This post has a long introduction – please be patient. After the introduction, I’ll show how it relates to gun rights and self-defense. However, you need to understand the methodology detailed in the introduction.
Introduction
I have a technology background. The term “balloon effect” is used when a fix is made to a complex system, resulting in another problem popping up in a different part of the system. Here, the balloon represents any problem, not just the original one. Hence, you push down on the balloon in one area (i.e., fixing a problem), and the balloon expands into another (i.e., creating a new issue).
Unlike a balloon, this relationship can be complicated to track. You attempt to address an issue and seemingly do so. Then, it turns into a completely different issue, whose connection to the original issue and fix is not apparent. For example, many software fixes are checked in a development cycle. When another problem emerges, it may not be clear which fix caused it. Furthermore, if new code is still being added, this code could have defects that cause problems in other parts of the system. In short, it becomes messy to try and find out what caused this new issue.
The number of defects a software product has is a typical measure of its quality. Software companies have a testing or quality assurance organization responsible for finding and reporting defects. Testing occurs at almost every step of the software development process. Often, the number of outstanding defects is a criterion for releasing a software product to customers. This measurement can be manipulated. For example, imagine if there was tremendous company pressure to release a software product to customers. The CEO calls the test manager in and tells the test manager to quit testing the product or be fired. The test manager complies. The number of reported defects drops because no one is testing, and the product can ship without reported outstanding defects. This behavior, of course, is unethical. It also shows how the measurement process can be gamed.
What keeps this situation from happening all the time? The “problem” with our defect example is that ethical people raise hell because what is going on is obvious. Employees who care about the quality of the product may resign or take another job elsewhere. Customers who receive a buggy product complain, and the customer support group takes issue with the process.
Unfortunately, there is another unethical method of getting your way. It keeps measuring the same thing, just like our defect example, but pushes the actual costs to the unmeasurable, and, significantly, it is not apparent at all. I call this the Intentional Measurement Swindle.
To illustrate this better, let’s move to another example. In technology companies, it is common to hire “cost-cutter” types to come in and help streamline the company. One of the most common things was centralizing departments or organizations to save money. Consider the Information Technology (IT) department of a company. The IT department typically handles employee computer, network, and access problems (and many other things). Here is what I’ve seen happen:
- The “cost-cutter” comes in and adds up the costs of having decentralized IT departments. Often, the company has a local IT department at every reasonably sized site. For instance, there is a site in Denver with its IT department, one in Dallas with its own, and so forth.
- The “cost-cutter” tells the company that the IT department needs to centralize to save money.
- The “cost-cutter” then implements an IT self-help process and online documentation that the employees must follow if they have trouble with their computer, password, or whatever. Since most online help and documentation are outsourced, only a few people are on the centralized IT budget.
- The “cost-cutter” then shows the budget of the new centralized IT department and compares it to the previous budget of the decentralized IT departments. It is much less.
- The “cost-cutter” gets a large pay bonus.
This process seems reasonable. The “cost-cutter” took an easily measured activity and made it the evaluation metric. A higher number meant failure, and a lower number suggested success. Again, this seems reasonable. However, what happened is that the actual costs were pushed out to something hard to measure and unobvious. What is it that is hard to measure? In the centralized IT model with the self-help center, the IT work is pushed out to all company employees! Some of these employees may be high-salaried employees. Now, you have a software architect making six figures a year and spending hours going through self-help trying to fix their laptop. In the decentralized model, an IT person would fix the computer for the software architect. In sum, the decentralized IT department allowed the software architect to do other things – like go to unproductive meetings (almost kidding).
Tracking the time each employee spends on their job, down to the hour level, is difficult. If you tried to track it to that detail, each employee would have to spend an hour a week just reporting how they spent the other hours of the week—hardly an efficient strategy. The unethical “cost-cutter” uses this fact to hide the actual costs of the new implementation. What needs to be noticed is that the company’s employees have differing job responsibilities between the two models. The more responsibility an employee has that doesn’t relate to their job (IT work), the less efficient they are at the job they were hired for (e.g., software architecture).
