While Gun Deaths Decline and Schools Remain Safe, Americans Flip Out

May 9th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Moral Values | Politics - (1 Comments)

The National Rifle Association has been using the death of a small number of children to try and mandate the use of armed guards in every school across the country. Not coincidentally for a group funded by gun manufacturers, that would require school districts everywhere to buy a large number of guns. But is such a measure called for?

Not according to a new report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics this week. Confirming earlier studies, the BJS finds that more than 98% of the killings of young people happen outside of school, despite the fact that children spend so much time in school. Expanding on this finding to non-fatal violence, the BJS finds that from 2007-2011 (the last year for which full data is available), more than 99% of gun-related violence occurs outside of school. Schools are already safe.

Furthermore, as both the BJS report and another report released this week by Pew Research show, the rate of crimes committed with guns is sharply lower over the last 20 years. But that’s not what Americans think is going on. In a representative poll of Americans conducted by Pew, 56% of respondents said they thought that the rate of crimes committed with guns had gone up over the past 20 years. 26% of respondents said they thought the rate of gun crime had stayed the same over the past 20 years. Only 12% of respondents answered correctly, that gun crime has fallen over the past 20 years.

Americans are freaking out about school safety and freaking out about gun violence. In neither case is the panic supported by facts.

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Picture of a Panic: Fear of Crime and Actual Crime

April 10th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity - (1 Comments)

The Gallup Poll does a great job of juxtaposing two trends. On the one hand, we have Americans who are consistently convinced each year that crime has worsened compared to the year before:

Gallup poll question: Is there more crime in the U.S. than a year ago, or less?

And on the other hand, we have actual crime report data from the Department of Justice, which shows that violent crime has been falling year after year:

Uniform Crime Report Data shows Violent Crime Fall

The property crime rate is falling too, by the way.

We’re safe.
We’re panicking.
Cut it out.

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Infographic: What They’re Saying about the Obama Microchip Consipracy Hoax

January 28th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Barack Obama | Legislation | Media | Politics | Tech - (4 Comments)

Last week, F.G. Fitzer debunked yet another conspiracy theory being spread about Barack Obama. According to rumors spreading in right-wing and libertarian circles, there is a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) that will force Americans to have government-trackable rfid microchips implanted under their skin.

Even a few lower-quality newspapers have been used to help spread the hoax. The Chattanoogan, for instance, features the supposed text in the Obamacare law:

The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the ‘registry’) to facilitate analysis of postmarket safety and outcomes data on each device that— ‘‘(A) is or has been used in or on a patient; ‘‘(B)and is— ‘‘(i) a class III device; or ‘‘(ii) a class II device that is implantable, life-supporting, or life-sustaining.”

And Patriot Update” declares that, because of this supposed text, “the Obama Health Care Bill will require all U.S. citizens and babies to receive a microchip or Medchip by March 23, 2013.”

That’s all utter nonsense, of course. As F.G. noted last week, a simple search of the text of the Obamacare law reveals that the supposed language just isn’t there. There’s nothing about medical device tracking in the law, there’s nothing about the date March 23, 2013 in the law, and the only tracking described by the law is a new complaint tracking system to make sure that patient complaints about poor care are followed up on and resolved to the patient’s satisfaction.

Regardless of the fact that the “Obamacare Microchip” conspiracy is a falsehood, a hoax, a confabulation and utter hogwash, it’s still useful to pay attention to such stories. The most important reason, of course, is to counter a false claim. But just as importantly, the shape of the forced-implantation story reveals something about the mental map of the people who find it so believable that they pass it on to their friends, neighbors and acquaintances in indignant, angry tones.

To try to sketch out what’s on the mind of those who spread the Obama microchip hoax, I’ve taken the text of all the Twitter posts (“Tweets”) in the last week that discuss the idea of the Obama Microchip. From this accumulated text, I’ve drawn out the network of all word pairs occurring at least twice (ignoring common structural words like “a,” “the,” “if,” “of,” “or,” “and,” and “but”). That network, with most-used terms in fiery red and least-used terms in deep blue, appears below:

The Language of Conspiracy: Network of Word Pairs used in Tweets spreading the Obama Microchip Conspiracy Hoax, January 21-28 2013

Immediately notable is the bilingual nature of this network; the rumor is being spread in non-English-speaking as well as English-speaking circles. The language of obligation, force, and requirement is heavy. Notions that a tracking microchip are part of a globalist conspiracy, and an idea that somehow a court is weighing in, add more layers to the story, layers that are believable enough to some to spread the story onward, as if it were true. Realists can be comforted by the occasional use of the webword “lol.” Better to laugh than to cry.

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Study: American Whites (Inaccurately) Perceive Crime Danger based on the Blackness of a Neighborhood

January 4th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | Science - (6 Comments)

In the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager report on results of a national two-stage survey. In the first stage of a survey, respondents — some of them white and some of them not — are asked to share their zip code and their estimate of the chance that they will be a victim of burglary or robbery over the following year. A year later, the survey followed up and asked the same people whether they had actually been a victim of burglary or robbery during that year.

Because the survey asked for respondents’ zip codes, it was possible for Quillian and Pager to find out all sorts of things about the area in which respondents lived, including the area’s poverty rate, per capita income, population density, housing vacancy rate — and most centrally, the share of residents in the area who identify as Black or African-American.

The following figure from Quillian and Pager’s article is a graphic summary of a multivariate analysis in which they find that (when controlling for the other characteristics of an area listed above) the percentage of Black people living in an area has no statistically significant effect on the actual crime experienced by white or non-white people.

Figure 3 from Quillian and Pager 2010 in Social Psychology Quarterly

What does the percentage of Black people living in an area influence? White people’s perception of the likelihood that they will be victims of crime — a perception that is wildly inflated above the actual risk.

