Back to episode — Episode 1776 Scott Adams - The Highlight Of Civilization Is About To Begin
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. What do you think happened? Do you think that the employee said okay, hearing what your problem is, here's the address you want to go to? Nope. Couldn't do that. Do you know why? Because I didn't have the healthcare number for the person. So couldn't tell me which facility to go to because one requires an appointment and one doesn't. And so can't make an appointment without a membership number.…
← Previous segment →with guns. There was changing crime of all kinds. So I'm pretty sure from 1993 to 2013 that all kinds of crimes, violent crimes, were all way less. And I think there's some argument about what that was. I mean Freakonomics thought it was something about abortion. I don't know if that's checked out or not. But there were some number of factors that substantially made everything safer at the same time the number of guns was going up.
So what could you say about gun ownership either making more or less gun murder based on this data? Well I would say you can't tell because there's something bigger than gun ownership, much bigger, that's changing how people are acting. And that whatever the guns are doing is being masked by some larger social change. So you could not tell. You cannot answer this question from this data.
If I added guns or subtracted guns from this society would there be more or fewer murders? This data doesn't tell you anything on that. So you can't answer the question do more guns cause more murder even if more guns happened during a time when there was less murder. Because remember the larger outside thing, whatever is making less violent crime in general, is overwhelming whatever the guns are doing or not doing. So you just can't tell. It's hidden.
You can at least say guns aren't a huge factor. Can you? It depends how you define huge. You could certainly say it's more of a gray area where some people would say it's huge and some wouldn't. Maybe I think it's a little more of a gray area.
All right. So we don't know what the trend would have been if the larger outside trends had not been what they were. But here's another thing. Did you know that gun deaths correlate with income? You probably do that, right? The higher your income the less likely you're going to get murdered with a gun.
And so when I look at the United States having extreme extremes of poverty and rich people, so we've got income inequality extremes, and then we blend it all together to see how the United States does compared to other countries. But the United States is sort
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of like two countries. One is poor America where things are terrible and one is rich America where things are better. And they don't have the same gun violence rates. Not at all. So again there's something much larger than having a gun or not having a gun that's causing people to die or not die. Also interesting that gun deaths were correlated with more suicides which is largely a white person pr…
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