Do Guns Make You Safe?

Over on Facebook, a friend shared a story about an elderly woman who was pulled over. The officer discovered that she had a variety of guns in the car. (She had a permit.) The story ends with the woman saying that she's not scared of "a f***ing thing," the implication clearly being that it's because she has firepower at her disposal. A friend chimed in that there's "nothing for one's piece of mind that good, reliable piece of the gun maker's craft," to which I replied:

Yet, oddly, *not* owning a gun makes you safer, statistically speaking. Chalk one up for human irrationality!

I recall having read this statistic although I freely admit I can't remember the source, or any specific study that backs it up, which makes me wonder how true it may be.

The easiest way to frame the question is: Does owning a gun actually make you safer?

If people with guns are safer than people without guns, then the increased peace of mind is fully justified ... but are they?

Cause and Effect
First of all, let's be clear on what I said ... or, more specifically, what I did not say. I did not say that buying a gun, by itself, makes someone less safe. I said that statistically speaking someone who doesn't own a gun is more safe than someone who owns a gun. Even if the statistic is true, this doesn't mean that the gun itself is the cause of the decrease in safety. In fact, likely far from it.

For example, it's very reasonable to think that many people who have legitimate fears for their safety would go out and buy a gun, such as in the case of someone who has received specific death threats. In this case, the gun isn't the cause in the decrease of safety. These people are already in a situation where they're afraid for their lives, and the gun is an effect, not a cause, of the decreased safety. This is perfectly in line with my above statement.

Or, alternately (and probably more commonly), someone who has an illegitimate fear for their safety goes out and buys in a gun. As I will show, it's actually very unlikely that most people will be a victim of violent crime, so if you're afraid of being a target, it's probably a misplaced fear. In other words, I would argue that people who fall in this category are more prone to excessive amounts of stress over unnecessary things, and you're far more likely to die from stress-related causes (heart disease, stroke, etc.) than from a firearm, according to the CDC.

I suspect that the results of my analysis will say that guns do increase safety, but that's in part because I don't have the research capacity to actually look into all of the demographic information involved.

How Prevalent is Violent Crime?

The point is that a gun gives one "piece of mind," which presumably comes from the idea that the gun offers protection from potential harm. In other words, the gun is acting as insurance. If you are in a situation where a gun can protect you from harm, then this feeling might be perfectly justified.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, in 2010 there were 1,246,248 violent crimes. Here are other statistics from that report: 

• There were an estimated 403.6 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. 
• Aggravated assaults accounted for the highest number of violent crimes reported to law enforcement at 62.5 percent. Robbery comprised 29.5 percent of violent crimes, forcible rape accounted for 6.8 percent, and murder accounted for 1.2 percent of estimated violent crimes in 2010. 
• Information collected regarding type of weapon showed that firearms were used in 67.5 percent of the Nation’s murders, 41.4 percent of robberies, and 20.6 percent of aggravated assaults. (Weapons data are not collected for forcible rape.)

Using the 403.6 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants figure, if we assume that crimes are distributed randomly among the population, then the probability of being the victim of a violent crime is 0.4% in 2010.

Now, the intelligent reader will argue that there are no doubt more crimes than this, because certainly violent crimes happen which the police never learn of. I'll grant this point. In fact, looking at previous years shows that this is actually a fairly low rate even among the crimes that law enforcement knows about. (In 2008, for example, it was closer to 0.45%.) The Crime Victimization Survey 2010 indicates that 50% of crimes are never reported, but I'm assuming that the Uniform Crime Report includes all of these, not just the ones that are actually reported.

One other factor, which is harder to nail down, is about crimes that are completely averted because of the presence of a gun. In a 1994 study, criminologist Gary Kleck indicated that he believed (based on survey data) that somewhere between 800,000 and 2.5 million crimes were averted because of the presence of a gun. (Oddly, many of those citing him, including Wikipedia, reference only the 2.5 million number. Biased much?)

Still, we can assume that there are a fair number of crimes out there which take place if not for the presence of guns. For the sake of argument, let's assume that there's a real massive unseen sea of lawlessness out there, and in fact there are twice as many violent crimes (or attempted ones) as those that law enforcement officially included in their Uniform Crime Report.

Using our new, probably-high estimate, we end up with a 0.8% chance of a random person being the victim of a violent crime. Let's round up to an even 1%!

Demographic Considerations

I have, of course, vastly over-simplified things. Among gun-owners in America, the vast majority don't own guns for protection, but rather own them for hunting and other sport activities. And most of these people live in rural areas. (Reference: Gun politics in the United States, Wikipedia.) Therefore, the majority of guns are in rural areas, but the majority of crime is in urban areas.

