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LR: Steve, you talk about reason and privelging of anecdotal over statistical evidence, perhaps you only peruse the media sources such as MSNBC, CNN and places like Moveon.org. You clearly have not an inkling of empirical statistical data that shows you are completely off base. I suggest you do a little research rather than argue in a bubble of your own creation. There is no statistical data whatsoever that gun bans reduce gun crime in the US. In fact although the causality isn’t certain, the opposite is true. But liberals are big on claiming causality when it suits them and denying it when it doesn’t. Regardless, you are way out of your league here. But don’t take my word for it, look it up.

SH: L, I’m completely familiar with the statistical evidence, which is why in my above comments I stated that TRANSNATIONAL comparisons show a correlation between laxer gun regulations and higher rates of deadly violence, a distinction you seem to have difficulty understanding despite your self-proclaimed superiority. I also mentioned that INTRAnational statistical comparisons (that’s intra, not inter) in a nation with no barriers to the transport of goods across state and municipal boundaries need to focus on where weapons are bought rather than where they are used. In fact, the overwhelming majority of weapons used in the commission of crimes are bought in those states with the laxest gun regulations, from which they are disseminated to all parts of the nation with ease independently of any local or state variations in regulations. As you say, don’t take my word for it: Look it up. It’s a fact.

The statistical data that you’re referring to comes from economist John Lott’s study, published in his book “More Guns Less Crime,” and is used by Libertarian pseudo-intellectuals ad nauseum. Many things in the study have been brought into doubt, but, for the sake of this conversation, let’s grant that Lott’s findings are accurate. Those findings suggest a possible correlation between laxer gun regulations and reductions in deadly violence, with the hypothesis that it is due to the fear that criminals feel toward more probably armed victims. (Lott excludes any analysis of anything other than violent crime, such as accidental or mistaken shooting rates, thus conveniently ignoring precisely the frequently cited pitfalls of an armed population while trying to isolate one advantage, an advantage which required very specific statistical assumptions to find.)

If these findings were indeed accurate, they would indicate what is called a local optimum lodged deep in a global trough. In other words, what they would prove is that, in a country saturated with firearms with almost no barriers to their purchase somewhere and transportation anywhere within the country, those municipalities that more heavily arm their residents see a slight decline in violent crime rates. Those allegedly slightly lower rates, however, are still many times higher than the rates of deadly violence found in ANY other developed nation. Your paradigm strives for a slightly less horrible status quo, rather than for a status quo comparable to every other developed nation on Earth.

As a lawyer, sociologist and author who has taught college criminology classes and has done professional policy research and writing, I’m pretty sure that my reliance on primary sources is adequate to the task, though I certainly appreciate your smug dismissal of those who both know far more about the topic than you do and are far more adept at social analysis than you are. (You say I’m out of my league, L. Yes, that’s true: I’d have to get a lobotomy to reduce myself to a level that is in your league.) It’s delightfully ironic that someone who relies on right-wing talking points, based on a polemically selective use of statistics, accuses someone who does research for a living and refers to primary source data as being the one who relies on biased sources. Ironic, but an all too familiar right-wing delusion.

As I said above, you rely on the convenient invention of reality to suit your needs rather than actual analysis of actual data. One of the most amazing inversions of reality on which you rely is to dismiss precisely those professions which systematically gather, verify, analyze, and contemplate information as bastions of liberalism, while arrogating to yourselves a superior grasp of the evidence based on a careful selection and exclusion of information from consideration to engineer an arrival at the preferred conclusion, precisely the ancient human foible that those professions you’ve dismissed as bastions of liberalism have evolved to avoid. And then you accuse liberals of the error that you are in fact so brazenly guilty of. It’s simply breathtaking in its absurdity.

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Since consciousness can only be experienced subjectively, and either imputed or not imputed externally, we are left to guess as to what extent something similar to it is woven into the fabric of other aspects of reality. Throughout our history, our view on this has varied in many ways, from animism (seeing everything as being imbued with consciousness) to a more mechanical conceptualization of objective reality. In fact, our history, the history of our own consciousness, involves not just a de-animation of our surroundings, but also a rediscovery of unexpected intelligence beyond us. Racist notions of differential intelligence are now reviled as historical follies, and we continually find that other mammals (from dolphins to dogs) are more intelligent than we had previously believed them to be. What was once perceived to be a more exclusive quality (“consciousness”) is proving to be ever less exclusive.

Our consciousness, which, by virtue of its existence, is proof that consciousness is somehow a part of the fabric of reality, was produced by a process which both preceded it and closely resembles it. Evolution, a process of trial and error involving large numbers and long periods of time, creates the appearance of intentional, highly sophisticated strategies for reproductive success. It creates the appearance of consciousness. In fact, evolutionary biologists and ecologists routinely use the language and mathematics of intentionality (microeconomics and game theory) to describe the phenomena they are studying.

Our technologies and social institutions, the products of our own consciousness, closely resemble the anatomical technologies and ecological “social institutions” that define the biosphere, the products of that diffuse process. But why would we assume, as an a priori position, that the phenomenon that preceded and created us just coincidentally and insignificantly resembles us so closely in that essential way (of being “conscious”), rather than consider the possibility that we, a by-product of it, resemble it in a significant way?

Our scientific paradigms have in fact been shifting away from a mechanical conceptualization and toward a more “living system” conceptualization. Complex dynamical systems analysis (“Chaos Theory”) has made clear that the characteristics of living systems are far more widespread throughout the inanimate world than we had previously realized. Increasingly, as physicist Fritjov Capra noted in “The Web of Life,” the dominant physical paradigm is organic rather than mechanical.

Physics has led us to a paradigm of a Cosmic Symphony of one dimensional vibrating strings and loops which generate all other material existence. It’s a mindbogglingly wonderful and extraordinary reality in which we find ourselves, and seeking ways to more fully embrace and celebrate that wondrous complexity and subtlety that so exceeds our normal range of conceptualizations, and so exceeds our comprehension, may be as natural a demand on our minds as naming the other things we encounter in our experience of life.

Taken in its entirety, a comprehensive understanding of our universe and our place in it suggests more continuity and less discontinuity between what we subjectively experience ourselves to be, and what the universe around us is. That quality that we identify in ourselves as “consciousness,” which we have come to consider something unique to us, in much the same way that dominant races considered it unique to them, and humans as the dominant species consider it unique to them, may be one manifestation of something more ubiquitous, more an inherent part of nature, than our mechanistic paradigm acknowledged. Even our scientific understandings of nature are moving us in that direction.

Now, there’s certainly no necessity in giving this complex, proto-conscious coherence to Nature a name. But there’s no real reason not to either.

So, it appears that the agreement I identified in my re-edited comment (re-edited before seeing your latest comment, by the way) as a foundation for conclusions other than the rejection of reason are the basis for shared conclusions as well. Phew! I’m always glad to see reason getting a boost, and it’s absence a rebuke! You’ve turned my “ire” into relief….