated. The New York Times had a series about that by I think Walt Bogdanich. One batch of children's cough syrup contained antifreeze and killed about 100 children. You want to sue them? The NYT tried to track some of those companies down, and couldn't find them.
I don't think you can find a country in the world that has a successful health care system where the government stays out of it. Very few patients know enough to shop for health care. A doctor has the ultimate high-pressure sales pitch: "You have to do this, or you might die. And you have to do it now." What are you going to do when a doctor tells you that in your 15-minute office visit? Stop and look it up on Google?
For many years, industry organizations, like the tobacco industry, the lead industry, and the chemical industry have hired writers to publish attacks on their critics, and to create what are now known as Astroturf organizations. One of the first people they attacked was Rachel Carson.
You can find out more with a search for the book "Toxic Sludge is Good for You," by Sheldon Rampton. They follow these things better than I do.
I don't know if Rand Simberg got paid by industry groups with a financial stake. If he is, it could come out in a libel suit. He works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Who funds the Competitive Enterprise Institute?
I've edited aerospace papers. I've dealt with a lot of engineers. I have a lot of respect for them. I like them.
Rand Simberg is an engineer. Engineering is very specialized. An engineer, like a scientist, is an expert in his specialty, but he's not an expert outside his specialty. He may be able to design a rocket engine, but that's a lot different from interpreting tree rings.
If someone writes for a newspaper or magazine, he has an editor reviewing what he writes. Editors say things like, "How do you know it's fraud? What's your evidence? He has a lawyer to fall back on for the same reason. A blogger doesn't have any of that. It's easy to slip into libel, I think that's what Simberg did. When a lawyer asks him on the witness stand, "How do you know it's fraud?" we'll see if he has a good answer.
I can't discuss this any further without having the text of the FOIA regulations and rulings in front of me, but FOIA doesn't cover every email and document that a scientist has written, even if he did get federal grants. The courts have realized that scientists need a vigorous, candid internal discussion of their work, and for that reason they've held internal documents confidential and not disclosable under FOIA. Internal discussions are privileged.
Disclosure during a libel suit is much broader than FOIA. The courts can order the parties to disclose anything that will further the interests of justice. Sometimes it's filed under seal, but anything relevant to the case would be disclosed in open court.
I've talked to lawyers about discovery, I've read trial transcripts and I've sat in court during trials. So I know something about discovery.
In one patent case, the lawyers had subpoenaed a chemist's entire 4-drawer file cabinet, digitized it, put it in a database, indexed and reviewed the whole thing, and projected pages in the courtroom.
The First Amendment doesn't protect you from disclosure in a libel suit.
Lawyers tell me that the judge can order both parties -- and people who have nothing to do with the litigation -- to supply them with any information that's "in the interests of justice."
As the Mann complaint details, they were doing more than just stating personal opinion. This is what the libel lawyers call "personal opinion based on underlying facts." People have lost libel suits for saying things like, "In my opinion X is a Communist," even when the person was a public figure. "Communist" is libelous per se.
Steyn and Simberg crossed the line when they accused Mann of "fraud." That's libelous per se.
"Academic and scientific misconduct," if it is an opinion, is an opinion based on claims of underlying fact. "Misconduct" is libelous.
That's libelous even if Mann is a public figure.
After discovery, Mann's lawyers will look through the documents to see if they demonstrate reckless disregard for the truth.
I'd like to see Simberg on the witness stand explain how he came to the conclusion that Mann was guilty of "academic and scientific misconduct."
I know a bit about the writing business that these guys are in. Lots of people in their position take money from industries that are affected by their work. They might get paid $10,000 from the industry to fly out to Nevada to give a speech. A freelance writer might get paid travel expenses to attend a meeting. They're getting money from somewhere, and it would be interesting to know where it is.
Yeah, it's a fishing expedition. Their demand for Mann's documents was a fishing expedition.
I've made FOIA requests and I've argued over deletions. There are huge classes of documents that are exempt from disclosure. When I read an accident report for a medical device, they don't disclose the name of the people who filed the report (so I can't call them to check the facts, or see whether I'm reading two reports of two incidents or two reports of the same incident).
The excuse there is that they're allegedly protecting medical information, something which isn't at stake with Dr. Mann's emails. And if you disagree with that assessment, you can always bring it to court to try to get that withheld information. You might win.
The "medical information" they were protecting didn't involve any confidential patient information. It included the location of the accident, and the reporting institution.
Just because someone's research is funded in part by the government, it doesn't follow that he has an obligation to disclose all his email. The FDA reviews drugs and medical devices all the time. They don't have to disclose all their internal emails. The companies that submit drugs and devices to the FDA don't have to disclose all their emails.
Scientists draw a line between what they're required to disclose in order to support their published conclusions, and internal or private documents that shouldn't be disclosed.
