Mass Shootings, Climate, Discrimination: Why Government's Fear of Data Threatens Us All

(a lengthy, and very disturbing, article)

Mass Shootings, Climate, Discrimination: Why Government's Fear of Data Threatens Us All

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In the aftermath of the massacre of 26 people in a small-town Texas church, you might have seen that the killer used a gun called an AR-15. It’s a popular weapon—relatively easy to use, endlessly customizable, military in appearance. How popular? It’s the same gun that a killer used in the massacre of 58 people at a Las Vegas concert last month, and by the killer who murdered 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando, and the one at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. And the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. And the party in San Bernardino, California. Oh, but wait: It’s also the gun, apparently, that someone in Texas used to shoot back at the killer at First Baptist Church, accurately enough to pinpoint places his tactical vest didn’t protect. “We keep hearing that AR’s are useless for self-defense, that they’re simply ‘weapons of war,’ useful only for mass killing. This is simply not true,” writes David French at The National Review. He didn’t save lives inside the church, French goes on to say, but this straight-from-the-gun-advocate-storybook good guy with a gun “did stop the shooter and prevented him from harming anyone else. He did so with exactly the kind of weapon that the gun control lobby would like to deny to law-abiding Americans.”

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You see that lack—or rather don’t see it, I guess—with guns. It comes up with every mass shooting and more rarely when people talk about the epidemic of suicides and accidental gun deaths in the United States. But that data void is growing like the ozone hole in the 1980s, an encroaching Big Nothing. Washington Post politics reporter Philip Bump has been updating a list of things President Trump has undone in office, and an eye-popping number are numbers: oil and gas company payments to foreign governments, corporate salaries organized by race and gender, employer records of workplace injuries, government contractor labor law violations, health effects of mountaintop-removal mining, safety issues at chemical plants, visitors to the White House. Did you want to know any of those things? You cannot. Would you like detailed information about arrests, homicides, and gang murders in 2016? Well, the FBI isn’t giving it to you anymore. How about melting Arctic ice? Nope; Congress is dismantling a satellite that was supposed to update the aging monitor network. Climate change? Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, doesn’t think human beings cause it and, more importantly, doesn’t really think you can measure anything to find out. The weather? Forget it; the National Weather Service is coming apart at the seams. How many people live in the United States, data critical to determining political representation and funding priorities? Yeah, no—the 2020 Census is shaping up to be an epic disaster. It’s hard to imagine a good argument for knowing less—about anything, really, but especially about difficult problems with profound policy implications. The government is supposed to base policy on the best data possible, along with political concerns, budget concerns, social priorities ... the usual warp and weft of running a country.

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According to the information warfare expert Molly McKew, the Russian government is practicing something called the Gerasimov Doctrine, threading chaotic, contradictory, often false, always divisive information throughout the global media—mainstream, alt, social, whatever. The point isn’t to make any one person believe any one thing. It’s to make all the people believe none of the things. As Roberts wrote in Vox, policymaking becomes nothing more than a contest of raw power— “tribal epistemology,” as he calls it.

Here, then, is the real danger. As a practice, science (and, I’ll add out of a perhaps naive romanticism, journalism) are supposed to be the arenas to which a non-practitioner can turn for knowledge and clarity. Confronted with its own crisis—in the reproducibility of its findings—the institutions of science turned in part to data hygiene, making complete datasets public, as is the practice at the journal Hotez edits.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/mass-shootings-climate-discrimination-why-governments-fear-of-data-threatens-us-all/ar-AAuxnOg