Gun Crime

The impression so many of us have as we read of the of the daily carnage in our cities and of the horrible mass murders in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut is that gun crime in the United States is more frequent than ever. In a recently released Pew Research Center study of 900 Americans it was found that only 12% said gun crime had declined over the last couple of decades, 26% said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

The facts, however, are otherwise. It may be surprising to learn, but homicides with guns are actually substantially lower today than they were during the 1990s. The LA Times, reporting on the Pew Study, said that:

In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%.

The Times mentions a couple of reasons for the disparity between the statistical facts and the common misperception of the facts by the American people. The suspicion is that the media's intensive reporting on gun crimes, particularly those which horrify the public, leads to the notion that homicides committed with a firearm are more likely to occur today than ever before. The public debate over gun control and the claims by advocates of gun control may also have fed the notion that the problem of gun violence is worse today than ever.

The U.S. still has one of the highest murder rates in the world, driven largely by urban killings. The victims of gun killings are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately black, which may indirectly explain why overall violent crime has fallen.

The two factors many experts believe responsible for the decline are both factors which largely impact this demographic: the withering of the crack cocaine market and surging incarceration rates. A third possibility is reduced lead in gasoline. Some researchers believe that lead can cause increased aggression and impulsive behavior in exposed children and that the reduction of environmental lead has concomitantly reduced those behaviors.

The Times doesn't mention this, but a fourth factor has also been cited as contributing to the decline in violent crime among black males. Over the last forty years some 60 million children, most of them black children, were aborted. It has been suggested that since many of these children would have grown up in conditions conducive to a life of violence and crime, the reduction in their numbers has led to a relative diminution - beginning in the 90s, twenty years after Roe v. Wade - of the amount of social trauma their communities experience.

Without getting into a discussion of whether the drop in violent crime is a moral justification of abortion perhaps the truth is that all of the above factors have played a role in reducing gun crime. The salient point, though, is that contrary to the impression created by the media and politicians seeking to limit gun ownership, homicide by gun is down almost 40% from what it was twenty years ago.

DNA Replication

Watch this animation of DNA replication in E. coli and ask yourself whether - if you had no prior commitments to either a materialist or theistic explanation of the origin of life - you would conclude that this process happened by blind, purposeless chance or was intelligently engineered:

Is Free Will an Illusion?

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is inadvertently hoist on his own petard as he seeks to persuade us that there really is no such thing as free will and that we shouldn't believe that we have it. This is a very strange argument for a determinist to make, but first let's look at Coyne's lede:

Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today.

You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

Coyne goes on to define free will and to explain why he thinks it's all an illusion. He then discusses the consequences for religion and morality if, in fact, we do not make free choices. As you might expect the consequences are not good:

But there are two important ways that we must face the absence of free will. One is in religion. Many faiths make claims that depend on free choice: Evangelical Christians, for instance, believe that those who don't freely choose Jesus as their savior will go to hell. If we have no free choice, then such religious tenets — and the existence of a disembodied "soul" — are undermined, and any post-mortem fates of the faithful are determined, Calvinistically, by circumstances over which they have no control.

But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can't really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren't freely chosen?

We should use reward and punishment, Coyne argues, but not because anyone deserves them. We should use them as environmental factors that assist in determining behavior - promoting what we want and discouraging what we don't.

He then closes with what he believes to be the upsides of accepting determinism:

The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection.

So far from prompting wonder, this sounds positively dehumanizing, but his second upside is amusingly ironic:

Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

The irony is in this: Coyne is a very nasty man, particularly toward Christian theists and more particularly still toward anyone who doubts Darwinism. But if all he has said in this essay is true why should he be? People who believe in God and don't believe in molecules to man evolution are not responsible for those beliefs anymore than Coyne is responsible for his. Our beliefs are not something we freely choose, Coyne has taught us, rather, they're the inevitable product of forces that have been in play since the beginning of the cosmos. We're no more responsible, and thus no more blameworthy or praiseworthy, for holding the beliefs we do than we are for being the height we are.

Coyne's treatment of those with whom he disagrees causes his talk of empathy and kindness to ring hollow. His behavior toward his intellectual opponents reveals that at bottom he really does believe people are culpable for making wrong choices which in turn means that he believes, perhaps without realizing it, that we can indeed make free choices.

