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Monday, April 24, 2017

April 24, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Armed Victim Absolutely WRECKS Carjacker"--Active Self Protection (3 min.)

Firearms and Self-Defense:
       Getting back to the point of this, the comments to the TTAG article are mostly negative, suggesting that Wilson is a closet anti-gunner. But, from a purely statistical point of view, Wilson is correct. (Of course, from a purely statistical point of view, police officers would equally be served with a revolver). The problem is that the bare statistic doesn't tell us as much as we would like: for instance, without knowing the standard deviation, we don't know how probable is a high round count. For instance, if the mean was 2 (which is apparently the average for the number of shots fired by civilian in armed encounters), a standard deviation of 0.5 would tell us that nearly 70% of gun fights would be 3 rounds or less. In fact, over 99% of gun fights would be 3 rounds or less. However, if the standard deviation was 1.5, that means that we could reasonably expect that a gun fight might go as high as 4 rounds, and, more importantly, that there would still be a significant chance of being involved in a gun fight in which 6 rounds would be fired by the defender. 
       Moreover, this assumes a standard distribution. But there is no guarantee that gun fights follow a standard distribution. In a 2012 article from Guns Save Lives entitled "Analysis of Five Years of Armed Encounters (With Data Tables)," it notes that: 
The average and median number of shots fired was 2. When more than 2 shots were fired, it generally appeared that the defender’s initial response was to fire until empty. It appears that revolver shooters are more likely to empty their guns than autoloader shooters. (Underline added)
       The number of shots fired does not necessarily equal the number needed. For instance, an unknown number of people probably fired until empty because they panicked or had trained themselves to shoot until the target was down. 
         And the number to end an encounter (because someone runs off) is not the same as stopping a determined attacker, or multiple attackers. (Interestingly, the article notes that reloading was very rare; and that one of the few occasions a reload was required was someone that used a .32 revolver to kill a lion!) 
        In short, magazine capacity is not as important to the civilian defensive shooter as other factors (e.g., access to a weapon, willingness to use a weapon, etc.). The take away is not that you should necessarily carry a small revolver, but that if you choose to do so, it will probably be sufficient if you should have to defend yourself. 
  • Related: "Self Defense Findings"--The Thinking Gunfighter. Another article discussing the study referenced in the Guns Save Lives article. 


Other Stuff:
      The Venezuelan opposition just staged a massive protest against the government, which the government repressed with military force, leading to at least three deaths, The New York Times reports. Detained opposition activists say the authorities tortured them, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, across the country, people are starving.
          Venezuela, a beautiful, oil-rich country, once one of the wealthiest nations in the Southern Hemisphere, is only sinking further into economic devastation and chaotic, corrupt authoritarianism. ... 
            Meanwhile, the economy keeps rotting. Venezuela has topped Bloomberg's Economic Misery Index, a benchmark whose title is self-explanatory, for three years running. The economy shrank by 18 percent last year, with unemployment at 25 percent, and inflation slated to be 750 percent this year and 2,000 percent the next, according to the International Monetary Fund (Venezuelan government statistics are, of course, made up, so third-party figures are more reliable).
                But it's other statistics that show the real extent of the misery, and make one's stomach truly churn. Over the past year, 74 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of nearly 20 pounds each, reports The Economist. The military controls the country's food supply, and the result is widespread malnourishment and, of course, corruption. Venezuela's hospitals have more in common with those in Aleppo than with those of an oil-rich, emerging economy. As the Guardian reported last year, children are suffering from malnourishment for the first time in the country's modern history; there are outbreaks of scabies, a disease easily prevented with basic hygienic practices; hospitals are running out of even basic drugs. Caracas is the murder capital of the world. Corruption has infected the country wholesale even as it has created a new class of kleptocratic oligarchs linked to the security services.
        • Related: "Bread Riots in Caracas as Venezuela Protests Escalate"--American Interest. In a great understatement, the author notes that "bread riots that see violent pillaging of bakeries while looters scream that they’re hungry are not typically a good sign for a government."
        • Diversity is our strength: "BART takeover robbery: 40 to 60 teens swarm train, hold up riders"--San Francisco Chronicle. Authorities refuse to release video of the incident, ostensibly because the raiders are minors. In a civilized era, such a raid would have resulted in a punitive military expedition into the tribal areas.
        • "Doctor accused of mutilating genitals of young girls defends procedure as religious practice"--Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that religious freedom only extends to beliefs, not practices. Obama even said the same while president. Of course, that was considering the practices of Christians. There may be a different rule for Muslims.
        • They will defend their right to virtue signal even till your death: "Providence Passes Ordinance Welcoming Gang Members To Their City…"--Weasel Zippers. The Providence, Rhode Island, city council passed a law that purports to reduce racial profiling, but will do nothing but tie the hands of police. 
        • "Will Islam Inherit the Earth?"--The Daily Beast.  Pew Research reports that babies born to Muslims will begin to outnumber Christian births by 2035. According to the report, "between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslims made up an estimated 31 percent of all babies born around the world — far exceeding the Muslim share of people of all ages in 2015 (24 percent)." The Daily Beast author is obviously pleased by this, but he overlooks a couple other relevant findings from the study: (1) "In recent years, 33% of the world’s babies were born to Christians, which is slightly greater than the Christian share of the world’s population in 2015 (31%)," and (2) those who belong to no religion face a birth dearth. Notably, the largest source of increased Muslim and Christian births is the same: sub-Saharan Africa.
        • Nothing. "What Christianity and Islam have in common"--The Tennessean. I included this article because it presents a common erroneous argument for the equivalence of the two religions. Basically, the author takes the position that because Islam venerates certain Biblical persons, the two religions are, at heart, the same. Of course, Islam categorically denies the divinity of Christ, which sets the two religions at odds. The militancy and violence inherent in Islam is just frosting on the cake. The author also, dishonestly, maintains that Islam protects religious minorities. I'm sure that the large Christian populations throughout the Middle-East would agree if they hadn't been slaughtered over the centuries.
                In short, r-strategists cannot be united with others. They can only be either destroyed, or they can fill enough mass graves to kill all their enemies and make everyone left submit before them. They will never live in peace alongside their fellow Americans. As we try to live in peace alongside them today, you see what happens. If we even gather someplace to talk they will descend on it to try to disperse us with violence. The fact we never raided a Bernie rally, or threw explosive devices outside a speech by Elizabeth Warren means nothing to them. They violently demand subservience of our peaceful people, as they call us fascist.
                   The reason I think Civil War may be likely is two fold. One, the r-strategists will engage in violence in proportion with the degree to which a society has gone r. If a society is completely K-ified, the r’s will be completely peaceful. If the society has gone completely r, then it should prepare for the mass graves to begin filling up, first from violence, then from shortage.
                    The second reason I think this path may be leading to civil war is that I am not sure any society has gone as r-selected as we have. I do not think anyone saw “Caitlyn Jenners” in the French Revolution, let alone had them being hailed by the media for posing naked in some magazine shoot as they pined for a “boy toy” to play sugar mommy to. This is a period of psychological r-selection, probably facilitated by our massive technology-fueled dopamine overload, the likes of which history has never seen. If the rise of r causes a proportional level of mortality, and we already have had mass mortality events we cannot imagine under lesser periods of r without the trannies, what awaits us today?
                       Given the degree of r-selection, and the fact that it seems directly proportional to how much violence the left will produce, this may be the biggest bloodletting in all of history. And that ignores the amount of diversity the r-strategists have imported which will produce even more conflict once the free-resource spigot closes.
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