If you run a pizzaria, and a government agency orders a pizza from you, you're a government contractor. But you don't have to disclose your internal email to the world just because you got $15 from the government for a pizza. Same with Mann.
I think there were cases in which really stupid people made statements that they believed were true, but lost libel cases anyway.
It's libelous per se to falsely call somebody a Communist, even if you believe it's true. During the cold war, right-wing groups went around making indiscriminate claims that people were Communists, even though there was no basis to it. For a while they got away with it, but eventually they started losing libel suits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Faulk#Blacklist_controversy
Opinion is privileged and can't be libel, but if opinion is based on underlying facts, those facts can be libelous. For example, If you say, "In my opinion, John Henry Faulk" is a Communist," and he isn't, that's libelous even if you think it's true.
Libel law is a branch of law in which you can't argue deductively. You have to look at the cases and see how they turned out. And the law changes with time, depending on how much of a panic the country is in. I wish I had a legal casebook so I could look over some of the cases to see how they turned out.
Interesting idea. Under that scenario, in order to settle, they would have to give Mann whatever he demands -- cash damages, a retraction, a groveling apology.
Mann could still insist that they disclose their documents as a condition of the settlement. That was one of the conditions of the tobacco industry settlement. http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco
I've made FOIA requests and I've argued over deletions. There are huge classes of documents that are exempt from disclosure. When I read an accident report for a medical device, they don't disclose the name of the people who filed the report (so I can't call them to check the facts, or see whether I'm reading two reports of two incidents or two reports of the same incident).
Why don't you make a FOIA request for Sara Palin's emails as Alaska governor? Including her "personal" emails in her AOL account?
Steyn and National Review will also have to disclose documents in discovery. We'll see how they like getting all the facts out.
I don't think too many people here are actually going to read both letters, but saying that somebody committed "fraud" is libel per se, as the complaint charged. It's also libelous to say that a professional acted in a deceptive, incompetent manner.
They said that Mann was "behaving in a most unscientific manner", "engaging in data manipulation", hiding "academic and scientific misconduct." Steyn called Mann "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph."
Yes, Mann would be subject to discovery. So would Simberg, Steyn and the National Review, for all documents relating to their charges against Mann. If any of them had any financial relations with the energy industry, that would come out. If they cut corners anywhere, as they accused Mann of doing, that would come out.
That complaint is a good summary of this dispute. For Mann to win a libel case, he has to show that they wrote things that were false and defamatory, and (since he's a public figure) that they published it with knowledge that it was false or with disregard of whether it was false. It's libelous to accuse somebody of "fraud" or "deception." It's libelous to accuse someone of practicing his profession incompetently. Libel law protects opinions, as opposed to fact, but I think they've crossed the line. I think a jury could decide that they've met that test.
This isn't William Buckley's National Review. I'm familiar with right-wing crackpots from reading the Wall Street Journal comments pages. One of their problems is that they don't particularly concern themselves with facts. They don't even seem to understand what a fact is, or what the difference is between a fact and an opinon. They think that if somebody disagrees with them, he's a "liar." You see people calling Obama a "socialist," a "Kenyan," etc. These are words without meaning. It's like football hooligans screaming insults at Manchester United. Chris Mooney has written about this in his books and articles starting with "The Republican War on Science." I've often reflected on how much of it was actually libelous, if anybody bothered to sue. Now somebody did bother to sue.
Rand Simberg, as quoted starting in paragraph 26 of the complaint, said that Mann was "behaving in a most unscientific manner", "engaging in data manipulation", is hiding "academic and scientific misconduct." In paragraph 28, he called Mann's hockey-stick curve "deceptions" "in the service of politicized science." Steyn called Mann "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph."
In paragraph 31, the complaint says that "their allegations of misconduct and data manipulation were false and were clearly made with the knowledge that they were false." If they can convince the jury of that, they've won the case.
In paragraph 32, the complaint says that Rich Lowry, the editor of NRO, said that Mann's research was "intellectually bogus."
In paragraph 35, the complaint says that the statements "are defamatory per se and tend to injure Dr. Mann in his profession because they falsely impute to Dr. Mann academic corruption, fraud, and deceit as well as the commission of a criminal offense, in a manner injurous tot he reputation and esteem of Dr. Mann professionally, locally, nationally, and globally."
The delicious irony is that in a libel suit, both sides have to disclose huge amounts of documents relating to the case in discovery. Mann's emails were already exposed. Now Simberg and Steyn's correspondence will probably be exposed. If they were taking money from the energy industry, that will be exposed. They'll get the same treatment Mann did.
Really? Many people have responded to a beating with a shooting without spending 20 years in jail.
Yes, but many people have. The legal system isn't perfect, and isn't even reliable. I've seen evidence that about 1/3 of civil cases are wrongly decided. Once you go into court, you're throwing the dice. Guilty people go free and innocent people are convicted.
