Year: 2009

Accidental death statistics someone sent me are interesting, mostly because it gives total lifetime odds.  You have higher lifetime odds of accidental death from the following sources more than guns (which are 1:5981):

• Drowning in a swimming pool (1:5501)
• Drowning in a lake or other natural water (1:2384)
• Being struck by or striking against an object (1:4555)
• Contact with machinery (1:5189)
• All types of falls, including falling from furniture (1:4238)
• Plane crash or spacecraft explosion (1:5862)
• ATV accident (1:3579)
• Being a pedestrian (1:623)

It’s not an excuse to get lax about safe gun handling or education, but in the realm of ways to die accidentally, guns are not a problem. When you consider how many households have a gun in them, it’s really not a problem. Fewer houses have swimming pools, and overall lifetime odds of dying from a swimming pool are more than guns, and this is whether you own a pool or a gun or not.

When we talk lifetime odds of being killed by criminal action rise to 1:207, which is roughly on par with a lot of transport accidents. Yet someone who wears a seat belt is sensible, and someone who carries a gun is crazy.

Marketing guru Seth Godin has some useful thoughts that could be applied to our issue:

If they only thought like you, of course, and knew what you know, then there wouldn’t be a problem.

The challenge doesn’t lie in getting them to know what you know. It won’t help. The challenge lies in helping them see your idea through their lens, not yours. If you study the way religions and political movements spread, you can see that this is exactly how it works. Marketers of successful ideas rarely market the facts. Instead, they market stories that match the worldview of the people being marketed to.

RTWT. That’s why we have to think very carefully about messaging. Lots of people got angry at NRA for “enforce the laws on the books,” who in my opinion were falling victim to this kind of problem when it comes to marketing ideas. Most people do not have a constitution theory on gun rights. They might say they support the Second Amendment, and in some form they do, but they don’t really have a strong theory about it. You’re not going to get them to think too hard about it either, because they really just don’t give a shit. There’s two ways to deal with that, one productive and the other unproductive. The unproductive way is to just get angry with them, and write them off as stupid fools. The productive one is, as Godin says, making arguments “that match the worldview of the people being marketed to.”  That doesn’t have to mean sacrificing our constitutional theories, but it does mean having to use language and arguments that ordinary people can relate to. That helps suck energy from our opponents’ world view, and make it less appealing, which does have real value.

GOA was really the one to raise the alarm about the Health Care Bill, but Politico reports it’s been fixed regardless. I suppose that’s a positive development, since it looks like Harry Reid managed to buy off Ben Nelson and Lieberman, giving him the 60 needed votes.

Dave Kopel has a new law review coming out on the subject. This is something we’ve talked about here too in regards to the history of the Pennsylvania constitution, where successive constitutional conventions have preserved the right intact.