But anyway, that whole Bloomberg situation aside, what was really interesting about this episode was when John Lott Jr., author of "More Guns, Less Violence", showed up as a guest to debate gun control. As you can probably guess from the title of his book, John believes if more people carry guns, there will be less violence because everyone will be afraid of everyone else shooting back. I will refer to the movie's Tombstone, The Quick and the Dead, and Wild Wild West as evidence that this type of situation won't work, but that's a topic for another day. Instead, what I would like to shed light on is the evidence that suggests this WOULD work. Ready? Here it comes...BAM - there is none. Instead, John's focus is on evidence that gun control (i.e. making it harder for someone to own a gun in the states) DOESN'T work. Importantly, even if he proves this, he's not proving that more guns will equal less violence. He's merely highlighting the fact that new measures need to be taken to ensure that guns (and bullets for that matter) need to be harder to access. So really, these people are in agreement, based on the evidence of John and the Opinion's of Piers and his debater colleague.
Of course, being Piers Morgan, it was more of an attack on John than an actual debate, which is a pity because I would have genuinely been interested in John's response to what the fellow debater had said when he referred to Johns research as "Junk Science". Unfortunately, Piers didn't let him explain it in full. Essentially, his evidence is that in the year 1900, there were 2 gun-related murders in London, England. In the year 2000 (or somewhere near it) there were 39 murders in London. John is saying that within that 100 year span, gun control laws and policies were implemented, yet it still didn't stop the increase in gun related murders. The same types of trends exist all around the world, allowing John to draw the conclusion that gun control policies and measures actually increase gun violence. He then takes that conclusion, and goes one step further stating that if there was less gun control measures, and more people carried guns, everyone would be safer. The general example would be the Colorado shooting, where the shooter could have been shot down after a few shots if everyone in the front row had a gun. Of course, the counter point to this could be the reality that the killer was wearing a bullet proof vest, or the theory that if everyone starts shooting at him your bound to get a few innocent victims. (In other words, gun related murders may decrease, but gun related deaths would not). But all that is beside the point, because the conclusion John is making isn't a conclusion, it's an opinion based on a conclusion he made from his previous evidence.
On top of this, clearly, this is faulty evidence John is providing. It ignores a growth in population, a shift in culture, an advancement in gun technology, the ease in which guns can be illegally attained, and probably about 100 other reasons that would contribute to an increase in gun related murders. Essentially, it is exactly as the other person called it, Junk Science. You can't draw a conclusion by simply ignoring every contributing variable but the one that proves your point, that's not how science works. And I would have been really interested to the rebuttal, but that idiot Piers decided his viewers would be more interested in him instead repeating "What do you say to the Victims of the Colorado shootings parents when you defend gun control?". Instead of allowing John to defend his insane theory, Piers made it personal. What an idiot.
On deck tonight (though I'll regrettably miss it - I only fit in about 2 or 3 episodes of Piers a year): Michael Moore. No surprise here, Moore turns a national tragedy into an opportunity for him to waddle into relevance again. My guess, he'll make it political.
Arriving in Torona, Adios Blogosphere