In fact, once you shoot somebody, even if you think it's self-defense, you're throwing the dice.
And of course the costs of defending yourself in a criminal trial are enough to consume all the assets of most middle-class people.
The law has to restrict people from shooting other people. Any law has to come down to allowing one person to kill another person only when the shooter had a "reasonable" belief that he was in danger of death or serious bodily injury.
No, actually; other standards are possible. Some have proposed a standard of "no deadly force in self defense no matter what". Going the other way, one could envision a standard of allowing deadly force in self defense against any assault.
Straw man. Nobody in the American political discourse has proposed a standard of "no deadly force in self defense no matter what". Name one. There are absolute pacifists, but they've never been elected to office.
You can never tell when you kill the other guy that the legal system is going to decide that your killing was "reasonable."
If I'm getting seriously beaten up, I can never tell if the other guy is going to kill me.
That's right. If you're getting beaten up, you're not in a good position to tell whether deadly force is justified. If you use deadly force, you're liable to wind up with a 20-year sentence for homicide. Or you're liable to lose all your assets in a civil suit. That's my point.
I don't trust you to make a rational decision in the heat of the moment. You're going to kill someone who never would have killed you. I want to prevent you from carrying handguns around, if possible.
In most of these killings, the shooter really wasn't in danger of death or serious bodily injury.
Citation needed. One example doesn't make "most".
I just gave you one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori There are many others. There are handgun-control web sites where law students have compiled long lists of such cases.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has had lots of articles on handguns, given lots of data, and refuted the books defending handguns. One of the statistics I remember from JAMA is that more people use a handgun to commit suicide than to defend themselves.
People get into fights all the time.
I don't.
They seldom get killed in fistfights. Put a gun in the situation, and people will get killed.
If people who go around [beating] other people with their fists get killed by those people, that's all right with me.
People get into fights. It's hard to tell afterwards who was "responsible." Often the person who started the fight is the one with the gun, and kills the other person.
If you take the gun out of the situation, the victim doesn't get killed. If you put the gun back into the situation, the victim does get killed. I think that the victim gets killed more often than the aggressor. For that reason, I would restrict the possession of guns. Of course the NRA won't let that happen. So we have to accept innocent people getting killed.
You're looking at it from the perspective of the shooter.
That's not your option. The law has to restrict people from shooting other people. Any law has to come down to allowing one person to kill another person only when the shooter had a "reasonable" belief that he was in danger of death or serious bodily injury.
You can never tell when you kill the other guy that the legal system is going to decide that your killing was "reasonable." In most of these killings, the shooter really wasn't in danger of death or serious bodily injury. The killing was usually motivated by fear, anger or stupidity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori . After the victim is dead, the shooter is facing a homicide charge.
People get into fights all the time. They seldom get killed in fistfights. Put a gun in the situation, and people will get killed.
You're looking at it from the perspective of the shooter.
I'm looking at it from the perspective of the innocent citizen who might get shot by mistake, or because some guy got mad at me. It won't do me much good to have you tearfully tell my survivors that you're sorry. I'll be dead.
You'll be facing criminal and civil charges (although thanks to the NRA, you may get off).
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Ignorance is temporary, stupidity forever.
"Red team" biowarfare exercises, where we create biological weapons to figure out ways to "defend" against them, is the dumbest idea since sharing needles.
Our brilliant military scientists were doing red team exercises in Fort Detrick when they developed weaponized anthrax. Brilliant! Now we've demonstrated to every biology grad student in the world that it's possible to turn anthrax into a cheap, effective biological weapon, and how to do it.
Now any terrorist with a budget of $100,000 and basic bacteriological skills knows how to bring the U.S. postal system, and most of the U.S., to a halt. Then what do we do? Require photo ID to mail a letter? Autoclave the mail?
Not just Finland. Most of the countries that outrank the US on international tests have unionized school systems.
You can even compare union schools to nonunion schools within the US. Union schools (mostly in the north) outrank nonunion schools (mostly in the south).
In fairness, union school systems aren't entirely to blame. Those places where school systems are unionized tend to have unions across the economy.
The main factor that affects student achievement is family income. Unions give families higher incomes (and job security). So it may be that unionization of the entire society is responsible for higher educational achievement.
Standardized tests correlate more strongly than any other measurement with later academic success, college graduation rates, and later life success.
Not true. According to Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, the one factor that correlates most strongly with achievement on standardized tests is family income. This is the consensus, unchallenged by people who follow the data.
Some standardized tests are validated, like the NAEP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educational_Progress However, the NAEP measures aggregate scores for groups of students (and for small subsets, it isn't valid). It will tell you how well the school system as a whole is doing, but it can't tell how well individual teachers or students are doing. It doesn't have statistical power to evaluate individual teachers and students. That's the best test we have.
