stochastic carry

armed societies are polite societies

one of the core differences between the dullard and the galaxy brain is the number of orders to which their thinking extends.

the truly dim bulb barely comprehends cause and effect.

the truly astute think in 3rd and 4th order effects and in “general case” solutions.

as so often seems the case, the issue is the midwit.

i am coming to the inescapable conclusion that there is some sort of dunning krueger effect for midwits where they are irresistably drawn to building mountaintop fortresses atop mount stupid. they presume themselves to be engaging in complete thought because they have arrived at some rudimentary understanding of cause and effect and are using it to bray “nuh uh!” at people and play at contrarian.

i fear this is an increasingly trained reflex, the specific sort of barking that one gets from a specific kind of seal sent to university and sold a bill of goods about “you are an intellectual and a thought leader now” despite being mired in the callow gotchaball of first order thinking.

“aha!” they superciliously proclaim. “i have some angle on first order matters that you have no considered!” they play this like it’s a laydown hand.

they are rarely correct.

there’s been a poignant example lately around gun ownership, gun carry, and forms of self defense.

twitter has been awash with some sincerely awful takes on this topic.

it starts with ideas like this (which is, btw, a good take)

but has been rabidly disputed by a number of bad takes like this one:

this is the classic example of “one order thinking” midwittery.

first off, it fails the classic IQ test for ability to understand statistics and means which goes like this:

you: the average dane is taller than the average chinese

them: yao ming is 7 foot 6!

aaaaaand, buzzer. they failed. a specific outlier does not disprove a general relationship.

it’s a mental miss. one says “well because it would not have stopped this, it is not helpful.”

you might as well say “seatbelts do not save lives in car crashes because i know a guy who died in a car crash while wearing a seatbelt.”

this sounds funny, and once i too would have laughed, but social media has shown me something that i have found jarring: alarmingly few people understand the differences between average or median expected outcome and individual instantiation and can move back and forth between the two with fluidity.

seemingly otherwise competent people simply cannot do this.

and this leads to all manner of awful policy takes and safety excusions becuase every time there is some outlier outcome they all want to upend everyone’s behavior and plead some special case based on whatever just upset them.

this brings us back to zarathustra’s gun take.

it ignores two separate avenues of second and third order thinking.

consider:

people who go around attacking and killing people fall into two broad camps:

1. those capable of controlling and adapting their behavior and

2. those who cannot control or adapt their behavior.

for those in camp one, we have deterrence which works in 2 ways: the first is the visible sight of a weapon which makes the person carrying it a “hard target” and the second is the knowledge that while you cannot see a weapon, many are carrying them and so if you pick any target, you might pick wrong and get shot in the face.

this cascades into a number of other “penumbra” effects. even if you move off a hard target to some easier prey, doing it near someone who is obviously armed is a much higher risk level. they might intervene. again, you get shot in the face.

both are highly effective.

you see it in the states where crime drops after concealed carry is made more permissive. (read lott on this, he uses the county level data that resolves the simpson’s paradox in state data)

you see it in places like utah or san juan where most homes can be presumed to have a gun in them and so home invasion is not a thing. again, you get shot in the face.

this is known and knowable.

you see it even in simple behavioral outcomes. most people, it seems, are well deterred by the visible or predictable presence of guns. you rarely see or hear of a decarlos type attack near a police officer or armed guard. most people are sufficiently compos mentis and self-regulating to avoid such an extinction event.

“aha!” says the one-order midwit, thinking they have you, “but what about case two, the person who cannot control themselves? what about decarlos brown whose brainpain is full of rabid marmosets and nightmare fuel and has no idea what he’s doing or ability to control himself? you cannot deter him. he is not rational!”

thanks for asking.

in some small number of cases, this is correct, perhaps you cannot deter him.

but you also likely don’t need to for long.

not if you have “stochastic carry.”

and this is the part people really seem to miss.

so let’s take a simple example from the newly horrible caliphate of toronto:

as you can see, we have a fairly rabid guy here. he’s ultimately deterred by the camera and threats of police, but let’s say he wasn’t and let’s say instead of a camera, the cinematographer had a 9mm handgun.

the minute this guy swings that knife in threatening fashion?

bang. mozambique. two in the chest, one in the head.

guess who will not be around to do this to someone unarmed again?

it does not take much to do this because there are not actually that many people like decarlos around, people who literally cannot control themselves.

and the ones that are like that have life trajectories like this:

and the data is VERY clear on this.

the typical DC homicide suspect has 11 arrests prior to graduating to murder.

so how many murders get avoided by truly widespread carry that adds the halting state of “bang. shot in the face” to this equation?

