The will of the uninformed

Well you know, some of the Sacred Founding Fathers were not too high on democracy for that very reason. Imagine how screwed up things would be if all those idiots were required by law to vote!

This is why pure Democracy is bad.

And when the masses are uninformed, the ruling class turns to Congressional Quarterly (CQ) for their ideas. Like this one:

April 23, 2007 – Page 1154
www.cq.com

"Political Economy: The Price of Safety"
By John Cranford, CQ Columnist

The tragedy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute last week isn’t likely to bridge the nation’s political divide over guns. If anything, it was the sort of seminal event that will just harden positions....

Still, that hasn’t stopped a few academic experts from continuing to posit ideas for stemming the tide of gun violence, even if they appear to clash with the revealed wisdom of the two opposing camps in this debate. Into that breach comes Philip J. Cook, an economist, sociologist and public policy expert at Duke University who has been writing about guns and crime for three decades. Some of his more recent work has been to try to assess the true cost of gun violence, using what he calls “the economist’s perspective, not the public health perspective.”

From that starting point, Cook and fellow researcher Jens Ludwig, an economist and public policy professor at Georgetown University, have looked beyond traditional measurements — the cost of medical treatment, lost earnings and productivity, and the like. These are misdirected, they contend. It’s not that they aren’t important, it’s that they vastly understate what society pays to overcome the fear of being a victim.

In essence, Cook and Ludwig say the price of gun violence is roughly $80 billion because surveys they have conducted suggest Americans would spend that much to eliminate it. Theirs is an intriguing approach, akin, Cook argues, to assessments that are made about the cost of environmental degradation. “People don’t like to live with risk,” Cook says. “They avoid it, and they’ll pay to reduce it.”...

Make no mistake, Cook holds to the view that gun violence needs to be curbed, and the best way to do that is to restrict the availability of firearms. His research shows that the more difficult it is to obtain guns, particularly handguns, the less often these weapons are used in crimes of all types and as instruments of suicide. Moreover, he contends that guns intensify the level of violence that might otherwise occur during robberies or other crimes. ...

America could take a wholesale swipe at gun violence by spending money on such steps as improving police practices and enhancing the ability to trace firearms — including building a national registry of serial numbers and firing pin markings, even if names weren’t a part of the list, Cook says.

Some of that, however, sounds like it would not sit well with those who view the Second Amendment as granting an absolute right to their personal arsenals. At the same time, advocates of that point of view aren’t offering much beyond suggesting that allowing college students to freely arm themselves would be a good solution to last week’s tragedy.

On that point, the research most cited in the last decade by the pro-gun group — that crime has diminished in Virginia and the other 33 states that permit citizens to carry concealed weapons — has been largely discredited. There is no such evidence, said a study published in 2004 by the National Academy of Sciences.

Cook’s ideas also may not jibe with those who advocate an outright ban on guns — even though lawmakers plainly have no interest in taking that route now or any time soon. ...

If Cook is correct that Americans are willing to spend quite a bit more than is currently in the budgets of federal and state law enforcement agencies to rid the nation of gun violence, then lawmakers might want to give his ideas some thought. It’s likely few people would disagree that it’s past time to try something.

http://www.cq.com/display.do?docid=2494587

For either Cook or Ludwig to somehow distance themselves from one side of the gun control debate would require them to recant essentially everything they've published over the past 30 years. Holding them as examples of disinterested objectivity has a certain similarity to Boston's favorite gun control advocate, John Rosenthal, starting up a neutral group of "gun owners" for reasonable gun "safety" measures.

Like when I talk about the Second Ammendment and the responce I get is "Which one is that?"

**Sigh**