It has been almost two months since my last blog entry. I have been busy, and a lot has been happening, some of which I thought would make good posts, and some of which interfered with my writing. In that category, if you have been following Debra’s and my SCS posts, you know that Debra needed to have a complete hysterectomy. She is now recovering and still hoping to spend the coming winter in Florida, which she has been thinking of as a “healing garden.”
Some of the discussion following the shooting of the children at the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, elementary school led me to think about what in NLP is often called “evidence procedure.” One of the general Metamodel questions, “How do you know,” is designed to elicit someone’s evidence procedure.
Statement: “The Moon is made of green cheese.”
Question: “How do you know?”
The idea behind the Metamodel question is to discover the rationale behind the statement rather than simply saying, “That’s crazy.” All the Metamodel questions are designed to fill in or correct significant deletions, distortions, and unwarranted generalizations in what is being said.
Following the shooting and the outcry for more and better gun control, a number of politicians were saying that we need more guns, not fewer. The claim was that if teachers and custodians had been armed, they could have “taken out” the shooter before most of the children had been killed. Metamodel questions about those claims would reveal deletions, distortions, and unwarranted generalizations.
What evidence suggests that armed teachers would have provided much of a defense, and what evidence suggests that more guns make communities safer? The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other industrialized country, so if more guns make us safer, we should be the safest nation in the world. That isn’t the case, however. Other countries, including Norway and Scotland have had similar attacks, but no other country has such attacks with the frequency of the U.S.
Would more guns be an effective deterrent? Although many gun owners like to think of themselves as the modern equivalent of Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok, most civilians have insufficient training to hit the right target at the right time. Even with sufficient training, armed civilians are lucky when they succeed. Even police on the job are as likely to shoot bystanders as they are the “evil doer.”
Saying that armed teachers and custodians might have been able to take the shooter out before most of the children had been killed presupposes that some children would have been killed. How many dead children would be an acceptable number to continue ensuring the availability of automatic weapons? Whatever your ideas for preventing the slaughter of innocents, subject your beliefs to an evidence procedure that is not only practical, but also will withstand scrutiny. What does the evidence suggest? One of the ironies of the current policy in the U.S., is that gun advocates in Congress want to allow guns everywhere but in their own chambers. If more guns really would ensure greater safety, why does Congress prohibit guns in their chambers and install metal detectors to keep them out?
Evidence suggests, however, that gun advocates are right about one thing. The problem isn’t guns per se. Switzerland, for example, has about as many guns per capita as the U.S., and somehow the Swiss manage to live peacefully with one another—at least for the most part. The one recent exception occurred in 2001, when a disgruntled citizen opened fire with his army rifle and killed 14 and injured 14 others. Norway and Switzerland have one crazy shooter in a decade or two, the U.S. not only has mass shootings with regularity, but virtually countless additional gun-related homicides daily. When it comes to gun violence, the U.S. is the “outlier.”
It would be nice to know what makes the difference, but having a scientific evidence procedure to investigate that issue seems unlikely. Gun proponents in the U.S. have made researching the subject of gun violence difficult. It is hard to conduct scientific research when Congress prohibits funding for such research. Some statistics comparing gun violence by country are available, but they haven’t been subjected to much analysis, nor have they been widely published.
Most of the major issues in U.S. politics at this point (and I suspect other countries have the same or similar issues) pit one viewpoint against its opposite without examining the available evidence. People simply take sides and argue. Global warming (global climate change) is one such issue. The evidence is available to prove or disprove global climate change and the degree to which human activity (primarily the burning of fossil fuels) is a contributing factor. We have climate records for a lot of years at this point, and we can measure CO2 in both the atmosphere and the oceans. It is understandable that deciding what to do and whether to take action are still matters of debate, but the evidence is available that shows it is time for serious discussion.
Another major issue, at least in the States, about which people take sides and argue about without having a well-considered evidence procedure is fiscal policy. Do we have a revenue problem, a spending problem, or both? Does “trickle down” economic policy actually work? What evidence supports the recent claims that the wealthiest of people are “job creators”? At this point, we have good records of tax rates over time and their relation to national economic well-being, so we ought to have a good idea of what works. When we create essentially a religious belief in a point of view and steadfastly refuse to look at the evidence, we end up arguing with reality. And, as Byron Katie has said, “When you argue with reality, you lose—but only 100 percent of the time” (Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life).
In addition to revenue and spending, we seem to lack good evidence procedures for where and how we spend our collective funds. How much defense spending do we really need to remain relatively safe, and what exactly do we hope to do with our military might? What else could we do with some of the money currently going to the military-industrial complex? Why should health-care in the States be more expensive while having worse outcomes than health-care in most other industrialized nations? It seems to me that for far too many things, people form opinions—essentially religious beliefs—about subjects without having the willingness to examine related evidence.
I think it would be in our best interests to look closely at the available evidence, even when the evidence might suggest that some of our beliefs simply don’t hold water.
