The Problem With Statistics

Anti-gun folks: “We have the highest rate of gun violence in the industrialized world.”  This isn’t actually true; we have the highest rate of gun violence (the definition of which includes suicides, justified homicides and gang-on-gang violence, as well as homicides) among European and North-American countries.  Some other industrialized countries have higher rates.  I’m sure the liberals weren’t implying that people who don’t live in Europe and North America are less somehow less important than ethnic European nations?  But that’s not the problem with statistics.

I digress; to continue:  Gun folks: “Places with easier access to firearms, concealed carry and/or constitutional carry, have successfully reduced their violent crime rates because the criminals are scared.”  I think that’s probably true, though how statistically significant, correlated or causal such a relationship is to guns may be debatable.  But that’s not the problem with statistics either.

The problem with statistics when it comes to gun violence is that the problem set is not what we think it is.  Both sides argue from good public policy approaches, which are typically based on statistics and utilitarian ethics of doing the most good for the most people.  It’s public policy based on the Greek idea of Logos (logic) and the Utilitarian Ethics of increasing greater good for the many, as evidenced by statistical data.  Politicians look at the nation as the data set for making public policy for crime rates and gun violence, and a whole host of everything else imaginable from nuclear missiles to how many trees to allow to be chopped down in any given forest.  And that is the problem with statistics.

Violence has a data set of one.  Life is a binary state, not a statistical proportion.  There is no such thing as a person who is 72.3% alive or 54.7% dead.  So in matters of life and death, statistics are irrelevant.  It matters not to the murder victim what is the homicide rate.  In a life or death encounter, one hundred percent of your life is on the line, not a proportion of it.  Therefore, any statistical representation of violence, while perhaps informative to social scientists, is not an accurate representation of the true nature of it.  When somebody is trying to kill you, it’s a zero-sum game, you 100% live or you 100% don’t.  It’s a binary state of 1’s and 0’s: 1, the switch is on, I’m alive; 0, the switch is off, I’m not.  There are no proportional statistics or extrapolations to larger populations to be gleaned from such a data set.  To put it more plainly, as Stanley Kubrick did, “The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.”  Statistics of a sample size of one are not very productive.

Violence, especially criminal violence, is personal, not proportional.  Life is a binary state: you either are alive or not.  When somebody has a knife to your throat in an alley in the statistically “safest” neighborhood in America, that statistic is irrelevant and dangerously absurd.  It lures people into a false sense of confidence about their surroundings, for one thing, but for another, most violence in America is what Tim Larkin calls a “black swan event.”  It’s not that it is rare; it’s that it is a rare event in the life of any one single person.  Even in high crime areas like Detroit and Chicago, ordinary people—who are not making their livings off of violence (on either side of the law)—encounter personal violence pretty rarely.  While they probably encounter it more frequently than a guy living in the woods in Montana, it is still a “black swan event” in their lives.  If it wasn’t rare, people would not suffer from PTSD from violent crimes.  It would be a normal part of their lives, not a trauma.  We do not get traumatized by ordinary events. 

Which of course makes it all that much worse; I’m not trying to diminish the effect of interpersonal violence.  On the contrary, I’m trying to say it is far worse than statistics can reflect, especially homicide, because to the victim of a violent crime, the crime rate is 100%.  And that is what statistics cannot get right.  Statistical representations of gang members per hundred thousand people in Chicago, does not represent violence.  Homicides per hundred thousand people in Baltimore, does not represent violence.  Homicides per ONE PERSON laying on the street with multiple gunshot wounds in the chest, bleeding out…that is violence.  And no amount of math can prepare you for it or protect you from it.

Legislators who believe they can bring the statistics down totally miss the point of interpersonal violence.  I understand their intentions and do not fault them for it one either the Left or the Right; they are trying to make good public policy using numeric data and Logos.  But violence has NOTHING to do with Logos.  It is entirely about Pathos: rhetoric and policy designed to appeal to the emotions of the audience and elicit feelings that already reside within an audience.  Violence is not logical, and thus not statistical, it is deadly (zero-sum) and thus emotional.  People are afraid of violence, regardless of the statistics, and no data analysis will ever change that fear.  Second Amendment advocates often come off as illogical because they talk about freedom and tyranny, ignoring any statistical data presented to them, because freedom is emotional (Pathos)!  In statistical samples of one, any murder rate is unacceptable, and thus people want the ability to protect themselves, and you can “Molon Labe, get the heck right outta my country, or try to pry it from my cold, dead hands!!!”  Harumph!

The issue is not statistical.  It is not even about guns.  It’s about violence, fear of violence, fear of death, the ability to deal death with seeming impunity in some communities.  It is about FEELING terrorized in our own towns.  We are mortal, and as long as we are mortal, evil people can use our mortality to coerce us, or they can implement our mortality for their own evil purposes.  There is no statistical solution to that.  Logos and equations do not apply to a sample size of one with a knife against your throat.  Only another policy of Pathos can solve this problem: bravery.  The only thing that can defeat terror is courage.  You can’t legislate it, but you can EDUCATE it; you can’t sample it in a survey, you have to train it into hearts and minds and an ethos of a society.  The solution to predators is being impossible prey:

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Soule
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