The standardized tests that are used for rating teachers are not validated. That's the big argument against them. A science teacher at Stuyvesant high school ran some standardized statistical tests on the NYC teacher tests, and the tests reported literally a random distribution. Principals were complaining that the tests were giving low rankings to teachers that were doing an excellent job, that they wanted to rehire the next year.
Standardized tests are worthless for rating teachers. They're worse than worthless, because they're used to fire perfectly competent people and reward people who are at best skilled at teaching to the test. How would you like to be a principal, and have a system that removed 5% of your teachers at random every year?
Standardized tests give the greatest rewards to teachers and principals who cheat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee#Test_erasures
You wouldn't imaigne the new developments year in, year out, in Algebra, History, and English are staggering.
Biology, chemistry, physics, electronics ....
If your science teacher didn't keep up with new developments, you might not have heard about this amazing new device everybody is using -- it's called the transistor. It may replace vacuum tubes.
Science teachers have to work pretty hard to keep up with the field. I know middle-school science teachers who subscribe to Science. That's pretty heavy reading. Science has many articles about new ways to teach science -- and what the important concepts are.
It looks pretty easy to give a 45-minute class on, say, the immune system. But in order to give a 45-minute class, that teacher has to go through ten times as much information, to pick out the stuff that's important, understandable by students that age, and interesting. Science teachers are educating their kids not for today's science, but for the science of 20 and 40 years from now.
I imagine there are lazy science teachers who don't bother to update their knowledge, and teach the same class over and over again. But I don't know of any evidence that's a problem.
(BTW, you don't seem to understand that history keeps going on. 9/11, the Iraq war, the health care debate, are now history. History teachers have to learn how to teach it. Or would you prefer to have teachers just get up in class and teach their own personal opinions of George W. Bush?)
Do you want to send every medical consumer to medical school? That's how much knowledge they'd need to be informed purchasers in the free marketplace.
Mother fucking bullshit. If you can't make a simple decision about your health without spending four years in college then you are a dumb ass.
You'd need at least the knowledge of a nurse to make informed decisions in the health care marketplace.
Again: you're a moron.
I know quite a bit more about medicine than you do. I was under the impression I was talking to somebody who was reasonably intelligent and might be worth talking to.
Once you start calling people names, that's a definite sign that you have nothing intelligent to say and aren't worth talking to.
My mistake. Sorry.
There was an article in Science about the Chinese health care system, and they had a photo of people sitting in a room getting infusions of antibiotics for colds and flu. (Antibiotics are useless for colds and flu.) As a result, they were getting epidemics of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
China's a big place. There are some very good doctors. There are also some very bad ones.
Look at areas of medical treatment in which the government is not involved. Sadly there are very few of those, but take for example Lasik surgery. Prices for that drop every single year. Why? Because of natural market pressures. People usually pay for that out of pocket, so they naturally price- and quality shop. Lasik establishments are incented to reduce costs and improve quality. And they do.
Let me answer the LASIK free market fallacy.
I made my living for a few years following LASIK and competitive technologies. I spoke to designers, manufacturers and ophthalmologists, and wrote articles about it.
1. The reason LASIK got cheaper is improved technology. Refractive surgery started out as a manual procedure and became increasingly automated. The procedures got faster, and the skills got lower. They tested different lasers and found the wavelengths that worked best. Once the best procedures were established, it was easy for an ophthalmologist to buy a laser, take a course, set himself up in the LASIK business, and start cutting prices and giving introductory offers.
LASIK wasn't a free market. They had a lot of FDA regulation. The FDA did a lot of their quality control. That's why they didn't wind up like the New England Compounding Center.
2. I also followed cataract surgery. During the same period, the cost of cataract surgery dropped just as much as LASIK, for the same reasons -- better technology. Cataract surgery used to require a large incision with a hospital stay. Now it requires a small incision as an outpatient procedure. The lenses got better.
Cataract surgery is overwhelmingly done under Medicare. As cataract surgery got easier and faster, ophthalmologists were making a killing, doing simple surgery and getting paid for complex surgery. Medicare renegotiated the fees, to bring the price of cataract surgery down so that the ophthalmologists' income went back down to what it used to be. That''s why cataracts cost less. Because the government, efficient and well-managed in this case, negotiated the prices down, the way they do in other countries.
Even so, you would be crazy to shop for eye surgery based on price. You don't want the best price, you want the best doctor, who is least likely to make a mistake. You could lose your eye. The malpractice award, if you get it, won't pay enough to be worth it. You can't look up an eye doctor on Yelp. If the government doesn't establish standards and quality control, you're fucked.
Why? Healthcare was freely available to the poor prior to government involvement in the industry. Doctors would even make housecalls to tenement houses.
In the days when doctors made housecalls to tenement houses, cancer drugs cost $30, not $100,000. The life expectancy at birth was about 50 years, rather than 75 years. And most of the savings in lives came not from doctors' treatments, but by government public health measures like clean water, sanitary sewage, and regulation of often-contaminated products like milk. Government intervention works. The UN eliminated smallpox.
