A nice review of my recent American Journal of Cultural Sociology

http://www.ajcs-blog.com/2013/03/notes-on-cultural-sociology-of.html?spref=fb

What a great break from my typical critical peer reviews!

Reef Madness

I recently picked up Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral – a book written by my friend, David Dobbs.

Reef Madness is biography, depiction of natural scientific fieldwork, and history of science all in one engaging book. Dobbs describes the rise of modern natural science, a half-century of struggles between inductive and deductive theorizing, and persistent tensions between science as the ongoing discovery of new facts and the tenacious hold of theories that no longer fit the evidence.

Louis Agassiz was a natural scientist of the public. He showed early promise as a taxonomist (the primary occupation of naturalists at the time) and, quite early in his career he developed the now widely accepted theory that periodic ice ages produced the gaps scientists observed in the fossil record and reshaped the topography of the land. In those formative years, Agassiz’s glacial theory effectively disproved some of young Darwin’s work – Darwin’s first foray into the world of theory-building. Where Darwin had argued that features of the natural world were the result of “uplift” – the changing elevation of land, he was trumped by the goodness of fit between glacial theory and the existing evidence. Darwin was humbled by the first taste of failure. Meanwhile, the success of his initial endeavors and a flair for the dramatic catapulted Agassiz into life as a public intellectual, scholar and lecturer of global renown. He eventually made his way to Harvard where he established the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and spent significant time on the lecture circuit delighting audiences with tales of the intelligent and intricate design of God’s natural order. Agassiz had a democratic conception of the scientific enterprise and he exhorted his audience to get out into the field to investigate creation for themselves – no university education required.

Agassiz had a son, Alexander, who also became a natural scientist. Although they shared a love of science, they were otherwise quite different. Agassiz was gregarious and his active research agenda was eclipsed by the time he spent with admiring audiences recapitulating his early discoveries. Alexander, on the other hand, continued the day to day work of collecting and classifying fossils and other specimens.

Meanwhile, two decades after seeing his first theory fail, Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The book posed both scientific and philosophical challenges for Agassiz. The brutal battle between the two scientists was often fought through surrogates. Ultimately, Darwin’s theory was accepted by the scientific community. Agassiz, his scientific reputation sullied by his refusal to abandon creationism, never fully recovered his standing in the academy.

In many ways the rise and fall of Agassiz sets the stage for the true tale told in Reef Madness. Alex spent much of his later life seeking evidence that he believed disproved one of Darwin’s minor theories - a coral reef theory contending that coral reefs form on subsiding land. Drawing on a wide variety of documentary material including personal and professional letters, research notes and scientific journals, Dobbs recounts the travel expeditions Alex undertook in the gathering of evidence. Dobbs also shares details on the politics of science for, indeed, when Alex challenged Darwin’s reef theory he encountered a cadre of supporters who were quite experienced in circling the wagons around any threats to the new master of the discipline.

All of this, and there is even a wonderful twist at the end.

I am so glad I picked up Reef Madness. The book engagingly demonstrates, as Dobbs writes,

that science, being a social as well as an intellectual enterprise, is prone to errors of idolatry, pride, cowardice, and politics.

Dobbs offers a great storyline, some interesting natural scientific knowledge, and suggests that our theoretical methods should match our mental processes. Reef Madness cautions us against mistaking a scientist for a prophet and substituting religious orthodoxy for attachment to a theory as an article of faith. Definitely worth adding to your reading list!

The logic of labor

I arrived in Copenhagen a couple of hours ago. I  waited 2 hours for a train from the airport because trains are running on the holiday schedule. I am now crammed onto a packed train, standing room only, to Växjö.

Why so crowded?

Today is Easter Monday, a national holiday in Sweden.  Most schools in the south of Sweden were off for Easter break last week as well (Stockholm has this week off). This means that today is a busy travel day as people return from their vacations to warmer climes.

So, given the fact that Easter Monday is a day when folks tend to be on the move, you might expect that mass transit would reflect that fact with, for example, more frequent and longer trains, right?