Similarly, our previous (high) estimate of 1% was assuming that violent crimes are evenly distributed among the population, but that's almost certainly not true. Some people are more likely to be victims of violent crimes. People, for reasons both legitimate and illegitimate, end up in situations that make them more likely to become the target of a violent crime, such as:

• convenience store clerks (robbery target)
• coin shop proprietors (robbery target)
• drug dealers (criminals / hang out with criminals / robbery target)
• drug users (wrong place / wrong time / hang out with criminals)
• money launderers for the mob (hang out with criminals)
• people who steal from the mob (piss off criminals)
• off-duty policy officers (revenge / piss off criminals)

You get the idea. Some of these people, legitimately realizing that they're likely going to be targets of criminals, are also likely to own a firearm. (My local coin shop, for example, features a prominently displayed handgun in easy reach of the clerk.) These people have a reasonable expectation that they may enter into a situation where there is violence, and where a gun might save their life, so they may well be justified in having an increased peace of mind. (I would argue, however, that their peace of mind could be increased even more by going into another line of work that lowers their risk of being assaulted.)

In fact, most of these people would probably be in a situation to be victims over and over again, which further throws off the statistical prediction (already very high) that the average person has a 1% chance of being the victim of a violent crime in a given year.

Do You Need a Gun?

In a given year, then, saying that there's an 1% chance that our hypothetical "average person" would be the victim of a violent crime is a very high estimate. If 25% of American adults own firearms (according to Wikipedia), that means that we have over 78,000,000 gun owners in the United States. Using these numbers, we would therefore expect that about 780,000 gun owners would be targets of violent crimes. Of course, many criminals are also gun owners, so these aren't necessarily going to be "innocent" people, but that's not really relevant to the analysis.

Note: This again throws the earlier statistics from Kleck into question. It's unrealistic to believe that 780,000 gun owners are able to prevent 2.5 million crimes a year by virtue of having their guns. Even the low estimate of 800,000 is highly questionable. This reassures us that we're making estimates that are skewed, if anywhere, in favor of gun ownership being beneficial. Of course, it may be that they're counting the deterrent effect of people like my coin shop owner having a gun on display, which I imagine does prevent people from being too stupid and trying to rob him on a whim.

However, are those 780,000 gun owners really safer? (For the sake of argument, we will assume that the gun owner is carrying their gun when targeted by a violent crime - yet another bias in favor of the gun owner.) It seems to me like violent attacks come in two varieties:

• Attempts to do harm (possibly with robbery as a motive)
• Robbery (with the intent to do harm if needed)

Based on the Uniform Crime Statistics, it looks like about 25% of the violent crimes are robberies. (Presumably if someone is shot and robbed, it would count as a murder, not a robbery, but that's not really clear from the report and I don't have the time to dive much deeper into the data than I already am.)

Therefore, it would seem that there will be about 535,000 direct assaults on gun owners with the specific intent to do them harm. In other words, the goal of the violent crime is murder, aggravated assault, or rape. Presumably these 535,000 people are able to prevent the assault, either by referencing the weapon, displaying it, or shooting the assailant. There may be a handful where the person only planned to beat the person up but they changed to murder when the victim pulled a gun, but I'm going to assume this is a negligible situation.

Now, on to robberies. Using our approximations, there are 195,000 people who are robbed while carrying a firearm. Again, the Uniform Crime Report indicates that firearms are used in about 42% of robberies, so we have 113,100 cases where the victim has "outgunned" the attacker and 81,900 cases where they're pulling a gun on a robber with a gun.

My assumption is that the average robber actually would prefer to take the money (or car or whatever) and run, without having to shoot anyone. Therefore, in these 81,900 cases, I'd say that the person pulling the gun has actually now escalated an already bad situation, and probably increased the likelihood that someone - possibly themselves - will be shot. I have no reasonable way to evaluate how these scenarios typically play out, so I'll just call this a wash: let's say there's a 50/50 chance a person in this situation comes out without being shot. However, if they had just handed over their wallet, I'm assuming the robber would have left, which means that the ownership of a gun has increased the chance that you'll be shot in about 40,000 cases.

We'll assume that the robber without a gun surrenders or runs away, although there is a possibility of the gun owner being stabbed while going for the gun or that the robber tries to wrestle it away or something.

So, in other words, using these assumptions we have the following results:

• 40,000 cases - gun owner escalates the situation and gets hurt
• 740,000 cases - gun owner prevents a violent crime

Certainly, it does look like (on average) if you are going to be the victim of a violent crime, then you come out ahead if you're carrying a firearm. That's to be expected, of course, so it's nice that our estimates have confirmed intuition.

