Brendan Gates

There was a massacre in Newtown, CT yesterday. 27 people were shot and killed, including many young children. As in the wake of previous massacres, which happen all too frequently in this country, we’re quick to place blame on others. Would this have been prevented if the killer didn’t have such ready access to guns? Maybe if the victims had guns themselves, then they could have defended themselves? Or is this really a mental health issue? Or something we can blame on the media?

The answer is yes. To all of the above. This is a communal, society-based issue that isn’t solved by taking a side and blaming somebody else. We all deserve blame.

Gun Control
The second amendment says this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Supreme Court has ruled that this right does not have to be connected to military service, and does protect home gun ownership. So yes, we civilians can have guns. But should we have guns?

Let’s step back for a second and affirm who should not have guns. Criminals and the mentally ill should not have guns. That’s an easy one that nobody disagrees with. Great, there is some common ground to start with. So who should get guns?

Sportsmen want guns with which to go hunting. They jump through legal hoops and background checks to qualify, and most of them are well trained and very responsible with their guns. So that’s okay.

Then you have the self-defense folks. She just wants a handgun because she lives alone in the city and there have been some home invasions in the area. And he just wants a handgun to keep in a small safe next to the bed in case somebody threatens his children. And they’re also willing to jump through a few hoops… maybe attend a training class or two. That certainly sounds reasonable. And responsible too, right?

Therein lies the problem. Our constitution protects the right to own guns, and it’s pretty easy to rationalize responsible use cases for gun ownership. Sure, let’s ban full auto rifles, flamethrowers, and mortars. So what does that leave? A legally protected supply of single action rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic handguns. Good thing nobody could ever do anything bad with those, right?

The shooter in CT used legally purchased weapons that he stole from his mother, before killing her. More restrictive gun control wouldn’t have prevented this massacre, since his mother wasn’t a criminal and still would have qualified to purchase the weapons. A flat out ban on guns would have prevented the massacre, but that ban will never happen. In our society, there are just too many use cases that most people consider reasonable. I’m to blame for this, and maybe you are too. It’s not that I think anybody should have a gun, it’s that I have a hard time arguing they shouldn’t.

Mental Health
The mentally ill need to be taken care of. If they could take care of themselves, they wouldn’t be mentally ill. That often requires doctors, medicine, and institutional stays that the ill themselves aren’t capable of paying for. If they’re lucky they have family that takes care of them. If they’re not, then they bounce back and forth between no care and underfunded state care required by law because of some crime they committed.

Do you do your part to take care of the mentally ill in our society? Do you donate money to private charities that care for the mentally ill? Or write your representatives to let them know that they need to make public mental health care a priority? I don’t, as most people don’t, so we’ll continue to have this problem of ill people floating around the fringe. Ill people with guns.

The Media
Media outlets fall over themselves to cover these tragedies, since most of us drop everything to follow along. It’s a ratings boom. We want every detail… from who might have known the shooter at one time to people who can speculate on what the parents are going through, no detail is too small to cover. It becomes the only story that matters anymore. We tweet about it, blog about it, argue about it on Facebook. If that troubled kid wanted to get everybody’s attention and go out with a bang, we certainly helped him achieve that objective.

Psychiatrists like Dr. Park Dietz argue that such sensationalized coverage only makes things worse. Other troubled would-be shooters see how we all pay attention, and know that they too could similarly grab the country’s attention. So what’s the solution? Not cover these events? That will never happen. It’s just like seeing a car accident on the highway. We all hate that rubberneck slow-down effect. We curse the other drivers for having no class, and for slowing us down. Then we get up to the accident scene and can’t help but take just a little peek.

Again, I’m to blame. Sure, I managed to not watch a single second of news coverage on this tragedy. And I’m proud to not have been a part of whatever craven and hypocritical garbage the TV networks were peddling. But here I am blogging about it. A blog post that was inspired initially by a Facebook conversation.

So I place blame on myself for the Newtown massacre. Do you?

Cash Rules Everything Around Missouri…

In a previous post, I looked at how much of a projected deficit each state has. The Show Me State is projected to be in the red $704 million. Since we’ve got 5,988,927 people, that’s about $117 per person. Would you pay extra to eliminate your state’s debt? Or accept less of a tax break to offset that amount?

I might. I asked Ladyfriend and she said that she might too, and added “but if they go back to using those credit cards again, and buying shit they don’t need, I’m taking my $117 back”. Well put, Ladyfriend.  Method Man would be proud.

A co-worker recently made a claim to me that our country’s most financially busted states were also the most liberal states, and went on to say that the liberal ideology is what put them into their debt-laden situations. I didn’t know if these claims were true or not, so I decided to do some research.

Getting data on state deficits, budgets, and populations was pretty straightforward. Quantifying whether a state was Liberal or Conservative was less so. I decided to go with three indicators. The first was whether the state’s governor was Republican or Democrat. The second was which presidential candidate the state’s electoral votes went to in the 2008 election. And the third was an average margin of victory for Republicans or Democrats over the last 5 presidential elections; something Wikipedia is using to label states as either Red, Blue, or Purple (in the middle).

So what does the data say?

For starters, one way to determine if a particular ideology is more fiscally responsible than the other is to just look at the states with no deficit at all. There are six; Arkansas, W. Virginia, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Three of them have Democrats for governors, and three have Republicans, though all six went for McCain in 2008. And four of the states were considered Red by Wikipedia. So far so good for my co-worker, and not so much so for the Liberals.

The other end of the spectrum, the most debt-laden, paints a picture that’s much less black & white. California has the largest deficit, and they’re as blue as a blue state can be. But second place is occupied by Texas, who is typically quite proud of their very Red state label. Absolute totals are probably not the best way to read the data, since of course California and Texas will have a lot of debt. They have a lot of people.

For deficit as a percentage of budget, Nevada reigns supreme with a whopping 45%. And they’re a Red state. Second place is New Jersey with 37%, and they’re a Blue state. Of course, third is Texas and fourth is California, so they don’t seem to do well no matter whether we’re looking at the absolute or the relative data. The all Liberals = Debt theory is starting to look a little weaker than it did before.

Alright, so what’s the answer? Does being a liberal state equal debt?

Not really, according to this data. You can probably make a strong argument that more of the states with debt are Blue states. But there are some Blue states with no debt or very little debt (like Iowa), just as there are Red states with tons of debt (like Texas or Nevada). So I can’t justify saying that being a liberal state means you automatically have more debt, since that doesn’t hold up across all of the states.

For the record, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a statistician and you can trust my analysis about as far as you can throw it. I personally think the argument that more populated states tend to accrue higher deficits is just as likely as any sort of political explanation (the six states with no deficit are all in the bottom third of population). But you don’t have to trust me. I put the data in a Google Spreadsheet so you can see it yourself and sort it any way you like. Download it here (State Budget Deficits 2012 [PDF]) as a PDF too, if that’s your thing.