Wrong. That would be a pretty American way of looking at things. In the US, if more people are going to be free to shop, we seek to make it easier for consumers – letting black Friday bleed into Thanksgiving, and having additional staff on hand to stock the shelves and man the cash registers, for example. If more people are going to be on holiday travelling, we increase staffing at airports, and on toll plazas.  These efforts require workers and, as my friend Shamus Khan notes in a recent Time Magazine (November 19, 2012) piece, the rights and protections of workers are eroding in the face of a society that claims to be governed by the “logic of the market.”

In Sweden it is different. As my current traveling circumstances demonstrate, on holidays there are fewer trains and the trains are more lightly staffed. Stores and restaurants are open for fewer hours, if at all. We remarked on this when we first arrived in Sweden – complaining about the inconvenience of holiday schedules and expecting that we should use a holiday to walk downtown to see what was going on and have brunch. Most of the shops and restaurants were closed while the lakefronts and parks were full of people out and about walking, riding their bicycles, and picnicking.

Swedish holidays provide a day of relief for workers, not a day of shopping for consumers. It interesting how this distinction is more than just semantics – we are talking about the same collection of people after all. I have frequently encountered circumstances here in which it is obvious that the rights of the worker have trumped the convenience of the consumer (for example, you can no longer buy tickets on the train because that was found to be a source of stress for conductors. Instead, you must buy your ticket at the machine on the platform. Too bad for you if that means you miss your train).

If the US system is built around the logic of the market, Sweden’s relies upon the “logic of labor.”

It may surprise Americans who have bought into misinformation that equates welfare states with rising laziness and an “entitlement” mentality, but the Swedish system is actually built on the principle of supporting people as workers (instead of consumers making investment choices with their skills, time and funds). The system both depends upon and is built to foster maximum labor force participation. Generous family leave policies that explicitly seek gender equality, national healthcare, free college education, direct child support payments, well-funded schools with high quality and inexpensive after-school options, 6 weeks minimum annual paid vacation, and subsidies for home improvements and house cleaning services – all of it designed to increase the number of people working and working though the system instead of under the table. For example, the house cleaning subsidy takes a job that was often off the books and brings it and the workers into the system where they can be taxed and receive their services and protections. The family leave policies were designed to maintain the labor force attachment of women with small children. They have been quite successful in this country with one of the smallest gender gaps in the world (see page 8 here). It doesn’t just work for women. Sweden isn’t perfect, but a look at pretty much any list on productivity and efficiency, innovation and creative economy, good climate for doing business, and labor force participation demonstrates that the welfare state is not a drag on the national economy.

Sweden is not a nation that divides itself into “takers” and “makers.” Instead it is a country that has embarked on a path toward increased support for its people as workers whose everyday efforts, as opposed to the occasional “welfare queen” and rags-to-riches millionaire that occupy the US imagination, are the focus of the nation. I may be writing this on a crowded train that I had to wait twice as long as usual for, but, despite the inconvenience, the atmosphere is happy and relaxed. After all, folks are heading back to work after a well-deserved break. Some inconveniences are worth their price.

Living Class

I have spoken before about our decision to not celebrate Christmas. When I last wrote about it 16 months ago, I was on the verge of something:

This year Jie-jie has again been saying that she wanted to celebrate Christmas but when I asked her what she meant she said that she wanted the chance to shop for others and give presents. It just so happened that that very morning I had received an email about a community program that matches neighbors with other neighborhood families who would like help with gift-giving. So, I signed us up.

Tomorrow morning I will be taking Jie-jie to meet the family she is providing for (although I decided not to tell her that she is providing their Christmas presents until after we meet them) and then we will shop for them.

I have not written a word about this since. Not because it wasn’t blogworthy, but because it was unmentionable. Here is what happened (details changed to protect the folks’ identity).