Now, though, let's keep in mind the various pro-gun ownership assumptions needed to reach these numbers:

• A high probability of being a target of violent crime, evenly distributed randomly among the population.
• All gun owners possess a gun appropriate for personal protection
• All gun owners always carry the gun (or at least when being victimized)
• The vast majority of gun owners are successfully able to use the gun to thwart the crime (except for the handful who I assume escalate danger during a robbery)

But what about the rest of the population?

The 99%

Our various pro-gun assumptions do have consequences for the rest of the population.

Specifically, we are now assuming that there are 78,000,000 gun-owners who are continuously within arm's reach of their firearm at any given moment. For one thing, this means that every criminal who owns a gun is always carrying it with him, which means our earlier estimates of the number of gun-related crimes was likely fairly low.

In 2004, the CDC reports a total of 750 accidental shootings of various types and around 18,700 suicides by firearms. The low shooting rate is likely in part because most people keep their guns (which, remember, are mostly used for hunting and other sporting activities) safely stowed, locked up, and unloaded, the vast majority of the time.

I think that even pro-gun advocates would agree we don't want all gun owners to have guns quite this accessible, and that doing so would likely increase the amount of gun injuries and deaths. Even if you assume that all gun owners are proficient in handling their gun, and you assume that there's a 1-in-a-million chance that an experienced gun-owner has a mishap that results in injury, you end up the following:

78,000,000 gun owners handling guns 3 times a day (at least) for 365 days a year = 85,410,000,000 gun interactions

Even a one-in-a-million chance of accident is going to be bad in this firearm utopia, resulting in:

85,410 gun accidents a year.

Still, the 740,000 hypothetical violent crimes that have been prevented are more than enough to probably justify these 85,410 gun accidents.

As I said at the beginning, though, these statistics have been fairly easy to find or extrapolate, but what's a lot less clear is the hidden correlation. Do gun owners stress out more or less than non-gun owners? What other demographic trends are there? Does the gun-owning population live more high-risk lifestyles, either in legitimate ways (hunting) or illegal ones (drug dealing)?

So, in short, it looks like guns may make you a bit more safe ... but the real takeaway from all of this research is, for me, that you really weren't that unsafe in the first place!

Sam Harris on Lying

I'm not much for lying. For one thing, I tend to suck at it. Very badly, in fact. I giggle a lot when lying, which doesn't help carry off the subterfuge.

So I avoid lying, mostly. At times, I probably go out of my way, blurting out my thoughts on issues where it would be better to keep silent. I actually love debating and, as any readers of this blog know, I love being a devil's advocate, so if someone says something that I see any reason to disagree with, I'm likely to actually voice that disagreement ... even if, in general, I agree with the overall sentiment.

That's not to say that I never lie, though.

For example, I have carried out the cultural myth-building around Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for both of my children ... feeling some measure of guilt and confusion even as I have done so. It causes cognitive dissonance, but I do love Santa Claus, and can't imagine being the jerk who dis-spells that particular illusion in my children.

Probably the worst "real" lying I've done in recent years has been focused around one thing: food. I'm diabetic and regularly sneak food that isn't good for me, and I'll go out of my way to hide this from my wife. It's caused several fights, though, and she knows that the one thing she can't trust me with is food. My wife would prefer that I not be poisoning my body with sugary foods. (She's picky that way.) As such, this lack of self control - and the lying related to it - has actually led to some of the strongest tension in our marriage.

And that, ultimately, is Sam Harris' point in this essay - released exclusively on the Kindle as part of the Kindle Singles line of short e-books. Using primarily anecdotes and personal reflections, Harris makes his case that lying in any form erodes the trust that forms the foundation of any relationship. It's a compelling case, especially when he argues that even white lies erode trust.

But as I said in my Amazon.com review, the biggest problem is that in describing his approach of radical honesty, the scientific evidence isn't front-and-center, but rather takes something of a back seat to the anecdotes.

There are some discussions of the science, though. For example, Harris explains that evidence suggestions that the erosion of trust works both ways. Liars are actually more distrustful of the people they deceive than they would otherwise be. This revelation carries a bit less weight than it could have, though, because the research isn't described, it's only footnoted. For people like me who really enjoy hearing how these things are tested, it fell a bit short of my expectations.

However, if you've ever felt like you'd like to be more honest, to avoid the lying that seems so prevalent in our social conventions, Harris does make a compelling case that it is possible to live a kind and social life while avoiding any sort of overt dishonesty. It's not his best work, but it's still a fun (and quick!) read.

The other good news is that the essay is very cheap - only $1.99 at the time of this writing.