Free markets work, no matter what you say about them. If they didn't, then computers would be ultra expensive and unavailable, while the Post Office would make money.
(1) Computers, like most industries, are a success of both the free marketplace and government support. Gordon Crovitz inadvertently demonstrated that in a Wall Street Journal editorial page column which claimed that the government wasn't responsible for the Internet. He was quickly corrected by the very people he credited with creating the Internet. And yes, they said that Al Gore helped. We should all thank Crovitz for making a fool of himself and educating the public on this issue.
(2) The U.S. Postal Service does make money. You may have missed it, but they're not longer subsidized by the government. They would show a comfortable profit, except that a conservative Congress, in an attempt to discredit the government, required the USPS to adopt accounting principles that nobody else uses. They have to treat their entire pension fund as a liability, which makes them look bad. In the free market, you pay UPS or Fedex $15 to deliver an envelope. Do you think that if you removed the competition of the USPS, UPS and Fedex would lower their prices?
(The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of free-market exceptionalism, was trying for years to develop a delivery system that would be cheaper than the USPS. They failed. The one government service the WSJ didn't want to privatize was the USPS. They'd lose half their circulation. And no, they can't substitute the Internet.)
There is at least 45 years of high-quality research , some of it in randomized controlled trials, on what people do when you give them co-payments. They all come to the same conclusion: People get less unnecessary care, but they also get less necessary care. Co-payments don't even save money. They cost more money in the end.
The first big study was the Rand Health Insurance Experiment on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment Look it up.
In the last 15 or 20 years, lots of corporate executives believed your argument, and put their employees into plans with copayments. For those corporations that monitored their results, like IBM, the result was always the same: people with chronic diseases didn't follow their regular maintenance, and wound up in the hospital, costing far more money than the plans saved. Those corporations went back to paying the entire bill.
Atul Gawande discussed that recently in the New Yorker. A company found that employees with asthma were less likely to use the (~$1-200/mo ) drugs for controlling asthma, and as a result had exacerbations and wound up in the emergency room (~$1-2,000).
Patients with high blood pressure don't take their BP medications, and wind up with heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure. Patients with rheumatoid arthritis don't take their expensive wonder drugs, and wind up with heart attacks (people with rheumatoid arthritis are more likely to get heart attacks).
When the Medicare managed care companies imposed a $10-20 copay on mammograms, the rate of mammograms dropped by about 15% (according to Trivedi in the New England Journal of Medicine).
One of the things you left out of your calculations is the cost of running a complicated health insurance system, which creates internal free-market incentives (like the Soviet system used to do).
When you pay for health care through insurance companies, as compared to having the government pay for everything directly through taxes, the insurance companies take 15c of your dollar, for profits and administrative expenses. Your doctor gets 85c, and pays 15c of that for managing the insurance company payments, so the doctor is left with 65c of your dollar.
As the Canadians and Brits often tell us, their government-run health care system is so much more efficient than ours, that they pay less in taxes than we do in premiums, and they have no copayments.
One of the problems with your argument is that people can't make informed decisions about their health care. I go into a doctor's office and he tells me he needs to x-ray my knee. What am I going to do -- spend my 15-minute visit having him explain to me why I need an x-ray? Search Google to find out? Shop around for a cheaper x-ray? What if he says, "We have to rule out Paget's disease?" What do I know about Paget's disease? Enough to risk my life? No, I have to take his word for it. (The insurance company paid ~$1,000 for the x-ray.)
The only way to cut out waste in the health care system is not with free-market consumer decisions based on choice, but with medical experts like triage nurses deciding on a case-by-case basis whether I need to see a doctor, and with other doctors reviewing their treatments to make sure they were appropriate. That's how the Canadian and British systems do it successfully.
Education? Do you think the Chinese chemists and American pharmacists didn't have enough education?
Do you want to send every medical consumer to medical school? That's how much knowledge they'd need to be informed purchasers in the free marketplace.
You'd need at least the knowledge of a nurse to make informed decisions in the health care marketplace. That's at least two thousand hours of classes.
One critical assumption of the free market is that people can make informed decisions. Most patients can't make informed decisions. That's why the free market doesn't work in health care. Whatever problems government regulations has, without it people would (and used to) get ripped off.
Medicare.
Medicare doesn't cover hearing aids.
Medicare does cover cataract surgery, and the price of cataract surgery has dropped dramatically over the past 30 years.
Another case in point. One of my students' father was trained as an M.D. in China. The family emigrated to the U.S. and the father had to go through medical school all over just to prove he knew what he was doing. The only thing that improved in med school was his English. Were he, and hundreds of thousands other fully capable practitioners, able to come here and just hang out their shingle, you'd see health care costs plummet. But no. The medical profession protects its own from competition by convincing everyone they know best by limiting the number of doctors and med students.