In the end I decided to leave Jie-jie at home for my first meeting with the folks we were helping out for Christmas. I decided to feel things out. I thought the whole thing was odd from fairly early on. When I emailed the organizer to volunteer for the program, I expected she would get back to me with some helpful, anonymized information (e.g. 2 kids, girls, aged 3 and 5, art supplies, dress-up clothes, winter clothes sizes 4 and 6). Instead, she got back to me with a name (let’s say, Sarah) and a phone number. I was instructed to give Sarah a call and introduce myself so the two of us could work together to come up with a plan of action. I called Sarah and said I was the person who was going to be helping them out. She was very friendly and invited me to stop by and meet her and her family.

I drove to the house at the appointed time, Sunday morning at 11 am. It was not far from my own house, but it was along a busy road. The old farmhouse clearly pre-dated the street that ran just a few feet from the front door. There was a muddy driveway and no steps to bridge the couple of feet between the ground and porch. I hopped up on the porch, which was littered with children’s toys – abandoned dolls covered with ice and mold, a capsized playkitchen, bits of a tea set, random action figures in various states of wholeness. As I walked to the door, a dog started barking. Beside the outer door, a metal screen door with no screen, stood a large plastic garbage barrel almost completely filled with plastic soda (mostly Mountain Dew) bottles – easily a couple of dollars’ worth of “returnables” worth 5 cents each. I opened the screen door, knocked on the inner door, and waited. The inner door had a window. Through the window I could see the kitchen. The linoleum was completely worn away in a path from the door to the kitchen sink and through a doorway to the right. There was no table. The kitchen drawers mostly lacked fronts so you could see that one contained a jumble of tableware, the other was full of plastic bags. Most of the cupboards were missing their doors. Some plates and glasses, not many, were visible on the shelves.

Sarah came to the door and greeted me pleasantly. The dog, a pitbull, came over with a friendly wag. Sarah was about my height, with wavy, shoulder length auburn hair and pale skin marked by the shadows of the freckles she must have had as a child. I would put her in her mid-20s. Sarah invited me in to the living room to sit down. I looked down at my boots covered with driveway mud. I wanted to remove my muddy shoes. Although I grew up in a house where we tended to keep our shoes on, that was ages ago.

“Should I take off my boots? They’re a little muddy.”

“No. Don’t worry about it.”

I followed Sarah into the livingroom, still feeling self-conscious about the boots. The air was warm and stale, smelling of old baseboard heaters and cigarette smoke. The tan carpet bore the stains of other shoes and I followed the treads of past feet toward the sofa. The sofa cushions were all askew and falling over the edges. The dog had clearly nibbled the piping off some of them. Sarah invited me to take a seat. I thought it might be rude to straighten up the sofa before sitting so I perched myself on the least precarious cushion, my legs doing most of the work of keeping me from sliding to the floor.

There was a dining table with one chair. The other three chairs were scattered about the room. Around the table movie posters decorated the walls. There was a closed door near the table (the basement? a closet?). Two holes had been punched in the door. The drywall near the door had also been punched in. There were a few end tables. On them stood ashtrays and beer bottles and cans in various states of emptiness. A large flatscreen TV with a crack running through the center leaned against the wall. In front of that there was a plastic crate with a small boxy television sitting on it and a video game system hooked up to it. A man sat in one of the dining chairs immediately in front of the television. He was playing a videogame. He did not look up or acknowledge my arrival. I saw only his brown hair and profile. Sarah introduced the man as her brother, Tom, and then she introduced her mother, Paula. Paula was sitting in another dining chair. She was smoking a cigarette. Her long gray hair was drawn up in a ponytail. Like Sarah and Tom, Paula was dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt.

“Sorry about the mess,” Paula said with a gravelly voice, indicating the bottles scattered about with a wave of her hand, “We had some people over last night.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” I answered, making sure to keep my voice casual and that I smiled a smile I could feel all the way to my eyes.

And in the minute or so that I observed everything I have just described, I developed the strangest feeling – a sort of comfortable familiarity in the face of the discomfort. Putting it to words it would be something like this, “Ah… I know places like this – old and used living spaces. I know this smell of cigarettes and decaying things. I remember the marks of fists on walls and doors. The clutter, the posters, the sagging furniture.” Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that my childhood home was exactly like that - there were some important differences, but there were some similarities, too. In comparison to the way I live now, my childhood home was not so far from that and I had close acquaintances who lived in even more similar conditions. And then I realized how long I had been gone from such places and their people – so long that I had basically forgotten that they existed. In the midst of the awareness that what was once familiar had become foreign and uncomfortable, I was confronted with my own self.

