This video was making the rounds last spring. The video maker wants to make two points:
1. Cops are racist. They are respectful of the White guy carrying the AR-15. The Black guy gets less comfortable treatment.
2. The police treatment of the White guy is the proper way for police to deal with someone carrying an assault rifle.
1. This video was made in Oregon. Under Oregon’s open-carry law, what both the White and Black guy are doing is perfectly legal. And when the White guy refuses to provide ID, that’s legal too. If this had happened in Roseburg, and the carrier had been strolling to Umpqua Community College, there was nothing the police could have legally done, other than what is shown in the video, until the guy walked onto campus, opened fire, and started killing people.
2. Guns are dangerous, and the police know it. In the second video, the cop assumes that the person carrying an AR-15 is potentially dangerous – very dangerous. The officer’s fear is palpable. He prefers to err on the side of caution – the false positive of thinking someone is dangerous when he is really OK. The false negative – assuming an armed person is harmless when he is in fact dangerous – could well be the last mistake a cop ever makes.
But the default setting for gun laws in the US is just the opposite – better a false negative. This is especially true in Oregon and states with similar gun laws. These laws assume that people with guns are harmless. In fact, they assume that all people, with a few exceptions, are harmless. Let them buy and carry as much weaponry and ammunition as they like.
Most of the time, that assumption is valid. Most gun owners, at least those who got their guns legitimately, are responsible people. The trouble is that the cost of the rare false negative is very, very high. Lawmakers in these states and in Congress are saying in effect that they are willing to pay that price. Or rather, they are willing to have other people – the students at Umpqua, or Newtown, or Santa Monica, or scores of other places, and their parents – pay that price.
UPDATE October, 6: You have to forgive the hyperbole in that last paragraph, written so shortly after the massacre at Umpqua. I mean, those politicians don’t really think that it’s better to have dead bodies than to pass regulations on guns, do they?
Or was it hyperbole? Today, Dr. Ben Carson, the surgeon who wants to be the next president of the US, stated even more clearly this preference for guns even at the price of death. “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” (The story is in the New York Times and elsewhere.)
Originally posted at Montclair Socioblog.
Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.
Comments 4
analogue2000 — October 5, 2015
But it isn't just "most of the time the assumption is valid," it is the overwhelmingly huge majority of the time the assumption is valid. Looking at the AR-15 alone, over 2 MILLION of them have been sold in the US in the last ten years. Only a few mass shootings have occurred with them. That makes the odds of any given owner doing it at less than 0.0001 percent. You have better odds of winning the lottery.
The huge amount of media attention these crimes (rightly) receive makes us think of them as being much more common than they actually are. Your odds of dying in a car crash this year are hundreds of times higher than your odds of being involved in a mass shooting.
I am willing to pay the price of a false negative. The alternative is paying the price of a huge number of false positives. And just like the video shows, the people paying that price (losing their liberty, being hassled by the police, being falsely accused or falsely arrested ) will be the most vulnerable members of our society - namely poor people of color.
I also take issue with the way the article says that lawmakers are willing to have "other people" pay the cost of mass shootings. What makes you think lawmakers are immune to these costs? Gabby Giffords anyone? Our lawmakers are no more or less vulnerable to these incredibly rare events than are the rest of us. Interestingly, they are actually less vulnerable to the effects of false positives - see above about poor people.
Jaki Benson — October 7, 2015
You'd think that someone with a PhD and writing for a sociology blog would realize that the amount of people killed in mass shootings is so negligible as to be statistically insignificant. You'd think that the author would know that mass shootings are on the decline, firearms homicides are at a 40 year low, and violent crime in general has seen a massive downturn. Twice as many people die from accidental falls as from firearms in the US every year, for fuck's sake. Ban assault heights! For the children! This type of emotional pandering and crocodile tears for a handful of victims is just so patently absurd.
Far more children die from drowning in the home or ingesting toxic chemicals than firearms. Yet, I have to buy a gun lock when I buy a gun, but Whitey McSuburbanite can stock up on bleach and leave her shower door ajar. If you really cared about The Children so passionately, you'd be demanding the mandatory sale of cabinet locks for below the kitchen sink.
But no one really believes that this is about protecting lives. It's a political agenda that seeks to further widen the gulf between the ability of the state to wield force and the ability of the citizenry to wield force. Political authority yields only to force and threat of force, and those who are part of the institutions of this country wish to further entrench the current political, economic, and social structure. This task is made all too simple when the citizenry is rendered docile and defenseless in the face of tyrannical capitalism run amok.
Keep shilling for the bourgeois, you stupid fuck.
fleiter69 — October 8, 2015
So let's assume everyone driving a car--a privilege not protected by the Bill of Rights--is also dangerous and incapable of operating that vehicle. Let's take away all cars from all law-abiding Americans because occasionally somebody plows into a crowd and kills a bunch of people. How about we enforce the gun laws on the books before we start taking away people's handguns?
Dave — October 8, 2015
Isn't erring on the side of the false negative supposed to be a principle for all our laws? We are innocent until proven guilty and we are supposed to be protected by rules of evidence and procedure that limit the ability of the state to imprison us without just cause.