What's Wrong with Big Government

Liberals tend to think that men are by nature good and that a government of men would be naturally inclined toward benevolence. Conservatives believe that men are inherently flawed, even corrupt, and that it's very dangerous to put power into their hands. Men are as likely, or more likely, to use that power for nefarious purposes as not.

The recent shenanigans in Washington are causing distress among many liberals because it's confirming what conservatives have been saying for decades about the dangers of big government, and, even more maddening for some liberals, it's the behavior of liberals that's proving conservatives right. Because men are corrupt, a government of men is not to be trusted, and the bigger, more expansive the government the greater the threat and the stronger the grounds for mistrust.

The President in his recent commencement address at Ohio State advised graduates to reject the voices that warn of government tyranny, but creeping tyranny permeates his tenure in office.

The President and his supporters scoff at concerns about the IRS policing Obamacare, but in light of revelations about how the IRS has been punishing opponents of the Obama administration those concerns seem particularly well-founded.

The President and his supporters scoff at concerns that background checks for gun buyers will be used to create a national registry of gun owners, but a Department of Justice that treats the First Amendment with contempt by secretly seizing phone records of journalists will suffer little compunction from meting out equally contemptuous treatment to the Second Amendment.

The legitimacy of a government is based on trust. Barack Obama himself said so in a speech as Senator in 2006. He correctly observed that, "if the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists—to protect them and to promote their common welfare—all else is lost."

The reason he told the OSU grads to reject the voices that warn of government tyranny is "Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."

Yet how can a citizenry trust a government that patently lies to them in the wake of the Benghazi tragedy, which secretly monitors reporters' phone calls, and which uses the IRS to harass, intimidate, and put out of business individuals and organizations which oppose the policies of this administration? It now appears that the IRS actually targeted over 500 conservative organizations and individuals, illegally releasing confidential information about them to Obama allies in the government and media, and it's not just the IRS that was engaged in this third-world type behavior. The EPA is now coming under scrutiny for making it more difficult for conservatives to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act than it is for liberal groups. How can anyone trust such people?

The bigger the government the harder it is to monitor the bureaucrats who might abuse their power. Indeed, this was David Axelrod's argument exculpating the President in these scandals: The government is just too big for him to know what was going on, Axelrod averred. Even accepting the veracity of Axelrod's claim that Mr. Obama didn't know what was going on he inadvertently put his finger on exactly why government should be kept small, and why most power should devolve to the states, close to where the people live, not to unaccountable, anonymous, Kafkaesque characters in opaque bureaucracies in far-away Washington.

Cheers

This will make your day:

Internal cost estimates from 17 of the nation's largest insurance companies indicate that health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent, crushing the administration's goal of affordability.

Weren't we assured that the Affordable Care Act (whoever came up with that name has a very perverse sense of humor) would lower insurance costs? Is there no promise made in the last eight years that this administration can be counted upon to keep?

New regulations, policies, taxes, fees and mandates are the reason for the unexpected "rate shock," according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released a report Monday based on internal documents provided by the insurance companies. The 17 companies include Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Foundation.

I don't know why the article calls this "rate shock" unexpected. People have been predicting this ever since before the act was rammed through Congress by the you-know-which party in 2009.

The report found that individuals will face "premium increases of nearly 100 percent on average, with potential highs eclipsing 400 percent. Meanwhile, small businesses can expect average premium increases in the small group market of up to 50 percent, with potential highs over 100 percent."

One company said that new participants in the individual market could see a premium increase of 413 percent when new requirements on age rating and required benefits are taken into account, said the report. "The average yearly cost for a new customer in the individual market grows from $1,896 to $3,708 -- a $1,812 cost increase," it added.(emphasis mine)

Who are these wretched people in the individual market? They're mostly young or self-employed folks, many of who live paycheck to paycheck as it is. Now they're going to see their monthly insurance premiums almost double. No wonder one of the architects of the law, Senator Max Baucus, has declared the legislation a "train-wreck" and has decided not to run for re-election.

The key reasons for the surge in premiums include providing wider services than people are now paying for and adding less healthy people to the roles of insured, said the report.

It concluded: "Despite promises that the law will lower costs, [Obamacare] will in fact cause the premiums of many Americans to spike substantially. The broken promises are numerous, and the empirical data reveal that many Americans, from recent college graduates to older adults, will not be able to afford the law's higher costs."