Unintended Consequences: Religious Freedom, Unless You're a Minister

This week, the Supreme Court unanimously decided in favor of religious institutions being able to make decisions about who they hire and fire, without government interference. While this is certainly a strong decision in favor of religious freedom, I think that those who are heralding this as a resounding success for religion as a whole are missing the point. While this decision does protect the rights of a religious institution, I think that it does so at the expense of ministers' rights.

Background
I don't follow Supreme Court cases very closely, but this week two of my Facebook friends led me to links about a recent case which was being portrayed as a key decision in favor of religious freedom against an administration that was seeking greater government control over religious institutions. The articles they pointed to are here, here, and here.

Now, none of these articles actually describe the specifics of this case - specifically, why she was fired - which instantly caused me to think there was more to the story. A quick search brought me to the actual Supreme Court decision and to this PBS Newshour discussion of the topic:



In short, here are the specifics of the case as I understand them:

• Cheryl Perich was a "lay teacher" at  Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School. 
• She underwent extra religious training to become a "called teacher," which includes an official title of "Minister of Religion, Commissioned."
• Perich developed narcolepsy and began the 2004-2005 school year on medical disability leave.
• She tried to return in February, but was told a lay teacher was filling her position through the remainder of the year.
• She was offered a deal on medical benefits if she agreed to resign. 
• She refused to resign and showed up for work in February, refusing to leave until she received written documentation that she had come in for work.
• She was told that she was going to be fired, at which point she said that she had rights under the American with Disabilities Act.
• Because she was disruptive, insubordinate, and had threatened legal action - and in general damaged her "working relationship" with the church and school - the school fired her.
• She filed a lawsuit on the basis that she had been fired for her disability and threatening legal action. (You normally can't be fired for threatening to exercise your rights under ADA.)

The Supreme Court has never officially ruled on whether labor laws apply to religious officials, but the lower courts have long recognized a "ministerial exemption" to labor laws. Perich lost the first case, but on appeal she won, because the appeals court decided that she didn't really count as a "minister." This is what brought it to the Supreme Court, whose ruling was:

1. Yes, Perich did count as a minister.
2. Yes, there is a ministerial exemption to the ADA (and, presumably, other workplace discrimination laws)
3. No, we aren't going to clearly define what a minister is. That will be left for each individual case. These cases can still be brought to court.

It should be noted that this was a unanimous decision.

Is This a Religious Question?
Let me first say that I do think the court's unanimous decision on this was the right one. The Constitution clearly lays out religious exception from federal control, and the justices across the board ruled that this shouldn't be tampered with.

Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so, intrudes upon more than a mere employment decision.  Such action interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs. By imposing an unwanted minister, the state infringes the Free Exercise Clause, which protects a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments.  According the state the power to determine which individuals will minister to the faithful also violates the Establishment Clause, which prohibits government involvement in such ecclesiastical decisions.

However, part of the reason that this case is so powerful is that the circumstances are not at all religious. This minister/teacher wasn't fired for violating any sort of religious code, or because she did not "personify its beliefs."

She was fired because she had narcolepsy and they replaced her while she was on medical leave.

As far as I can tell, if she had remained a "lay teacher" and had never gone to the trouble of being classified as a "called teacher," she would have been fully protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, because the "ministerial exception" wouldn't have applied.

So, in other words, the very fact that she became a minister robbed her of certain rights!

Because of this, it looks like the EEOC took the tactic of arguing not only that she wasn't a minister, but that even if she was a minister, the ministerial exemption wouldn't apply. The justices had no choice but to knock aside such an argument and they did so unanimously.

But what exactly are the consequences of this decision?

Churches Can Discriminate
What intrigues me about this case is that, if I understand it correctly, it has basically codified that ministers cannot have any legal job protection. It is, in essence, placing the rights of the religious institution above the rights of the individual religious person. (This is assuming, of course, that you concede the point of the American with Disabilities Act, that Americans have a right to not be discriminated against because of having a disability.)

The irony of this really cannot be overstated.

The one place in America where a person with a disability has no legal rights against discrimination is if they choose to become a minister for a church.

Concern 1: Unethical Churches
My wife brought up one concern immediately. Having grown up evangelical, she is used to churches that talk about "ministry" in very sweeping terms. She pointed out that she could well imagine unethical churches writing their contracts so the janitors are serving a ministry of cleanliness, or the secretaries are serving a ministry of organization.

I'm not too concerned about this sort of maneuver. The decision does point out that "... such a title [as minister], by itself, does not automatically ensure coverage [under the ministerial exemption]..." There's no indication within the decision that a janitor would fall under the ministerial exemption (although Justice Thomas's brief on the case apparently says that courts shouldn't second-guess a church's designation of who is or is not a minister).

Concern 2: The Disabled Minister
No, my bigger concern is that this ruling will have a negative impact on religious people exercising their individual religious convictions.