I’ve used the IT department as an example, but trust me, an unethical “cost-cutter” can size up almost any “improvements” on this basis. They are thinking: “How can I implement a change that is easily measured for my benefit yet push out the actual costs to areas that are almost impossible to measure and so granularly distributed that those costs are not obvious?”
I refer to this process as the Intentional Measurement Swindle.
Firearm Rights and Self-Defense
In a previous post on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I talked about how I found it odd that the CDC didn’t seem to have any partnerships with the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), or the National Firearm Survey (NFS). I also pointed out in another post that the CDC does not seem to be involved with the National Shooting Sports Foundation and its work on suicide prevention. Given the CDC’s stance on its “Fast Facts: Firearm Violence and Injury Prevention” page and declaring firearm violence a public health issue, these lapses seem pretty odd.
Other things seem odd as well:
- On their Fast Facts page, the CDC divorces intent from firearm deaths. Suicides, murder, justified homicides, and criminals killing other criminals are all lumped together. They use this information, along with much lower-quality information on firearm injuries, to justify declaring that firearm violence is a public health problem.
- If you read my book, you know that 98 percent of all violent crime is aggravated assault, robbery, and rape. Here is a Fast Fact that the CDC doesn’t mention: If you are injured in one of those crimes, firearms are rarely used.
- The CDC no longer publishes defensive gun use statistics.
In declaring firearm violence to be a public health issue, the CDC is hoping to get new powers. These powers could very well lead to things like restrictions on firearms, federal lawsuits to put gun manufacturers out of business (in the name of public health!), and so forth. Let’s assume that severe firearms restrictions are passed in the name of public health. The next question would be: Are these restrictions successful? To determine that, you have to measure.
Currently, the CDC’s gold standard of measurement is the number of firearm deaths per day. What would happen if these severe firearm restrictions were reasonably successful? Well, the number of firearm deaths per day would go down. If it does, it seems like a success! But wait, there’s more…
- The number of defensive gun uses would also go down. Around 82 percent of the time, the firearm is not discharged in defensive gun uses. This fact implies that the offenders weren’t armed with firearms, or there would likely be a shoot-out. We also know from my book that 98 percent of violent crime is aggravated assault, robbery, and rape. When the victim is injured in these crimes, the offender rarely uses firearms. Because there are an estimated 1.67 million defensive gun uses a year, there would be a dramatic uptick in non-firearm violent crime injuries if potential victims were not able to secure a firearm to defend themselves.
- The number of suicides by firearm would likely decrease. However, we know from my book that 50 percent of the time, suicide victims don’t use a gun. Assuming that a suicidal individual couldn’t access a firearm due to these restrictions, there is a good chance that they would find another means to take their life. Thus, I suspect that the number of suicides would remain the same even though the number of suicides by firearm would decrease.
In short, severe firearm restrictions might lead to fewer firearm deaths per day, but actual suicides would be about the same, and there would be a dramatic uptick in non-firearm violent victimizations. These effects would not be detected by simply looking at firearm deaths per day. Thus, the CDC could claim success if its only measurement was firearm deaths per day.
This process is no different than what happened during alcohol Prohibition. If your only measure of success is the amount of alcohol consumed each day, then Prohibition was wildly successful. The reason Prohibition wasn’t successful was the significant amount of violent crime that increased due to it. This violent crime uptick was primarily carried out by gangsters who were intent on buying, selling, and distributing illegal alcohol. Fortunately, these violent crimes were well reported, and the nation’s citizens were informed of them. Hence, one of the reasons Prohibition was repealed was to take the money out of the illegal alcohol trade and reduce gangster violence.
Non-firearm violent crime victimization, I would wager, would not have the same impact as it would be finely granulated across all the residents of the country. Today, murder dominates the headlines, yet it is less than two percent of all violent crimes. I doubt very seriously that dangerous, violent crimes that don’t involve death and firearms will get any media attention. After all, it doesn’t today.
In short, the CDC is set up for an Intentional Measurement Swindle.