Healthcare would be a hell of a lot cheaper if the government stayed the hell out of it.
You made a good point, but this isn't it.
China is a big place. They have some of the best scientists and doctors in the world. They also have some of the worst. We need someone to figure out which category a Chinese doctor falls into, before we turn him loose on a public that can't tell the difference.
HARSH TREATMENT
In China, Brain Surgery Is Pushed on the Mentally Ill
Irreversible Procedures Rarely Done Elsewhere; A Mother's Regrets
By NICHOLAS ZAMISKA
Wall Street Journal
November 2, 2007
NANJING, China -- Mi Zhantao, a poor 25-year-old living with his parents outside this provincial capital in eastern China, was battling depression and had trouble socializing. Doctors said he had schizophrenia. They recommended brain surgery.
Mr. Mi's family spent about $4,800 -- the equivalent of four years' income, and more than their life savings -- on the operation, at No. 454 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army in Nanjing. The highly controversial procedure involved drilling tiny holes in the young man's skull, inserting a 7½-inch-long needle and burning small areas of brain tissue thought to be causing his problems.
The surgeon, who operated on Mr. Mi the day he met him, says he has performed nearly 1,000 such procedures, mostly for schizophrenia, but also for illnesses ranging from depression to epilepsy, since the hospital started offering the operation in 2004.
Mr. Mi's parents say the surgery did nothing but leave their son with a partially limp right arm and slurred speech. He continues to be depressed and withdrawn, his mother says. Wang Yifang, the surgeon, says he checked the medical records and, as far as he knows, the patient left the hospital uninjured.
Mr. Mi's mother, Kong Lingxia, 50, says she'll regret the decision for the rest of her life. "I feel so angry," she says. "But I'm really angry at myself. How could I let this happen?"
(more)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119393867164279313.html
Chinese pharmacists in the US have generally escaped regulation, under the "dietary supplement" laws, and when the New York City health department investigated some of them, they were selling medicines that were adulterated with lead, Viagra -- you name it. The Chinese pharmaceutical industry sells source material to US companies, but the FDA can't go to China and investigate the manufacturers. As a result, there have been several incidents of people getting sick and dying because Chinese products, whose manufacture the government stayed the hell out of, turned out to be contaminated or deliberately adulterated. The New York Times had a series about that by I think Walt Bogdanich. One batch of children's cough syrup contained antifreeze and killed about 100 children. You want to sue them? The NYT tried to track some of those companies down, and couldn't find them.
I don't think you can find a country in the world that has a successful health care system where the government stays out of it. Very few patients know enough to shop for health care. A doctor has the ultimate high-pressure sales pitch: "You have to do this, or you might die. And you have to do it now." What are you going to do when a doctor tells you that in your 15-minute office visit? Stop and look it up on Google?
For many years, industry organizations, like the tobacco industry, the lead industry, and the chemical industry have hired writers to publish attacks on their critics, and to create what are now known as Astroturf organizations. One of the first people they attacked was Rachel Carson.
You can find out more with a search for the book "Toxic Sludge is Good for You," by Sheldon Rampton. They follow these things better than I do.
I don't know if Rand Simberg got paid by industry groups with a financial stake. If he is, it could come out in a libel suit. He works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Who funds the Competitive Enterprise Institute?
I've edited aerospace papers. I've dealt with a lot of engineers. I have a lot of respect for them. I like them.
Rand Simberg is an engineer. Engineering is very specialized. An engineer, like a scientist, is an expert in his specialty, but he's not an expert outside his specialty. He may be able to design a rocket engine, but that's a lot different from interpreting tree rings.
If someone writes for a newspaper or magazine, he has an editor reviewing what he writes. Editors say things like, "How do you know it's fraud? What's your evidence? He has a lawyer to fall back on for the same reason. A blogger doesn't have any of that. It's easy to slip into libel, I think that's what Simberg did. When a lawyer asks him on the witness stand, "How do you know it's fraud?" we'll see if he has a good answer.
I can't discuss this any further without having the text of the FOIA regulations and rulings in front of me, but FOIA doesn't cover every email and document that a scientist has written, even if he did get federal grants. The courts have realized that scientists need a vigorous, candid internal discussion of their work, and for that reason they've held internal documents confidential and not disclosable under FOIA. Internal discussions are privileged.
Disclosure during a libel suit is much broader than FOIA. The courts can order the parties to disclose anything that will further the interests of justice. Sometimes it's filed under seal, but anything relevant to the case would be disclosed in open court.
I've talked to lawyers about discovery, I've read trial transcripts and I've sat in court during trials. So I know something about discovery.
In one patent case, the lawyers had subpoenaed a chemist's entire 4-drawer file cabinet, digitized it, put it in a database, indexed and reviewed the whole thing, and projected pages in the courtroom.