When the high costs hit and your insurance premiums double please have the courtesy and good sense not to complain out loud if in either of the last two elections your good sense abandoned you and you voted for Mr. Obama.

Gosnell Gets Life

Kermit Gosnell, the 72 year-old Philadelphia abortionist who was charged with the murders of several babies and one woman was convicted on three counts of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Here's a question that might be asked of Mr. Obama at the President's next press conference: "Mr. President in light of the sentencing of Kermit Gosnell to life in prison for killing babies born alive after a late term abortion, do you think the sentence is appropriate?"

It would be interesting to listen to the President's answer. He is, after all, the man who, as an Illinois state senator, voted twice in committee to kill legislation that would have ensured that babies born alive after a failed abortion be given medical care and efforts be made to keep them alive. In other words, Mr. Obama doesn't really have a problem with allowing babies to die, although he might blanch at the thought of snipping their spines with scissors and cutting off their feet to preserve them as trophies as did the Mengelean Dr. Gosnell.

At any rate, although I favor the sentence - in fact, I think Gosnell should have gotten the death penalty - I think it illuminates a perversity in our culture. Gosnell was given life in prison for doing to a baby what would have been perfectly legal to do just a few minutes sooner. If severing an infant's spine is worthy of life imprisonment when done a few minutes after birth, why is it okay to perform similarly brutal acts on the child just a few minutes before it's born?

It makes no sense, at least not to me, but I guess the policies imposed by our liberal political leadership have never been about what makes sense.

Yet More Scandals

The number of people remaining who still believe that President Obama meant it when he promised us as a candidate that he'd run the most ethical administration in history has shrunk asymptotically close to zero, at least among those who are paying attention. No doubt the bulk of the reason is that the Obama administration seems to be stacking up scandals like airliners holding over an airport in the midst of a thunderstorm. You might say that the administration has the scandals coming at us fast and furious. The strategy seems to be to overwhelm us with crimes and misdemeanors and other legal dubieties to the point where we're no longer shocked by any of it.

It's a little like listening to the Vice-President's goofy Bidenisms. After a while the stupidity is no longer outrageous, and the offensiveness no longer offends. It just fades into the Washington background noise. So it is with scandal in this administration.

Stimulus money awarded to political supporters in unions or corporate execs who ran poorly performing green energy businesses; the refusal to prosecute Black Panthers who were almost certainly engaged in voter intimidation; the Fast and Furious operation which illegally put thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican killers who used them to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexicans as well as two American border agents; the refusal to provide requested security to our diplomats in Libya who paid for this egregious incompetence with their lives; the deliberate fabrication of a story to deflect blame from the administration in the wake of these murders. The list goes on.

And now three new scandals have emerged just this week which surely must set some sort of record for vigorous government malfeasance.

It turns out that by all appearances the IRS was using its power to punish political enemies of the administration. Conservative groups who applied for tax exempt status were made to fill out a battery of forms that were impossible to complete or to answer fully. Groups that had the words "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their name or organizations established to educate people on the Constitution (of all things), Obamacare, and the workings of government all were targeted.

Moreover, the IRS was apparently imposing similar burdens on Jewish groups that supported Israel.

This is an extremely serious abuse of power, the very sort of abuse that causes many to loathe big government, and although there's no evidence that the IRS was taking orders directly from the President, it's nevertheless the case that they were acting in concert with his penchant for rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Indeed, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said today that what the IRS was doing was a good thing, presumably because it was directed at groups he doesn't like.

Then the Department of Justice was caught in flagrante seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. If this had happened during the Bush administration the din emanating from newsrooms across the country would pain the ears, and truth to tell the Washington press corps does seem to be a bit disturbed by this gross infringement of the First Amendment and, even more, perhaps, by what they see as a betrayal by an administration to which they have so happily given up their virtue.

Finally, it turns out that Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has been shaking down health service corporations for big donations to fund Obamacare. Since these corporations are pretty much at the mercy of HHS for their economic livelihood, when the Secretary suggests that it'd be nice if they'd pony up some cash to help get Obamacare off the ground, what these execs hear her saying is that if you want to do business with the federal government you better dig deep and fork over.

You can get the details of these stories at the links. There's a lot more to each of them. The impression one gets while reading the accounts is of an administration out of control - unfettered by morality, law, Constitution, or competence - seeking to arrogate to itself as much power as it can amass before the 2014 midterm elections perchance sweep the Democrats out of the House and the Senate.