“Who the hell am I, anyway?”

And as I chatted with Sarah and Paula about what I could do to help them provide the children of the house with a happy holiday, I could visualize myself sitting there primly – skinny jeans, black leather boots, designer glasses, still wearing my wool coat (no one had offered to take it but that should not have stopped me from making myself at home).

“I am the rich lady.”

Sarah and Paula were kind and friendly and I responded in kind. As we discussed potential gifts for the kids, I got a sense of the culture clash that I would be navigating. Sarah listed the electronics that the kids wanted (hand-held game systems, etc) and their favorite characters (anything spongebob or dora). Inwardly I groaned as I imagined how I would reconcile my values to and justify to my daughters purchasing things they know I would never buy for them, my own children.

“Who the hell am I? I am the rich lady.”

Tom’s 8-year-old son entered. He had just walked to a gas station to buy breakfast. He sat, not at the table, but on the floor by the TV and proceeded to add about 1/2 cup of sugar to a small coffee. He stirred, sipped, and then took a bite of a jelly donut.

Sarah and Paula were smoking when Sarah’s preschool-aged daughter, just waking up, came down the stairs, coughing and sniffling through a stuffy nose.

“Poor kid,” Sarah said as she put down her cigarette to give her daughter a warm hug and then send her to get a donut from her cousin, “She hasn’t been feeling well. She’s been having so many ear infections and throat problems. She’s getting tubes in her ears next week.”

I expressed my sympathy for the struggles of parenting sick children. “Maybe put out your goddamn cigarette and offer some healthy food.” my inner rich-bitch was saying.

During our conversation I took notes about gifts. I had plenty of ideas. I stood up to go – anxious for the relief that returning to my own world would provide. Sarah thanked me for coming and suggested that we should get our kids together for a playdate after the holidays. I said that would be nice even though I knew it would never happen. How was I supposed to tell her that we were going to spend the holidays in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok? We weren’t coming back to the US afterwards but were instead going to be in Sweden for the next 7 months while a dogsitter lived in our house.

“I am the rich lady.”

As I moved toward the kitchen. Tom spoke up and made it clear that he knew exactly who I was.

“We could use a new flatscreen, ” he said, still not turning his eyes from the screen “and the kids want ipod touches.”

Sarah blushed. Paula did not react.

“I’m sorry,” I replied, “There is no way I can do that. We don’t even have those things.”

“Liar. If you skipped the Hong Kong ballet, you would save enough for those ipods. It just doesn’t fit your values.”

I took so many things from this experience but the one that I want to focus on right now is the experience of class.

It began when middle school tracking placed me with kids who came from families that were better off. When I was in college, I would go home over breaks and have folks make fun of my vocabulary. “Why do you use such big words?” they would say. “You’re not like us anymore, if you ever were,” they were telling me. But then I would get it from the other side, too. “You’re not from here?!” the wife of a prominent Chicago scientist who summered on my island home said in shock after she struck up a conversation on the basis of my UChicago t-shirt and learned that I was at home. “People like you aren’t supposed to make it so far,” she was telling me.  It has continued to this day. “So when are you selling the house?” our friends asked when we tell them about our impending move. “Oh, we’re going to keep it and summer here,” I reply. “Oh, you’ll summer here. How lovely.” came the mocking rejoinder. “People like us don’t ‘summer.’ We work. This is our community, it isn’t a summertime playground for the leisure class,” they are telling me. And from the other end: “That neighborhood is a good choice for people of modest means like yourselves. The people I know who are doctors and public interest attorneys – people who, like you, make a good living but are not rich – live there.” “You’re not wealthy. You don’t even know what wealth is,” they are telling me. True. All of it true.