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In the 631 Days Since National Terrorism Advisory System Started, Not One Terrorist Alert

December 28th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | Politics - (0 Comments)

Under the old color-coded “Terrorism Alert” system, there was always an “elevated” risk of terrorist attack, kind of like Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. But starting on April 7 2011 a new system was put in place in which the United States Government would put away its general colors and instead issue particular alerts when particular terrorist threats arose. The United States Government would make a Facebook post of its alert here. The government would issue a Tweet here. All current and archived alerts would be posted to this web page.

As you can see at each one of those locations, in the entire 631 days since the new National Terrorism Advisory System was put in place there has not been a single alert posted.

Keep this in mind as the U.S. Senate votes today to strip you of your constitutional freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. The Senate says it has to do this in order to save you from the terrorist attacks… that don’t exist.

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School Shootings are Less Likely than Asteroid Hits. No, You Don’t Have to Scare Your Kids.

December 17th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | Media - (3 Comments)

When I picked up the Bangor Daily News this morning, I read columnist Sarah Smiley insisting that she “had to tell” her children about last week’s school shooting incident in Newtown, Connecticut. Adults absolutely have the right to feel the way they want to feel about the shootings in Connecticut. But do we “have” to tell our kids? “Have” to make them cry? “Have” to make them scared and change the way they see the world? No, we don’t, because our children are not at a significant risk.

Look at the statistics, the actual numbers describing how incredibly rare violent school deaths are. See this table from the National Center for Education Statistics for context. Since the statistics started to be tracked in 1992, there has not been a single year in which the number violent school deaths have risen to even 40 for the whole nation.

Number of Homicides at School, 1992-2010

The death of 40, 30, 20, 10 or 2 children is indisputably sad. But in-school violent deaths are very, very rare. Compare those numbers to the number of children killed outside of school:

Number of Homicides In and Out of School, 1992-2010

Consider how many school-aged children there are in the USA — about 53.9 million in 2009-2010, according to the Census Bureau. Now do the math. In the most recent year with available data, 2009-2010, 17 children died of school violence in the USA. That’s about 3 deaths for every 10 million children: a 0.00003% probability for any one child. Let’s imagine that the 20 slain children in Newtown are unusual, bringing the typical 20 or so violent school deaths of children per year to 40 for 2012. That would raise the share to about 7 deaths for every 10 million children: a 0.00007% probability for any one child.

U.S. Homicides In and Out of School, Compared to the U.S. School-Age Population, 1992-2010

There is no reason to make a child cry in fear over an event that has a 0.00003% to 0.00007% probability of happening to them. Disagree? Then you’d better warn your kids about asteroid 2012 VE77, which according to NASA scientists has a 0.0009% probability of smacking into the Earth between 2033 and 2035. Let’s be realistic — you are not going to weep in bed and then go tell your kids about the asteroid and make them cry. So why should you weep in bed and then go tell your kids about another risk that is even more remote?

You have the right to feel the way you want to feel. You have the right to scare your children if you feel like scaring them. But no, there is no reasonable sense in which you “have to” scare them in order to be a responsible parent. It’s unfortunate that Smiley suggests otherwise.

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New Kid Danger: Squishy, Bubbling Feet

May 25th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Media - (0 Comments)

Those pretty, teeny, tiny, swirly packets of commercial detergent on the shelves in America’s grocery stores are the hottest new consumer product — and a source of peril for America’s vulnerable children.

Detergent Pods: Capitalist Innovation or Anti-Child Threat?Nearly 10 people across the country have called the hotline of the National Fashion Association after small children placed the packets on their feet and attempted to go jogging. “The rapid onset of bubbles, particularly when these packets are misused on a rainy day, can be pretty scary,” says Michelle Bondler, publicity director of the Shoewear Alliance for Public Safety.

The question of why so-not-actually-that-many preschoolers have been strapping the new detergent pods to their feet in the first place is a puzzling one. One possibility, according to Buffalo River University Associate Professor of Home Economics Dae Z. Chen, is that they evoke brand strong suggestions, especially for youngsters who are regularly exposed to television advertisements. “The colorful presence of the Nike swoosh on the Tide packets in particular is instantly apparent,” explains Chen. “Over and over again, our kids have been told to ‘Just Do It.’ We should not surprised when 3-year-olds do as they are told.”

The National Fashion Association’s alert does not name particular products or brands, but advises consumers to be on the lookout for children with an intense curiosity regarding the objects. Reached for comment, an industry spokesman told Irregular Times that starting in summer the packets will be shipped with shoelaces attached to discourage use.

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Santorum Seeks Security From Glitter And Loud Liberals

February 15th, 2012 | Posted by F. G. Fitzer in Election 2012 | Politics | Republicans - (4 Comments)

ABC News informs us that Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has submitted a formal request for protection by the U.S. Secret Service. Santorum has been using a private security firm, but apparently feels that a taxpayer-funded big government program would do a better job.

Secret Service policy is that presidential candidates will automatically be given protection if there is a credible threat – they don’t have to even ask for it. If there isn’t a credible threat, that’s when presidential candidates have to apply for security help with the Secret Service, as Rick Santorum did.

santorum afraid of fabulous confettiSo, what’s Rick Santorum’s rationale for taking big government assistance for his campaign, when his campaign has already hired a private security firm?

The ABC News article goes on to explain that Rick Santorum is afraid that his family may be beset by liberals who shout political slogans, and by glitter attacks.

Yes, Rick Santorum is afraid of glitter.

This is the man whom, according to opinion polls, the largest number of Republican voters now believe is the best choice to become Commander in Chief… a man whose resolve falters when confronted with glitter.

He’ll be able to keep America safe, just so long as America’s enemies don’t launch a surprise display of pizzazz.

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