For example, let's consider a person who has a disability and feels a calling to go into religious work as a minister. Let's assume this person knows that their disability will, at some point, require them to go on leaves of absence for surgery or other forms of treatment.

This court decision now places an added burden on that person, because they will be foregoing all legal protections to which they would have been entitled if they'd gone into another field. When they go on medical leave, they'll have to wonder if they'll come back to find that they've been replaced. They'll have to go to the added trouble of negotiating all of these things into their contracts up front, instead of relying on the ADA to protect them. (The Supreme Court decision makes it clear that churches can still be targeted with non-discrimination lawsuits, such as those for breach of contract or worker injury claims.)

The decision to go into the ministry always involves sacrifice (unless you're making millions of dollars running a megachurch or television ministry) but this decision seems to me that it is removing from ministers a right which everyone else in the country has: the right to be protected from job discrimination based on disabilities.

And in all of the stories where people are declaring this as a victory for religious liberty, that message seems to be getting lost.

Books Read in 2011

Every year, I like to look back at all of the books I've read in the previous year. In the days to come, I'll no doubt be putting together a more comprehensive retrospective of my other 2011 activities, but this is a good starting point. So, on to the list (with links to my reviews, when I got around to actually reviewing them):

The Books

1. Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld (audiobook)
2. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
3. The Wealthy Writer by Michael Meanwell
4. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen
5. A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
6. The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris (audiobook)
7. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson (audiobook)
8. Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (re-read)
9. Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein (audiobook)
10. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal (audiobook)
11. I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
12. The Gospel According to Jesus by Christopher Seay (audiobook)
13. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
14. WWW: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer
15. The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones
16. The Amazing Story of Quantum Physics by James Kakalios (audiobook)
17. The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff
18. Our Choice by Al Gore (abridged audiobook)
19. Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination by Hugh McLeod
20. Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science by Lawrence Krauss (audiobook)
21. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (Kindle)
22. Goblin Tales by Jim C. Hines (Kindle)
23. Wild Hunt by Margaret Ronald
24. Soul Hunt by Margaret Ronald
25. Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales, & Michael Bair (graphic novel)
26. Superman: Earth One by J. Michael Straczynski & Shane Davis (graphic novel)
27. JLA: Crisis of Conscience by Geoff Johns, et. al. (graphic novel)
28. Infinite Crisis by Geoff Johns, et. al. (graphic novel)
29. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (abridged audiobook)
30. Superman: New Krypton vol. 1-4 by Geoff Johns, et. al. (graphic novel)
31. Feynman by James Octaviani (graphic novel)
32. Pathfinder Tales: Death's Heretic by James L. Sutter
33. What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (Kindle)
34. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing by Barry Schwartz & Kenneth Sharpe (audiobook)
35. Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones
36. Goliath by Scott Westerfeld
37. Kitemaster & Other Stories by Jim C. Hines (Kindle)
38. Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture edited by William Irwin (Kindle - free!)
39. The Spiritual Power of Nonviolence: Interfaith Understanding for a Future Without War by George Wolfe (Kindle)
40. Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto
41. A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
42. A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (Kindle)
43. A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (Kindle)
44. The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card (audiobook)
45. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham (Kindle - free or get the illustrated edition!)

Analysis - My Kindle Transformation

The record-keeping this year got a bit more complex, as I caught up on some graphic novels and decided to include them in the count. The total book counts came out to:

• 26 books read (9 on the Kindle)
• 7 graphic novels
• 12 audiobooks

By and large, I've switched to buying new books on the Kindle (on my iPad app), with two exceptions:

• I know the author and will want the book autographed
• Review books still come in hardcopy, because publicists have yet to catch on to the idea of offering digital review copies

It took me a while to warm up to the digital books, but I'm finding it a very good format to read, especially on the iPad. The technology has progressed to the point where I do not miss the hardcopy books. Pretty much all of the books that I purchased in the second half of 2011 were in Kindle format.

The major benefit of Kindle (or other digital editions) for me is in the ability to make notes and search the book. The non-fiction I read (and even much of the fiction) is for research purposes, and being able to make notes and highlights within the book as I go is immensely valuable.

A secondary benefit of the iPad is that I am able to read with the lights off while my wife is sleeping. There's an option to switch to a black background with white text, and I find that this doesn't provide the backlighting problems that sometimes can come from a bright white background with black text.

A quick tally indicates to me that about 17 of them were purchased by me (although some were purchased before 2011), 5 were provided as free review copies from the publisher, 2 were obtained as free Kindle editions (links above), leaving 21 that I got from the library, which also now offers Kindle editions.