Class inequality is something we don’t like to speak of in personal terms – as an everyday fact that is probably the most impactful characteristic of the lived context of our daily lives. When we do speak of class, we do it in moral terms – either defending our moral turf vis-a-vis the exploitive, self-interested behavior of the wealthy or pointing out our virtue in making the smart and healthful personal and professional choices that yielded financial security. I think we need to start talking about class as an everyday fact – an obstacle to health and happiness, a chasm between understandings, the insider wisdom and practices that mark our positions.

How did I manage Christmas for Sarah and her family? I felt profoundly conflicted. Should I buy the things that I wanted Sarah’s children to have (art supplies, warm clothes, healthy food, books, toys for imaginary play) or the things that Sarah, and I suspect her children as well, recognized as good things to have (electronics and character merchandise)? Who the hell was I to decide what Sarah and her kids ought to have? What was the point of throwing away money on toys and electronics for folks who seemed to have a hard time taking care of the ones they already had? What kind of an idiotic, liberal elitist snob was I for wanting to give my children a lesson in making symbolic but futile gestures of goodwill to poor people? I was sick for a week – and only partly because prolonged exposure to cigarette smoke usually gives me a sinus infection.

I bought them an assortment of things that balanced their desires with my values (e.g. batteries and learning games for their electronic gadgets, spongebob toothpaste and board games, art supplies, dolls to replace the moldy ones on the porch, winter clothes, no ipods). My children wrapped the presents. I delivered them to Sarah at her house, refusing the invitation to visit by saying, truthfully, that I had to be somewhere. Sarah sent me a lovely card. I often see her and her children around town. I avoid her when I can and blush profoundly as I stammer out a greeting when I can’t. She hasn’t invited me again. I suspect she understands I have rejected the offer of friendship even if she doesn’t know the reasons behind it. I can hardly understand them myself.

Stepping in it: preface to a risky post

A little over a year ago I was conducting my first research interview in Sweden. My research there focuses on the way that school principals mange the diversity of their student populations (most schools were at least 50% first or second generation immigrant). One of my first questions – on a list of many questions that I developed in conversation with other (Swedish) researchers working within the project was “What are the different ethnic and immigrant populations in this school?”

If I asked that question in the U.S., I would expect the principal to spout off numbers (or have a sheet they printed in preparation for an interview on the subject of immigrant inclusion) concerning student diversity: languages spoken at home, percentage using ELL services, race and ethnic groups represented, percentage qualifying for free or reduced price lunch and perhaps moving into a discussion of teacher diversity (nationality, bilingualism, language and cultural curricular they implement) and the school’s approach to accommodating student diversity. To be sure, that is the information I was hoping that question would lead to in my interview with a Swedish principal.

Instead, it was as if a cold wind blew through the room. The principal, who had been polite and friendly, suddenly crossed his arms over his chest and pursed his lips. “That,” he said, “is a racist question.”

There are some things you are not supposed to talk about, and there are typical approaches to speaking about things that are difficult to discuss. Of course, those things vary depending on the setting and the people populating it. One of the first things I do when I get to a new place is try to figure out what you are not supposed to say and the manner of talking about things that are difficult to say (what it is easy to say and how is obvious, of course, because those are the things that people are saying and the way they are saying it). But you can’t exactly ask people directly, “What are the subjects I should not discuss and what are the touchy subjects that require a particular approach?” Well, actually, you can ask that question as I have in the past, but if you’ve been paying any attention and done any background research you won’t generally get a useful answer. Local customs around discussing work/family, income, politics, etc, are typical fare in most guidebooks and basic intercultural accounts. What you really need is to know what things are so unquestionably off limits or so obviously only approached in one particular way that folks would not even think to raise the subject or, if they thought of it, they can hardly muster the fortitude to mention such an unmentionable.

So, in my experience, you generally learn either by “stepping in it” or observing the missteps of others. I’ve stepped in it more times than I can count. Breaching social norms is not something I usually pursue intentionally – although I must admit to a couple of times when I have or have been sorely tempted to mess with folks (e.g. there was that time last spring when I could barely contain my desire to find out what might happen if I jumped to the head of a slow-moving line of orderly, silent, infinitely patient, well-spaced Swedish customers at a department store cash register). Instead, I usually stumble into moments in which I have violated social norms and I must rely upon quick wits and the forgiveness of others to recover.

