Pre-emptive Updates from 2021
This one is delayed because I wanted to just think about it for a day. What felt, at the time, like normal wait-and-see scientific caution on my part about the Trayvon Martin case (which I repeatedly mispronounced in the audio) now feels much different. George Zimmerman continued on a course of domestic violence and stoking of the fires of racial controversy over the past decade. The Stand Your Ground laws have been found to enable not just shootings in general but especially shootings of black people. From another story in the Independent about a Florida lawmaker’s attempt to repeal the law earlier this year:
Mr Jones pointed to statistics from Everytown USA, a gun-control group, which found that Stand Your Ground-type laws across the country contribute to an extra 150 gun deaths each month, and that white shooters with black victims were deemed justified five times more often than the reverse.
Those stats, according to the Everytown.org website, were pulled from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 2014-2018. This is one of two official government measures of homicide, the other being from the Centers for Disease Control (both explained and compared in terms of sensitivity and completeness here; includes the links I used to follow up).
I went to the government’s “Easy Access to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports,” and the tool was in fact easy to use, but it did not allow me to recreate Everytown’s analysis in terms of the homicides being ruled as justified or not.
Fact-checking is hard. That’s why more people don’t do it.
Original Episode Blurb from 2012
Today’s episode is partly about lazy journalism and fact-checking. As you'll hear in the episode, it seems pretty common on the web these days. In fact, I disagree (nervously, because I've never disagreed with a guest before) with Danielle Lee a little about one particular post, although I explicitly attribute it to expertise and not bias or laziness.
We both want these kinds of tragic shootings to stop, and (to me) the only way for that to happen is to understand what really causes them -- and not just at the level of statistical generalizations about WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) undergraduate psychology students, like the paper I mentioned and link to at the bottom of the post, but at the level of individual cases. Is the Trayvon Martin case typical? Based on George Zimmerman's 911 call record (50-some calls over several months), I'm guessing it is not quite typical.
How much of this particular case is race, and how much of it is the "Stand Your Ground" law, which has supposedly tripled the number of cases ruled justifiable homicides in 5 years? Talk about an environmental change that selects for different behaviors . . .
Episode References:
The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence Institute:
The Science Channel's Alien Encounters:
Contact: Cultures of the Imagination
Fibroid tumors and hair relaxers:
Shooting studies
In two links you can get here (read the abstract, or the whole paper, for free):
Baba Brinkman’s webpage (currently unhacked):
OPP’s Naughty by Nature lyrics:
Juvenile’s Mama Got Ass lyrics:
Kanye West’s Gold Digger lyrics:
Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison lyrics:
And, finally, to complete my plug for the Kentucky Bach Choir (friend of the show Tom Drury was a member):
VSI Episode 38