My number of audiobooks (mostly from the library) have also dropped dramatically, primarily because I've begun listening to podcasts (especially physics podcasts) more often than audiobooks. Also, I have begun working at home full time, so my 4+ hours of commuting time a week is gone, which also drops the amount of time I have to listen to anything.

The History

Here are some of my previous reading lists, offered here merely for the sake of completeness:

• 2010 books
• 2009 books
• 2008 books

Spider-Man Comes to iPad

One of my favorite modern myths is Spider-Man. Let's tick off all of the great things about Spider-Man's origin:

1. Peter Parker starts out as a teenage science geek
2. Peter Parker is bullied by other, more powerful kids
3. Though he gets enhanced powers, these powers are also augmented by his own innovation (in the comic, he doesn't naturally shoot webs, but instead designs and builds "webslingers" which shoot a chemical web compound of his own creation)
4. Upon gaining his powers, Peter responds by seeking self-satisfaction and fame
5. Peter's self-absorption leads to the death of his Uncle Ben
6. Peter vows to dedicate his life to the cause of justice, to serving others, as a means of atoning for his failure
7. Peter doesn't (in general) brood over this decision, but embraces it joyously, becoming "your friendly neighborhood webslinger"

Frankly, this resonates with me far more than the origin tales of other heroes, like Superman, Batman, Captain America (who has no real moral failings), or most of the other modern comic superheroes. I am very thankful that my eldest son likes Spider-Man, because this is a hero that I can really support him modeling himself on.

So I was very pleased to find out about "The Amazing Spider-Man: An Origin Story," an interactive reading app that has recently come out for the iPhone and iPad, read by none other than Stan Lee himself. The app currently sells for $6.99. My son and I had the opportunity to go through it and he "really liked it." So did I, though my one concern was that it was done pretty fast.

The story outlined is the basic origin story, without many of the embellishments that have been added over the years. There's no Doc Ock, Lizard, or Green Goblin. No supervillains at all, in fact. It's just about Peter gaining his powers and how he got set onto the path. It can be read or you can listen to Stan Lee narrate the tale at your own pace, with activities interwoven into the narrative. So the child (presumably) reading it is able to run the accelerator that irradiates the spider, look for hidden spider symbols, and swing Spidey from building to building.

The whole thing was over in easily less than a half hour, and these activities aren't really engaging enough to keep the student "playing" for longer. If you're looking for an app that can keep the kids busy for a long drive, though, this wouldn't be that app. This is best viewed as an interactive book, not an actual game. Like a book, the child will read it, then be done and, hopefully, come back to it later to read once again.

And, along the way, they might just learn the important lesson at the heart of Peter Parker's origin:

With great power comes great responsibility.

Disclaimer: I was provided a free iPad copy of this game by Disney Publishing Worldwide Applications, for review purposes. No other compensation was provided in exchange for this review.

Two Packages in the Mail: Books and a Game

This morning, two packages showed up on my doorstep, both of which are worth some discussion.

The first was a copy of my two contributor's copies from the anthology The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy. I've discussed this collection (and my essay in it) on the blog before. When I get around to reading the other essays, I'll probably have some more to say about it.

For now, though, I'd like to talk a bit about the other package that arrived. It was a promo copy of the board game Kings of Air and Steam. I learned about this game from the GeekDad blog, which posted a lengthy review of the game.

What's strange about this is that the game isn't even released yet, and won't be for several months. Kings of Air and Steam is a steampunk-themed board game that's going through a Kickstarter crowdfunding drive right now. Tasty Minstrel Games has previously used Kickstarter to fund another game. This time, they've quickly raised enough money to definitely make the game a reality. They have a number of advanced levels which will help them make the game even more impressive, and as of the time of this writing they're about $5,000 dollars away from the first of these targets, which will allow them to add a "Mafia guys" team to the game. I'll give more details on the game and game play once I have time to, you know, play the game.

If you've never heard of Kickstarter, it's a website that allows businesses (or individuals, or organizations) to raise money on the internet. This is usually done by offering special prizes for people who help fund them at certain levels. In the case of Kings of Air and Steam, the benefits are editions of the game, sent to you ahead of the official release, at a deep discount. In this case, supporters also get their names in the rule manual as supporters, and there are some other nice benefits for higher levels of support.

I'll be reviewing the game for Black Gate magazine, probably in the next week or so, but if the game sounds like fun, you should definitely go ahead and buy your discounted copy now, because each copy purchased will help improve the game. After the "Mafia Guys" team is added, the next levels involve better quality of molded plastic miniatures. With a steampunk game, of course, you want a quality look and feel, so it'll be really nice for them to reach these higher levels, making the game more fun for everyone.

It's days like this that I realize how much fun it is to be a writer ... and to live in a world where I can devote my time to stuff like this.

