Scientia est potentia

Like many people, I have a soft spot for ideology. I have many dearly held beliefs of my own, which are both aesthetically appealing to me and confirmed by my personal experiences. That said, nothing is more frustrating than running up against the brick wall of absolute immutable beliefs in a debate about concrete issues. I love to talk philosophy, but I prefer to do it openly, not in a kind of sociopolitical proxy war with someone who pushes a certain policy for ideological reasons yet insists on hiding behind an appeal to practical good. It’s nothing short of intellectual dishonesty; a feeble attempt to prop up an argument which cannot stand on it’s own merits by shrouding it in politically charged smoke and mirrors.

This is all leading up to Elizabeth Mandelman (seen at right). In short, Elizabeth is a gun control advocate. I encourage you to read her detailed bio at her own site before proceeding. Now, most people that I meet either favour or are ambivalent about such gun control measures as the firearms registry, magazine capacity restrictions, storage requirements and so forth. They generally don’t know much about them, and when they do learn about them, continue to favour them. From here they fall into three groups:

1. People who are concerned about public safety
2. People who have a negative emotional response to lethal weapons
3. People who have an ideological objection to private citizens having the right to self-defense, ergo, the right to own and use whatever tools are necessary for that purpose.

Now, none of those is a deal-breaker for me. If people are concerned about public safety there are mountains of data that I can show them which all point to private firearms ownership having no positive causal relationship to violent crime. I can rebut the same tired old statistic that Elizabeth and her supporters have been using for 15 years in about 2 seconds (I can even do it without speaking). If people have emotional issues with firearms some education is usually all that is needed to resolve their fears. Even the third group can be game for an interesting philosophical debate.

Where I run into a problem is when people of group #3 masquerade as group #1 – this is Elizabeth I’m talking about now – because they know that their radical ideology is totally unplatable to the voting public and indeed most human beings. Self-preservation has been bred into us as a fact of biology, making it perhaps the only true natural right. You can’t attack it directly, so instead people like Elizabeth use smoke screens like domestic violence and mental health issues to strike at the tools needed to exercise that ever-so-crucial right.

I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I have found most people that I disagree with to be quite reasonable and open to discussion. Hardcore ideologues, however, are just like annoying little robots. You can yell at them all day but they just don’t speak your language. When Elizabeth first started blogging about Canadian gun laws, I was eager to help her understand this complex mess and correct some of the factual errors in her postings. I honestly hoped that she was an average concerned citizen, not just another gun grabber who can’t be reasoned with.

I was disappointed.

She ignored the corrections of her factual errors, she continued to repeat misleading statistics, she ignored calls to cite sources for some of her most damaging stats, and at every step of the way showed us that without a doubt, she absolutely does not care about public safety. She knows all the answers, and just wants to bend whatever facts she finds to support those preconceived notions. Let me explain how I came to this conclusion.

Elizabeth is pursuing a Master’s degree in public policy, but she would do well to take first-year engineering design. There I learned how to identify and frame problems, and then evaluate solutions. As my professor said, framing is everything. If the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s easy to see a world full of nails. Elizabeth claims to be addressing domestic violence – a complex social problem. It has many components: the social stigma of abuse that prevents victims from coming forward; the natural physical advantage that men have over women; and the historical disparity in economic power between men and women, which makes it difficult for women to leave an abusive home and still provide for themselves and their children. Think of it like a complex puzzle. Gun control is one of the big hammers of prohibition, and Elizabeth is slamming it all over this delicate problem. Instead of taking an intellectually honest approach and looking at individual pieces of the problem, identifying their relationship to the behaviour we want to combat, coming up with broad but detailed metrics with which to evaluate solutions, and then determining the best course of action, Elizabeth has gone through the design process in reverse. She decided that guns need to be controlled, then moved backward to establish her metrics, picking illogical ones that have no connection to stated problem (e.g. she focuses on guns only and ignores that taking a gun out of an abuser’s hands doesn’t make them into a loving husband but taking an abuser out of the home makes it safe no matter which tools reside there), and thus framed the problem in a way that suggests – no, demands – the solution she had in mind to begin with.

Designing in reverse, my professor said, can work. The difficulty with it is that while you do get something that works and solves some problem, it’s usually not the one you set out to fix. Gun control is a perfect example of this – it does work, just not at reducing violence. What it does perfectly is the objective that ideologues don’t dare to mention openly – civilian disarmament and abolition of the right to self-defense that must necessarily ensue.

I find it disgusting that people like Elizabeth choose to hide behind important issues like domestic abuse because they are too afraid to put their real agenda out for everyone to see. People are dying and you’re distracting from the real causes of domestic abuse because those don’t fit in so nicely with your ideology. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

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