I used to think that Mr. Obama wanted to emulate Robert Mugabe and turn the U.S. into an economic Zimbabwe. Now it's beginning to look as though economics is only one facet of Mr. Mugabe's government that this administration envies.

Can Ethics Be Taught?

Ray Penning at Cardus Blog asks the question, "Can ethics be taught?" The answer, of course, is yes and no. Ethics as the study of the rules that philosophers have prescribed to govern our moral behavior can certainly be taught, but, although thousands of books have been written about this, I doubt that any of them have changed anyone's actual behavior. Part of the reason is, as Penning observes:

Ethics courses that leave students with a bunch of “you shoulds” or “you should nots” are not effective. There are deeper questions that proceed from our understanding of what human nature is about and what we see as the purpose of our life together.

This is true as far as it goes, but the reason teaching such rules is not effective is that focusing on the rules fails to address the metaethical question of why we should follow any of those rules in the first place. What answer can be given to the question why one should not just be selfish, or adopt a might makes right ethic? At bottom secular philosophy has no convincing answer. Philosophers simply utter platitudes like "we wouldn't want others to treat us selfishly, so we shouldn't treat them selfishly," which, of course, is completely unhelpful unless one is talking to children.

The reply is unhelpful because students will discern that it simply asserts that we shouldn't be selfish because it's selfish to be selfish. The question, though, is why, exactly, is it wrong to do to others something we wouldn't done to us? What makes selfishness wrong?

Moreover, this sort of answer simply glosses over the problem of what it means to say that something is in fact "wrong" in the first place. Does "wrong" merely mean something one shouldn't do? If so, we might ask why one shouldn't do it, which likely elicits the reply that one shouldn't do it because it's wrong. The circularity of this is obvious.

The only way to break out of the circle, the only way we can make sense of propositions like "X is wrong," is to posit the existence of a transcendent moral authority, a God, who serves as the objective foundation for all our moral judgments. If there is no such being then neither are there any objective moral values or duties to which we must, or even should, adhere. This lack of any real meaning to the word "wrong" is a major consequence of the secularization of our culture, and it's one of the major themes of my novel In the Absence of God (see link at the top of this page) which I heartily recommend to readers of Viewpoint.

The Cost of Legalization

Congress is currently mulling the question whether to put illegal immigrants on a track to citizenship. One of the aspects of this debate that hasn't received too much attention, perhaps because it's an inconvenient subject, is what amnesty of illegals will cost the taxpayer. The Heritage Foundation has done the math and their sums are not encouraging:

The comprehensive immigration overhaul being taken up in the Senate this week could cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion if 11 million illegal immigrants are granted legal status, according to a long-awaited estimate by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

This $6.3 trillion figure is based on the assumption that there are 11 million illegals in the country. Some estimates are almost twice that.

The cost would arise from illegal immigrants tapping into the government's vast network of benefits and services, many of which are currently unavailable to them. This includes everything from standard benefits like Social Security and Medicare to dozens of welfare programs ranging from housing assistance to food stamps.

The report has it's critics:

The study is already coming under criticism from some groups and economists who challenge its assumptions, claiming the legalization would help fuel economic growth. Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, though, defended the study ahead of its release Monday morning.

"There's no way you can look at this and say that it's good for the American taxpayer," he told Fox News.

Perhaps the most startling calculation in the Heritage study is an estimate that over the course of their lifetimes illegal immigrant households would receive an average of $592,000 in government benefits.

I've several times over the last few years expressed my opinion on Viewpoint (Go here and scroll down for a couple of past posts on illegal immigration) that illegal aliens should be granted a kind of amnesty, once it is determined beyond reasonable doubt that the border is secure, but it should be an amnesty that grants only the opportunity to live and work here (as long as they obey the law). No one who broke our laws to cross our borders should be rewarded with citizenship and the consequent benefits to which that citizenship would entitle them.

These folks often risked much to come here, but they came here for the opportunity to work, not to be made citizens. Trying to deport them at this point would be a moral and logistical nightmare which a compassionate people should surely balk at attempting. On the other hand, a just people should have a high regard for the law and be loath to set it aside for political convenience.

The kind of amnesty that allows these people to stay in the U.S. without being harassed by the immigration authorities, but which does not make them eligible for citizenship strikes the proper balance, I think, between compassion and justice.