Unintended Consequences: Embryonic-Americans in Mississippi

Next week, the people of Mississippi get to vote on who they think people are. No, we're not talking about a return of Jim Crowe laws, but instead to a recent measure called Initiative 26, which seeks to extend the rights of personhood to all fertilized embryos, thus creating a new class of American citizen: the Embryonic-American.

I recently learned about this issue while listening to one of the Nature magazine podcasts (one of many physics podcasts I've begun listening to lately), and they have an article up about it on their website. Over at Slate they brainstormed some strange implications of the new law, but I wanted to delve a bit more deeply into some of the unintended consequences, while The New York Times has tackled it in a more straightforward manner.

On the one hand, I have long supported this sort of move on the part of the pro-life movement. My biggest criticism of the pro-life stance is that it's so obviously inconsistent. If a fertilized embryo is truly a person, why can't pregnant women get tax deductions for embryos like they do for actual children? Why don't they count toward welfare payments of pregnant mothers? If a pregnant woman has children's life insurance through work, then shouldn't she get the life insurance if she has a miscarriage? In no way do we treat embryos and fetuses like actual children, thus undercutting the merit of their whole argument.

Of course, this new tactic creates huge problems of its own, even for those who are pro-life. In the words of Jackson, MI, fertility specialist Dr. Randall S. Hines, an advocate for Vote No on 26 (funded by Mississippians for Healthy Families), the amendment represents "biological ignorance." He goes on to say:

Once you recognize that the majority of fertilized eggs don’t become people, then you recognize how absurd this amendment is. (Source: NYT)

Specifically, the law runs the potential of drastically increasing the state's infant mortality rate and also making it illegal to practice many forms of fertility medicine, such as in vitro fertilization. In fact, it runs the risk of creating an opening for extensive government regulations of pregnant women - an almost-literal "nanny state" situation - where anything that could potentially harm an unborn fetus would be outlawed.

What Is Initiative 26?
The precise wording of Initiative 26 is:

Initiative #26 would amend the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of the state constitution, to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.

The word "person" or "persons" show up a few times in Article III of the Mississippi Constitution, but given that I doubt the fertilized embryos will exercise their rights to bear arms or are in danger of being convicted of treason, here are the ones that seem most relevant:

SECTION 8. All persons, resident in this state, citizens of the United States, are hereby declared citizens of the state of Mississippi.
SECTION 14. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property except by due process of law.

So, taken at face value, it seems that the state of Mississippi is proposing that all embryos gain citizenship rights at the moment of fertilization. The obvious consequence (and motivation) for this is to make abortions illegal in Mississippi, and to legally punish pregnant women whose actions lead to miscarriages.


Now, I suppose it could be argued that abortion has already been through "due process of law" since it's been through the court system. I'm not sure on the legal definition of "due process" in this case, so don't know what the ruling would be. Either way, it certainly gives Mississippi an opening to deny reproductive rights that have traditionally been upheld by federal law.


And it might not stop at Mississippi, because the U.S. Constitution contains this in Article IV Section 2:

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

I'm no Constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that this implies that if you're a citizen of Mississippi, then you must be afforded the rights of citizenship in all of the states. I don't know that this'll pass judicial muster, but I'm pretty sure that someone will try to invoke this, resulting in some sort of court battle. This is basically the same tactic that liberals try to use to spread gay marriage through the Full Faith & Credit clause (Section 1 of Article IV, by the way), which is why I am opposed to such back-door routes to policy change. Those back doors can always swing both ways.

So those are the intended consequences of this legislation, but what about the unintended consequences?

Fertility Police
The first unintended consequence takes the form of the fertility doctors who are currently rising up to oppose the legislation. See, when someone goes to a fertility doctor because of trouble conceiving a baby, what often happens is that the eggs and sperm are fertilized outside the body and then implanted in the woman's uterus. The problem is that this is a costly process and not all of the fertilized eggs will survive, so they take and fertilize more eggs than they'll need, picking the most promising of the fertilized eggs for implantation.

And that means that when the process is over, there are some fertilized eggs left lying around that have to be ... dealt with.

I won't go into detail on this (you can get some good details here, although it might be biased), except to say that it's probably an unintended consequence. While some extreme pro-life activists consider this on par with abortion, I've never really run into anyone who was particularly opposed to this aspect of assisted fertilization ... at least not when they've really been asked about it. The religious right is able to whip up a lot of loud support against embryonic stem cell research, but honestly, most people don't consider this as morally objectionable as even an early-term abortion. I doubt this was the goal of whoever posed the legislation.