The First Amendment doesn't protect you from disclosure in a libel suit.
Lawyers tell me that the judge can order both parties -- and people who have nothing to do with the litigation -- to supply them with any information that's "in the interests of justice."
As the Mann complaint details, they were doing more than just stating personal opinion. This is what the libel lawyers call "personal opinion based on underlying facts." People have lost libel suits for saying things like, "In my opinion X is a Communist," even when the person was a public figure. "Communist" is libelous per se.
Steyn and Simberg crossed the line when they accused Mann of "fraud." That's libelous per se.
"Academic and scientific misconduct," if it is an opinion, is an opinion based on claims of underlying fact. "Misconduct" is libelous.
That's libelous even if Mann is a public figure.
After discovery, Mann's lawyers will look through the documents to see if they demonstrate reckless disregard for the truth.
I'd like to see Simberg on the witness stand explain how he came to the conclusion that Mann was guilty of "academic and scientific misconduct."
I know a bit about the writing business that these guys are in. Lots of people in their position take money from industries that are affected by their work. They might get paid $10,000 from the industry to fly out to Nevada to give a speech. A freelance writer might get paid travel expenses to attend a meeting. They're getting money from somewhere, and it would be interesting to know where it is.
Yeah, it's a fishing expedition. Their demand for Mann's documents was a fishing expedition.
I've made FOIA requests and I've argued over deletions. There are huge classes of documents that are exempt from disclosure. When I read an accident report for a medical device, they don't disclose the name of the people who filed the report (so I can't call them to check the facts, or see whether I'm reading two reports of two incidents or two reports of the same incident).
The excuse there is that they're allegedly protecting medical information, something which isn't at stake with Dr. Mann's emails. And if you disagree with that assessment, you can always bring it to court to try to get that withheld information. You might win.
The "medical information" they were protecting didn't involve any confidential patient information. It included the location of the accident, and the reporting institution.
Just because someone's research is funded in part by the government, it doesn't follow that he has an obligation to disclose all his email. The FDA reviews drugs and medical devices all the time. They don't have to disclose all their internal emails. The companies that submit drugs and devices to the FDA don't have to disclose all their emails.
Scientists draw a line between what they're required to disclose in order to support their published conclusions, and internal or private documents that shouldn't be disclosed.
If you run a pizzaria, and a government agency orders a pizza from you, you're a government contractor. But you don't have to disclose your internal email to the world just because you got $15 from the government for a pizza. Same with Mann.
I think there were cases in which really stupid people made statements that they believed were true, but lost libel cases anyway.
It's libelous per se to falsely call somebody a Communist, even if you believe it's true. During the cold war, right-wing groups went around making indiscriminate claims that people were Communists, even though there was no basis to it. For a while they got away with it, but eventually they started losing libel suits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Faulk#Blacklist_controversy
Opinion is privileged and can't be libel, but if opinion is based on underlying facts, those facts can be libelous. For example, If you say, "In my opinion, John Henry Faulk" is a Communist," and he isn't, that's libelous even if you think it's true.
Libel law is a branch of law in which you can't argue deductively. You have to look at the cases and see how they turned out. And the law changes with time, depending on how much of a panic the country is in. I wish I had a legal casebook so I could look over some of the cases to see how they turned out.
Interesting idea. Under that scenario, in order to settle, they would have to give Mann whatever he demands -- cash damages, a retraction, a groveling apology.
Mann could still insist that they disclose their documents as a condition of the settlement. That was one of the conditions of the tobacco industry settlement. http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco
They can be subpoenaed in civil cases too.
I've made FOIA requests and I've argued over deletions. There are huge classes of documents that are exempt from disclosure. When I read an accident report for a medical device, they don't disclose the name of the people who filed the report (so I can't call them to check the facts, or see whether I'm reading two reports of two incidents or two reports of the same incident).
Why don't you make a FOIA request for Sara Palin's emails as Alaska governor? Including her "personal" emails in her AOL account?
Steyn and National Review will also have to disclose documents in discovery. We'll see how they like getting all the facts out.
I don't think too many people here are actually going to read both letters, but saying that somebody committed "fraud" is libel per se, as the complaint charged. It's also libelous to say that a professional acted in a deceptive, incompetent manner.
They said that Mann was "behaving in a most unscientific manner", "engaging in data manipulation", hiding "academic and scientific misconduct." Steyn called Mann "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph."
Yes, Mann would be subject to discovery. So would Simberg, Steyn and the National Review, for all documents relating to their charges against Mann. If any of them had any financial relations with the energy industry, that would come out. If they cut corners anywhere, as they accused Mann of doing, that would come out.
