Eyre Lines

Guns continue to occupy a lot of my facebook feed. There are a lot of very impassioned arguments being made, particularly in the comments sections – as is the case with this article.

I don’t resonate all that well with the author, to be honest, despite agreeing with him completely about climate change and recognising that I’d feel the same kind of lack of safety if I were in the States. If you’re teaching, you teach the facts as nearly as they can be known, and where there’s a substantial scientific consensus, there’s no need to teach minority viewpoints. I can’t see either passionate advocacy or diversions into another topic as being justified, in other words.

Where I do find common ground is in identifying the tendency of all such issues to be dealt with like a set of lawyers in a courtroom, and in particular an US courtroom with a jury (there is, for my US readers, far less use of juries in the UK, including almost all civil cases,, the major exception being defamation). I’ve spent some 25 years as a practising lawyer, and I recognise the tricks – and I’ve also spent 20 years in local politics, so I also recognise the political use of the same tricks.

I used to joke that when a client came to me and said “What does this mean?”, I’d negotiate a fee and then ask “What do you want it to mean?”. This was a cynical attitude which came to me eventually after going into law thinking that a court would decide reasonably correctly on the facts most of the time, and that all the lawyers had to do was to present the best interpretation of the facts from their client’s point of view and leave it to judge and jury (more often just judge or magistrates in the UK). As time went by, I became increasingly convinced that in fact, the victory tended to go to the best lawyer (for which read “best arguer”) more or less irrespective of the facts.

By and large, the best lawyer was also the most expensive lawyer, and the client with a disproportionately large amount to spend was therefore going to win in a lot of cases where they shouldn’t. Even if the small guy managed to get a lawyer who was a really good arguer, the big guy’s lawyers could spend more time and have more people working on the case (as inevitably time costs money), and frequently that would carry the day.

Incidentally, just in case anyone is asking themselves, I had an 85% success rate for not guilty pleas over the course of my career. This may sound really good, but was bolstered by the fact that I wouldn’t plead not guilty for anyone I was confident was in fact guilty. As time went by, I steadily stopped doing trial work, as the feeling that it was not, in fact, producing justice increased and I felt more and more that the system was intrinsically flawed. In addition, the three cases I lost which I was certain were wrongful convictions and the two I won which I became certain by the end of the trial should have been guilty verdicts weighed on me.

That, I point out, is in a situation where I was arguing in front of judges and magistrates, not juries; one could therefore expect that they would be less swayed by false logic and appeals to emotion.

Now, let’s look at the two standards of proof in legal cases. The first, which applies in civil cases, is the test of balance of probabilities. Which of these two situations do you think is more likely to be the case? This is, I think, the standard which we should apply to both climate change and gun control arguments. In both cases, the human cost of getting it wrong is substantial; in the case of climate change it could well be colossal.

The other test is that of proof beyond reasonable doubt, which is the standard which should apply in criminal cases. Actually, my experience in the UK is that most of the time you need to do a lot more than establishing a reasonable doubt, except in front of a jury; judges and magistrates become fairly hard-bitten and I was never confident in an argument before them unless I felt I could manage something close to balance of probabilities.

The problem is with climate change and gun control that there are a lot of people who do not want to restrict their lives in a way which would enable us on the one hand to reduce our CO2 emissions to a reasonable level and on the other, in the States, to give up playing with guns. There are also huge and wealthy corporate interests which would be damaged were we to take the necessary steps to alleviate these problems, and they have a lot of money, and the ability to produce a lot of arguments and a lot of statistics.

That alone would be sufficient, in my mind, to question very closely any claims made against CO2 reduction or gun control. They have the money, and they can buy the media and the research.

It is not, of course, a reason to question particularly closely claims for these unpopular positions; they do not have the money and find it far more difficult to pay for powerful arguments or slanted statistics. Indeed, the other side, having the money, has already done this!

Against this background, I find it striking that a majority of scientists with expertise in climatology or meteorology agree that there is human-caused global warming and that it presents a major threat. It is unfortunate that some proponents of climate change arguments are doing the lawyerly thing and skewing the statistics; it is not 85%, but it is substantially better than 50%. There is, of course, a range of opinions; the vast majority will agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and promotes global warming, but a lesser majority consider that this effect is large in comparison to cyclic changes in climate; there are even a few who argue that there is an underlying trend in the opposite direction in the statistics. That’s unfortunately true; however it is also a truism that “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics”, and it is regrettably easy to skew these.

The thing is, it has really not been in the interests of scientists to find human-caused global warming, just because doing something about it would be unpopular (so few votes) and because all the big money would like to find that there isn’t. Remember – “What do you want it to mean?”. There were, of  course, bound to be a few dissenters – after all, you make a name for yourself in science if you can destroy someone else’s hypothesis.

It also hasn’t been in the interest of politicians – see my comment on votes above, even if you don’t think politicians are swayed by campaign contributions at least as much as by votes. I therefore find it extremely convincing that the consensus of the G8 and of all the national leaders in the EU is that global warming is happening and is significantly human-produced and that reducing CO2 emissions will help. They were not quick to come to this conclusion – some scientists were saying this was likely back in the 1970’s, after all.

The thing is that these are both what a lawyer would identify as “admissions against interest”. Even in the case of a generally very unreliable witness, lawyers pay huge attention to these as they go against the trend of testimony to be self-serving.

Sadly, I can’t identify many admissions against interest in the case of guns in the States. In Australia, yes – their parliaments instituted fairly strong gun control after the Port Arthur massacre, which followed a number of mass shootings. This was in a country with a strong tradition of hunting, sport shooting and militia activity, so one which is not so dissimilar from the US, and involved every one of their state legislatures. They have not had a mass shooting of note since then.

There is, however, apparently a scientific consensus.

Perhaps the difficulty is that, where you have a personal interest in something, you’re inclined to take a “beyond reasonable doubt” approach. It is certainly possible, both with climate change and gun control, to say that there is “reasonable doubt”, even if it’s (as one of the statistics in the above article states) 73% to 8%.

So, how about this. This link is to an individual who actually supports concealed carry as a self-defence measure. He has one video in particular which I think illustrates my point (although the fact that the main site proposes a 20 hour course plus a huge amount of regular training before you contemplate carrying a gun as a means of self-defence and crime prevention). Insofar as it may put anyone off the idea of carrying (or even possessing) a gun, it’s an admission against interest. Of course, as the presenter is trying to sell training, there is an element of self-interest – but I note that his awful example is a police officer, who will have had plenty of training, albeit possibly not good training.

So, were I to suggest that no-one who has not followed every piece of advice in that video should be permitted to carry a gun (or have one at home for “self-defence”), how could that be unreasonable? Are you, for instance, happy that your neighbour, who has not done this kind of training, has a handgun?

PS. Needless to say, this last set of links doesn’t apply in the UK or in most of the rest of the first world, only in the States. Most of us aren’t allowed to own handguns for self-defence and/or have such strict laws on what constitutes self defence that it would be a very bad idea to chance using one.