Still, this law would clearly prohibit such activities, because these Embryonic-Americans are now citizens of the state of Mississippi. Mississippi cannot allow their citizens to be frozen (which carries with it a chance of killing the cell, as well) or handed off to some research laboratory. Fertility doctors in the state of Mississippi would essentially have to end all in vitro fertilization activities, forcing Mississippi residents who are having trouble conceiving to travel to another state for the procedure.

Infant Mortality Explosion
As bad as the fertility thing is, there's a bigger (at least numerically) unintended consequence: Missisippi's infant mortality. If they really invoke the law, and treat fertilized embryoes as people, then the result is an astounding increase in their infant mortality:

Mississippi's infant mortality rate goes immediately from 1% to 44%!

In fact, as I'll show below, this is actually a best-case scenario, using the lowest numbers, the ones that are most favorable to Mississippi's prospects of maintaining a low infant mortality rate. These deaths come about because about 30% (or, possibly, a less-favorable 50%) of all fertilized embryos (persons, under the new law) spontaneously miscarry, largely due to genetic abnormalities that make them non-viable. In other words, the mothers' body rejects the fertilized embryo.

However, natural deaths or not, these miscarriages would now be deaths of legal people in the state of Mississippi, and they have to be accounted for. The state would certainly be legally bound to account for the more than 19,000 prenatal deaths in some way.

Now, the state's numbers probably won't actually explode like this ... because when it comes to calculating infant deaths they will, of course, do the reasonable thing and not count embryos as people!

The Numbers Behind the Explosion
For those who are interested, I'll delve into the numbers behind this. (If you aren't interested, you can scroll down to the next section.) First, let's consider a couple of noteworthy statistics (from the BabyCenter website):

• 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, 80% in the first 12 weeks
• 30 to 50 percent of fertilized eggs are lost before or during the process of implantation

In other words, it's a sad fact, but miscarriages are extremely common. It's tragic on a personal level, but we're largely able to ignore the ramifications of these because, legally speaking, such early-term miscarriages "don't count" ... in fact, it appears from the numbers above that many of them happen without the woman even knowing that she's pregnant.

But, under this legislation, those miscarriages are all legally people.

According to the 2010 Mississippi Infant Mortality Report, published by the Mississippi State Department of Health, there are about 10 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births, or about 1% infant mortality. (The CDC lists Mississippi as having a 10% infant mortality rate in 2005, but I can't find confirmation of that.) About 61.6% of these deaths are "neonatal," which means they take place in the first 28 days after birth, and the remaining 38.4% take place between 28 days and the first birthday.


Using 2008 data, it looks like Mississippi has about 44,943 live births per year.


If there are 44,943 live births, then assuming that there were no abortions in Mississippi (there's only one abortion clinic in the whole state, according to NYT), and using the low-end 30% estimate of spontaneous miscarriages before/during implantation (and assuming that all of the remaining 70% make it to term), then that means that the low estimate is 19,261 spontaneous miscarriages within the state of Mississippi within a given year.

Here's the math:

Total fertilized embryos: 44,943 / 70% = 64,204

Miscarried fertilized embryos: 30% of 64,204 = 19,261

Current infant deaths: 1% of 44,943 = 449

Total embryonic & infant deaths: 19,261 + 449 = 19,710

New infant mortality rate: 19,710 / 44,943 = 43.9%

Birth Control Murder
While proponents of the law no doubt are happy to oppose abortion, it's possible that this law will run afoul of more traditional birth control as well. Many forms of birth control, in addition to limiting ovulation, also cause a thinning of the walls of the uterus, meaning that if a woman does ovulate and gets pregnant, then the egg will likely never even implant in the uterus. In these cases, the birth control pill will have resulted in the death of an Embryonic-American. Every woman who is taking the pill is now in danger of accidentally committing murder.

Mississippi: Nanny State
Taken to its extreme - as this law forces the state to do - Mississippi will be forced to make unprecedented legislation to protect its Embryonic-American citizens. Smoking will be outlawed. Drinking is a bit more unclear, since some evidence indicates that modest amounts of alcohol, such as white wine, can be beneficial while pregnant, while clearly drinking a fifth of Jack Daniels isn't beneficial for anybody, embryonic or post-natal. Is jogging while pregnant good or bad?

It would seem like miscarriages would need to be documented with death certificates, and perhaps there would even need to be investigations or autopsies to determine the cause of the prenatal death. So, while dealing with the trauma of a miscarriage, these 19,000+ women who have miscarriages will also have to justify their behavior to the state government.

In all, this personhood for Embryonic-Americans is just flat-out stupid on every level except one - the blatantly political attempt to make abortions illegal. In every other way, it will be (hopefully) ignored, because the consequences of actually following this law are absurd at best and potentially catastrophic at worst.