That complaint is a good summary of this dispute. For Mann to win a libel case, he has to show that they wrote things that were false and defamatory, and (since he's a public figure) that they published it with knowledge that it was false or with disregard of whether it was false. It's libelous to accuse somebody of "fraud" or "deception." It's libelous to accuse someone of practicing his profession incompetently. Libel law protects opinions, as opposed to fact, but I think they've crossed the line. I think a jury could decide that they've met that test.
This isn't William Buckley's National Review. I'm familiar with right-wing crackpots from reading the Wall Street Journal comments pages. One of their problems is that they don't particularly concern themselves with facts. They don't even seem to understand what a fact is, or what the difference is between a fact and an opinon. They think that if somebody disagrees with them, he's a "liar." You see people calling Obama a "socialist," a "Kenyan," etc. These are words without meaning. It's like football hooligans screaming insults at Manchester United. Chris Mooney has written about this in his books and articles starting with "The Republican War on Science." I've often reflected on how much of it was actually libelous, if anybody bothered to sue. Now somebody did bother to sue.
Rand Simberg, as quoted starting in paragraph 26 of the complaint, said that Mann was "behaving in a most unscientific manner", "engaging in data manipulation", is hiding "academic and scientific misconduct." In paragraph 28, he called Mann's hockey-stick curve "deceptions" "in the service of politicized science." Steyn called Mann "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph."
In paragraph 31, the complaint says that "their allegations of misconduct and data manipulation were false and were clearly made with the knowledge that they were false." If they can convince the jury of that, they've won the case.
In paragraph 32, the complaint says that Rich Lowry, the editor of NRO, said that Mann's research was "intellectually bogus."
In paragraph 35, the complaint says that the statements "are defamatory per se and tend to injure Dr. Mann in his profession because they falsely impute to Dr. Mann academic corruption, fraud, and deceit as well as the commission of a criminal offense, in a manner injurous tot he reputation and esteem of Dr. Mann professionally, locally, nationally, and globally."
The delicious irony is that in a libel suit, both sides have to disclose huge amounts of documents relating to the case in discovery. Mann's emails were already exposed. Now Simberg and Steyn's correspondence will probably be exposed. If they were taking money from the energy industry, that will be exposed. They'll get the same treatment Mann did.
Really? Many people have responded to a beating with a shooting without spending 20 years in jail.
Yes, but many people have. The legal system isn't perfect, and isn't even reliable. I've seen evidence that about 1/3 of civil cases are wrongly decided. Once you go into court, you're throwing the dice. Guilty people go free and innocent people are convicted.
In fact, once you shoot somebody, even if you think it's self-defense, you're throwing the dice.
And of course the costs of defending yourself in a criminal trial are enough to consume all the assets of most middle-class people.
Straw man. Nobody in the American political discourse has proposed a standard of "no deadly force in self defense no matter what". Name one. There are absolute pacifists, but they've never been elected to office.
If I'm getting seriously beaten up, I can never tell if the other guy is going to kill me.
That's right. If you're getting beaten up, you're not in a good position to tell whether deadly force is justified. If you use deadly force, you're liable to wind up with a 20-year sentence for homicide. Or you're liable to lose all your assets in a civil suit. That's my point.
I don't trust you to make a rational decision in the heat of the moment. You're going to kill someone who never would have killed you. I want to prevent you from carrying handguns around, if possible.
Citation needed. One example doesn't make "most".
I just gave you one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori There are many others. There are handgun-control web sites where law students have compiled long lists of such cases.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has had lots of articles on handguns, given lots of data, and refuted the books defending handguns. One of the statistics I remember from JAMA is that more people use a handgun to commit suicide than to defend themselves.
I don't.
If people who go around [beating] other people with their fists get killed by those people, that's all right with me.
People get into fights. It's hard to tell afterwards who was "responsible." Often the person who started the fight is the one with the gun, and kills the other person.
If you take the gun out of the situation, the victim doesn't get killed. If you put the gun back into the situation, the victim does get killed. I think that the victim gets killed more often than the aggressor. For that reason, I would restrict the possession of guns. Of course the NRA won't let that happen. So we have to accept innocent people getting killed.
I'm looking it from
That's not your option. The law has to restrict people from shooting other people. Any law has to come down to allowing one person to kill another person only when the shooter had a "reasonable" belief that he was in danger of death or serious bodily injury.
You can never tell when you kill the other guy that the legal system is going to decide that your killing was "reasonable." In most of these killings, the shooter really wasn't in danger of death or serious bodily injury. The killing was usually motivated by fear, anger or stupidity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori . After the victim is dead, the shooter is facing a homicide charge.
People get into fights all the time. They seldom get killed in fistfights. Put a gun in the situation, and people will get killed.
You're looking at it from the perspective of the shooter.
I'm looking at it from the perspective of the innocent citizen who might get shot by mistake, or because some guy got mad at me. It won't do me much good to have you tearfully tell my survivors that you're sorry. I'll be dead.
You'll be facing criminal and civil charges (although thanks to the NRA, you may get off).