Earlier this week the non-partisan Pew Research Center released a report on gun violence in America. Acknowledging that mass shootings remain a “matter of great public interest and concern” the report nevertheless points out that “compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010.” (It cites a Bureau of Justice Statistics review which found that “homicides that claimed at least three lives accounted for less than 1% of all homicide deaths from 1980 to 2008 overall.”) The report also notes that in 2010 55% of gun homicide victims were black (compared with the 13% black share of the population) and that the firearm suicide rate (6.3 per 100,000 people) is actually higher than the firearm homicide rate (3.6 gun per 100,000) and, like several other metrics of violent crime, was falling rapidly.
It is often difficult to make sense of broad statistical findings without a specific context, especially when the subject is something as incendiary as gun control. But a closer look at the Pew numbers does suggest why the US Senate’s failure to pass gun control legislation elicited such outrage. While the numbers are unquestionably falling (in 2010 there were 11,078 gun homicide deaths, compared with 18,253 in 1993) neither the data, nor its analysis, address the extraordinarily high rate of gun crime that has long been one of the darker features of American life. Last month, by contrast, Slate magazine crowdsourced a response to the question “How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?” The answer – which remains a work in progress – currently stands at 3,947. One remarkable feature of the Slate report, is that it allows viewers to customize the presentation of its data, to learn, for example, that nearly 200 teenagers are included in that number, and at least 75 children, and that 22 (just over 0.5%) of the victims were female.
In his preface to The Rhetoric of Reaction, a classic analysis of how easily political arguments can abandon the pursuit of knowledge in favour of polemical advantages, Albert Hirschman points out that “[t]he unsettling experience of being shut off, not just from the opinions, but from the entire life experience of large numbers of one’s contemporaries is actually typical of modern democratic societies.” He adds that if this “systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens” is allowed to feed on itself “each group will at some point ask about the other, in utter puzzlement and often with mutual revulsion, ‘How did they get to be that way?’”
Applying Hirschman’s insights the current gun-control debate, it is easy to see how the NRA and its lobbyists will seize on the Pew report to argue that the public response to recent shootings flies in the face long term statistical data. It will, in apparent good faith, counsel lawmakers against emotional appeals from the public that will pressure them into drafting bad gun control policies. As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein notes in a recent review of Hirschman’s biography, the NRA has already deployed variations on each of the three main polemical strategies Hirschman identified in his book. Some have cautioned against perversity (arguing that new laws actually produce more violence); others have warned of futility (that gun-control laws are irrelevant, since “people kill people”); and several have chosen to highlight jeopardy (the idea that, in Hirschman’s words, “the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high, as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.”). Beyond these rhetorical manoeuvres, of course, anyone who believes that murderous violence which disproportionately affects racial minorities, teenagers and children should be dealt with immediately, regardless of the political cost, is likely to take a very different view of these matters. Similar discrepancies between the two parties’ opinions are also noticeable on healthcare, abortion, marriage equality, foreign policy and a host of other issues.
Two decades have passed since Hirschman’s book was published, and technology has transformed the way we consume, share and process information. Today it costs little for large groups to weigh the meaning and value of large quantities of data, to sift through complex arguments, or to brood on any number of legal, social, political or economic factors which may affect their common interests. Hayek’s vision of free markets as a means of optimizing the knowledge “which is and which remains widely dispersed among individuals” has become a daily reality for thousands of people, often working in different countries, who collaborate to write software code, edit documents, and pool their instincts and knowledge on a wide variety of immediate concerns.
One well-known example of how efficiently this new system can work is the virtual prediction market that Google uses to aggregate feedback from its staff. In Infotopia – How Many Minds Produce Knowledge – Sunstein observes that Google’s internal market – which allows employees to place ‘bets’ on such things as sales forecasts and product launch dates, with virtual money that can be redeemed for prizes – has proved “stunningly accurate” on many occasions. (He also shows how other collectives fall prey to ‘groupthink’ which confirms their original biases and leads to dangerously flawed analyses and conclusions – such as the near certainty within the higher ranks of America’s Intelligence community that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.)
Sadly, little of the former, pathbreaking sort of collaboration seems to have changed the most consequential parts of the public sphere in America, or anywhere else. So while we are becoming noticeably better at processing information for private or commercial purposes, our ability to produce and share similar insights across political and ideological lines has barely made any progress at all. Here, as in so many other areas, Hirschman was unusually prescient. The great political challenge of this, or any, era is not simply how well it can deliberate on present crises and opportunities, but the manner in which such deliberation proceeds. For without a better sense of how gun crime, health insurance, welfare or even foreign policy should be assessed for the common benefit, much analysis and data, however thorough, remains largely beside the point.