There are also countless times when my own expectations of how to act and what to speak of are not met. My chosen profession, residential mobility within the U.S., class climbing, and international travel have contributed to an accumulation of experiences in which the cake of customs is broken, as Robert Park put it in his essay on migration and marginality. I have learned that there is little that is universal in my idea of modesty, how to be a good parent, and how to be kind and friendly, for example. I try to treasure the initial discomfort and subsequent freedom that follows an encounter with the boundedness of my own cultural programming.

I write this all as a preface (or maybe an advance apology) for my next post. Sometimes your missteps are accidental and sometimes you have something to say and you can’t see your way to saying it without treading heavily in places where stepping lightly is more advisable.

Rethinking death

I am areligous, but that doesn’t mean that I am an absolute relativist. It doesn’t mean that I don’t value life and truth and hope and the reality of suffering and the virtue of delivering people from it.  It does mean that I am OK enough with the limits of human knowledge and power to avoid filling in the gaps with stories and magic and all the rest. I also accept the paltry scope of my community, my time, my species, my planet, my solar system, etc. I acknowledge the temporary nature of myself – this particular amalgamation of stuff that came together as a sentient being, but (and here is where I think god-fearing folks sometimes miss what it is like to see it the way I do) I also recognize the way that all of who I am used to be elsewhere and will be elsewhere again. I find it an amazingly wonderful awareness.

“Where was I before I was born?” Jie-jie asked me one time.

“Nowhere. Everywhere,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we like to make chocolate chip cookies, right? Where are the cookies before we make them? They are in the flour and sugar in the cupboard, the chocolate chips at the store, the eggs the chickens are building from the food they eat, the flowing water that makes the energy that heats our stove. It’s the same thing with you. You were in me and your dad and the sunshine and the water and rocks and the air.”

Jie-jie didn’t ask about dying that day but Mei-mei came home from school saying that her friends told her our recently departed dog, Rodman, lived up in the sky now. I said that we know that Rodman’s body is gone – in the ashes in the memorial block, in the heat that came out of the smokestack at the crematorium, in the dog hair we brushed off him and put in the compost and then used to fertilize the garden to grow kale – but the energy he was made of is also all around – in our memories, in the wind, and, yes, in the skies.

My mom died 13 years ago this week. I miss her voice and her wisdom. I wish she were here to know and be known by my children and to help me to be a better mother, daughter, sister and spouse. All the same, I know she is not lost to me. I always struggled to find a way to express my thoughts on this subject and then I found Aaron Freeman has done it for me:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

Villains or heroes?

Why conceal carry? Based on my reading of the comments I’ve received here and here, there seem to be two primary explanations: because you have a right to, and in order to respond to protect oneself and the innocent should there be a crisis (requiring deadly force).

#1 is, in my opinion, stretching the constitution, but we can leave that up to the courts.

#2 is an interesting one because it seems to be built on this idea that people who carry are self-appointed protectors of the innocent and vulnerable. Kind of like this guy:

So, if you see yourself as a Clark Kent who, on account of being armed, can act heroically (and more heroically then those who are walking around unarmed, which is an additional burden of proof for gun advocates), I can understand how you might see social value in the opportunity to walk around with a gun.

But are guns more frequently transforming average citizens into heroes or villains?

When I hear from gun advocates, I don’t think superman. I think Bladerunner:

I think Sailor:

I think Rodriguez:

I think Zimmerman:

Sure, it is usually easy to come up with a few extreme examples of gun holders with good intentions who became villains. There are also accounts of armed citizens decreasing the length and death toll of incidents of mass shootings. Of course, the role of armed citizens in putting down perpetrators of mass shootings assumes a continuation of our current lax firearm regulations which are a factor in the prevalence of mass shootings.

Dramatic stories aside, however, at the end of the day we should ask if  average citizens, the innocent and vulnerable people folks are claiming their guns will help protect, are better or worse off because of our poor gun regulations.

The statistics suggest that America is a violent country.