Tweet [1]
Headline from an article in today’s Wall Street Journal [2] (SR):
Next Debate: Should Colleges Ban Firearms?
Firearms were already banned at Virginia Tech. Wouldn’t you want to try a different approach? Or wonder why the ban failed to prevent tragedy? Shouldn’t the "next debate" be about the failure of the current approach?
Suppose you know someone who spends his day banging his head against the wall. While he’s banging his head against the wall, he tells you he has a headache. What are you going to do about it, you ask. I’m thinking of banging my head against the wall, he replies. Maybe that will make my headache go away.
How do you explain that response?
At the end of Fooled by Randomness [3], Nicholas Taleb writes:
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated and tangible. We scorn the abstract.
That is part of the problem. Thomas Sowell explains part of it in A Conflict of Visions [4], a deep and insightful book.
Here is Penn and Teller [5] on gun control. (HT: BoingBoing [6]) The video is R for language if the kids are about.