On Nashville

In one of those grotesque coincidences that give rise to conspiracy theories, yesterday the major regime newspapers -- the Washington Post and the New York Times -- both had leading stories aimed at trying to gin up support for a gun ban. The Post in particular went with a full court press yesterday, with three different stories on the front page of the website aimed at especially AR-15-style rifles. These were portrayed as having always been intended by their designers for a military audience only, with evil profit-seeking capitalism in the gun industry driving their popularity with civilians. 

An admission against interest made in the Post: as many as 1 in 20 Americans owns an AR-15, meaning that there are fully 16 million such rifles in private hands. Unmentioned, but just as important, is that rifles of all kinds including these account for almost none of the gun violence in America statistically. These rifles aren't the problem: there are too many of them accounting for almost none of the violence. (Those numbers also mean that restrictions on them are presumptively unconstitutional under Bruen.)

The NYT had an extensive photo spread with moving quotes from the people included in the artful photography, talking about the psychological stress that 'the problem of gun violence' brought to their lives. The quotes showed that these people are mostly stressed about the potential for mass shootings. Not admitted by the article: mass shootings account for almost none of the gun violence in the United States statistically. The psychological stress is mostly being created by the media: almost all of the actual gun violence in America is committed with illegally-possessed handguns, and occurs in only a small number of neighborhoods in a few cities nationwide. The numbers are clear: America is a safe country. It has a few bad neighborhoods. 

What a conspiracist will grab upon is the timing of that full-court media press coupled with a mass shooting happening later that same day, carried out by what looks like a likely left-wing agitator (indeed an assassin, perhaps on the model of the anarchists who killed Archduke Ferdinand as a method of compelling political change). 

Even the press is grudgingly admitting that a likely motive seems to be opposition to Tennessee's legislation on what the unnamed movement likes to call "gender-affirming care." 

The most immediately striking fact about yesterday's violence, though, is that it was carried out by a biological female. That almost never happens. Just as mass shootings are a statistical anomaly in the field of gun violence, and rifle shootings are a statistical anomaly in a field of all homicides, murders -- let alone mass murders -- by females are very rare. This is like lightning striking three times.

What strikes me as a probable lane of inquiry is the use of testosterone 'hormone therapy' as an aggravating factor. The difference between the female murder rate and the male murder rate probably has something to do with the presence of this hormone at vastly higher rates in males; adding injections of it to a biological female may well be associated with an increased aggressive violence rate. In other words, the 'gender affirming care' looks like a probable suspect, at least an aggravating factor.

We know for sure that we'll be hearing plenty of inquiries into the other two statistical anomalies because they are the favored hobby horse of the government and media, as a way of trying to restrict an American right they despise. The other one? It looks like the media would like to "correct his pronouns," which is perhaps not merely about political correctness: perhaps it's about burying the issue of hormone therapy by hiding the statistical anomaly. 

UPDATE: The shooter was apparently receiving "mental health treatment," which could mean a lot of different things. Treatment for gender dysphoria is one such treatment, one that often involves hormones. Did it here? How safe is it to inject hormones not to replace ones that have declined with age, injury, or disease, but to add new ones that the body never generated at similar scales on its own? These are the sorts of questions that ought to be asked here.

4 comments:

J Melcher said...

The furor I experienced in my youth over the sort of firearm labeled "Saturday Night Specials" has completely disappeared from the discussion. Why is that, I wonder?

Grim said...

That's a good question. Illegally owned and carried handguns, cheaply bought on the street, are the cause of most of the gun related homicides. That's what the term meant, and it's still by the numbers the most destructive of all firearms.

J Melcher said...

On the other hand, I do notice a disproportionate furor over "ghost guns" -- which I take to include "zip guns", firearms made with CNC or 3D printing technology, and anything cooked up or cobbled together from recipe sites:

https://thehomegunsmith.com

I notice my noticing is disproportionate -- while I notice fearful talk about ghost guns I hardly ever notice their use in school shootings, drive-by executions, bank robberies, domestic disputes, home invasions...

Grim said...

I think that the "ghost guns" language is also being used by police and politicians to refer to guns where the serial number was just filed off. There's no other explanation for the disproportionate explosion in such guns being reported found by police; 3D printing of firearms isn't nearly that good nor that common yet.