70%?

90%?

so the question is not the first order question of “could ilyana have pulled a gun fast enough to stop decarlos?” it’s “in a world with far more guns and reasonable stand your ground and defense laws where those defending themselves are rarely charged and almost never convicted, would decarlos have even still been around to be on that train in the first place?”

personally, i doubt it.

people talk about this as though it were some kind of “taxi driver” level vigalanteeism, but it’s not.

it’s the simple rediscovery of a basic principle of human interaction that has underpinned many of the better societies in human history and whose forgetting has turned them awful:

lethal violence is a legitimate form of self defense.

it’s not legitimate as an unprovoked initiation of aggression, but when one faces the threat of violence from people, and to some degree one always will, deterrence is your friend and “3 center mass” the last resort and the ultimate chlorine in the civilizational pool.

this is not a cause for civil outrage, it’s a form of civic service, the protection of the social contract of peaceable people from those who are not peaceable and would attack and kill others.

nor is this arbitrary. it’s self-defense undertaken against aggressors who self-selected to attack others and put themselves at such risk.

and it takes a lot less than people think to make huge differences.

the lojack car tracking system resulted in a near elimination of auto theft rings in cities where it hit even 1-2% penetration. it turns out most cars were stolen by a small group of people who steal A LOT of cars. take them off the streets and it stops. violence is much the same.

up until quite recently a number of scandinavian societies were so safe that parents left babies in strollers in corrals outside of coffee shops while they went inside.

this is not a civilizational stretch goal, it’s basic table stakes of “nice place to live.”

once more the midwit will opine “aha! but they did this without widespread gun ownership!” but neglect questions like “yeah, but what did their viking forbears do to the sort of person that grabbed a baby and how did that adjust the pool of people who remained and how has that gone since they started importing scads of low trust folks from elsewhere?”

there are many such inversions when one moves past first order association which is why first order only midwit policy making is so dangerous.

in much of the west, the US included and perhaps especially, we’re seeing a rise in these “murders by maladaptive menace” because we’re leaving them on the streets and because “defend yourself” has become an awful sort of daniel penny process of absurdist accusation and lengthy, life-wrecking prosecution.

and its really quite easy to fix.

1. 3 strikes and you’re out and we take you out of circulation as someone who cannot or will not participate in social contract.

2. self defense re-recognized as an axiomatic and fundamental right and those forced to engage in it given moral prevalence over their aggressors, police who once more will not arrest you for it, DA’s who will not charge it, and juries who will not convict.

all these things exist downstream of our own social mores and what we choose to prioritize and our ability to fail to rise to the bait of “one bad thing happened way out on the edge of the bell curve so we must pretend that an overall good is now an overall bad and upend successful systems.”

you don’t ban helmets on motorcycles because of one corner case where a guy died when his helmet got caught on a fencepost.

you have to tolerate some unfortunate outcomes resulting from good plans and good intent.

and sometimes that means that people who f-around face the final find out.

time to gird our loins and accept it.

if you try to carjack someone or pull a knife on them, you pushed your chips in. you made a decision about what your life was worth and you reap the rewards and “didn’t know no better” is irrelevant to the one whose life was put at risk by attack. their rights stand paramount and if we err, we err on the side of protecting self-defense.

and eggs will be broken in the making of this omelette.

the soft squeamishness of soft men makes for hard times and the longer it goes on the harder the men will have to be in order to return us to something good. nothing is gained and much is lost by waiting.

no system is perfect and all have trade offs.

but some value structures work to generate flourishing societies and some do not.

the dystopian dark-clownshows of “lionize the violent and maladapted criminal because they are the victim here and render their rights sacred at the expense of the rights of people who wish to be left in peace” have ruined city after city, life after life.

the evidence here is clear and the choice stark.

choose well.