HWFO Highlights from the David Hogg vs. Spike Cohen Debate at Dartmouth

Spike used some of my stuff. Here's where you can find it for your own use.

Yesterday former Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate Spike Cohen entered into a moderated gun control debate on Dartmouth Campus with nationally recognized gun control activist David Hogg, which was streamed live on Youtube.

In it, Spike repeatedly displays graphs to illustrate his pro-gun position, most of which originated here on HWFO, and were very difficult to make out in the stream. I’m thankful he referenced us, but the viewer can’t really see them well or know their origins. Herein, I’ll review portions of the debate, show you the graphs in question, and link you back to their origins so you can verify them yourself. Also, we’ll provide some others which are even better, and review some missed opportunities in the debate in which Spike could have capitalized.

Review

18:50

At 16:30 Hogg is doing the usual “yay Massachusetts has fewer guns and fewer gun deaths” argument, at once ignoring that Massachusetts is a low crime state, a low GINI coefficient (wealth inequality) state, and a low black population state, all of which have been shown to be far more influential on gun homicide rate than gun ownership rate. He’s also doing the Ole Homicide-Suicide Switcheroo, referring to Massachusetts’ relatively lower gun death rate by including gun suicides (but not non-gun suicides) in his figures.

If I were to plot “rope ownership rate” against “rope-specific suicide” and show the obvious relationship, then scream IT’S THE ROPES on Twitter based on this graph, you’d consider me a fool. This is the same argument Hogg and other gun control advocates make with their “gun deaths” rhetoric. Spike covered this in his opener at 13:44 and Hogg immediately pulled the trick in his first statement to follow.

Spike had a couple ways he could address this and chose the most basic, which was covered in the first ever HWFO article from Medium.com in 2018.

Spike hands David this graph in the video:

If Spike had time, he could have explained that Hogg and many of the audience are misinformed because of graphs like this from Mother Jones and similar outlets.

ITS THE ROPES

The “Deaths” number here includes gun suicides but does not include non-gun suicides. They’re hiding a false presumption in the graph, that every gun suicide would not have happened if a gun wasn’t present. “It’s The Ropes!”

33:56

The moderator attempts to beg the question with “why does the US have this problem when the other developed nations do not?” which is intended to be a layup for David to say “IT’S THE GUNS!” Which he of course does. David then goes on to lie about several other things regarding foreign countries, and ends with an allusion to Parkland because that’s his brand, when we all know that school shootings are so rare they’re only a problem because of their sharing ratio. School shooting victimization rate is lower than rate of death from airplane crash by commercial flyers. (note: that linked analysis includes both Boeing and non-Boeing flights)

David Hogg really walks into a wall at this point though, when he says, and I quote, he really actually said this while holding up my graph,

“You wanna talk about graphs? I wish I had my own printout of a graph of the countries relationship between firearm ownership and the gun homicide rate, even putting aside the suicide rate, there is a pretty strong relationship with all these developed countries…”

Here Hogg shows he’s still literally stranded in 2018, since I included all those graphs in the same article Spike referenced. It would have been nice to get a name drop instead of Spike referring to yours truly as “a guy whose name escapes me,” but the pleasure I got when Spike handed Hogg the exact graph Hogg said he wished he had was immeasurable. It’s the best “gotcha” of the whole debate. Here’s the graph.

Then he went on to share the rest of the graphs from the article, such as this one which shows no bivariate correlation among low-homicide countries.

And this one which shows no bivariate correlation among high homicide countries.

And this one which shows no bivariate correlation among European countries.

If Spike had branched out deeper into HWFO material, he might have hit this article:

…in which we also calculated it for top twenty Human Development Index countries other than the USA, which also shows no bivariate correlation. USA is the outlier.

David Hogg has no response other than to say, “just anecdotally, the fact of the matter is…” and then rambles about how nice he feels when he visits Europe.

36:57

David Hogg says he would have gotten an F in college if he turned in my graphs because “they’re from Wikipedia.”

Well, see, it turns out there’s no one source for “list of countries by firearm related death rate” nor for “guns per capita” internationally because you need a different source for each number, and you can’t fit those all on a graph. Poisoning the well because he wanted 115 different sources listed on the side of a scatter plot is lazy, sloppy, and disingenuous, but he’d just been nailed and was grasping at straws.

The truth of the matter is that Hogg or anyone else could replicate those graphs in any way they liked, and if they do so honestly they’ll come to the same conclusions. You could do the same, and I encourage you to do so yourself. That one procedure, literally doing the mathematics myself, is what started me on my writing journey in 2018. Hogg knows Excel, he should try it. It might not fly at Harvard though because the results conflict with the Harvard Narrative.

Missed Opportunities

If Spike had time, he could have delved more into the real issues at hand, but doing so might have gotten him run out the door at Dartmouth given its campus climate. One of HWFO’s more recent RECOIL pieces:

..is a reprint of an HWFO article online:

..which contains this synthesis graph:

The U.S. white murder rate is about the same as the World Bank high income nations and the U.S. black murder rate is double that of sub-Saharan Africa. That doesn’t tell you the cause, but it does tell you where to look. For causes and cures, the same article shows this, among a bevy of other graphs:

The homicide rate racial divide remains when plotted against wealth inequality, education level, housing security, and every other socioeconomic factor except one. One factor seems to be more directly explanatory than all others: fatherlessness rate. If you want to address the murder rate in the black community to bring it down to the rates we see in peer nations, or other racial categories domestically, the data shows we must somehow address black fatherlessness rate.

But that’s far too complicated to fit into the time allotted by the Dartmouth moderator, so I doubt even I would have gone that far in the debate. Debate formats are rarely good sense-making formats.

Another universal argument Spike could have dropped is that the debate is already over, and guns won. Guns won in 2020 when the whole country went out and bought guns, and now the household ownership rates are now between 47% and 53% depending on the source. The people responsible for a year’s worth of riots, and burning police stations, businesses, and homes, and setting up “autonomous zones,” and police defunding, still haven’t apologized for their behavior. Everyone who bought a gun in 2020 and 2021 expects that might happen again, so they’re not giving their guns up. Murder rate did spike in 2020 and 2021, likely due to the riots and reduction in policing, but is currently crashing at historic rates while gun ownership numbers remain as high as ever.

Spike could have gone into these staggering gun ownership numbers purely to explain patiently to Hogg that Hogg already lost. HWFO covered that in RECOIL in print here:

And online here:

43:40

Spike rebuts Hogg on Assault Rifles:

You are more likely to be beaten to death than you are to be killed by someone wielding an assault rifle. You're three times more likely to be stabbed and you're something like 17 maybe it's 14 but it's in the teens more times more likely to be killed with a pistol. So that's really it is, and that's with any rifle including hunting rifles not just assault rifles.

Spike missed a golden opportunity to compare this to other death rates, as HWFO did here:

Relevant graph:

“Deaths by assault rifle” in the United States are so exceedingly rare they’re fewer than deaths by lawnmower or deaths by bees, and only barely more than deaths by buckets, even with tens of millions of semiautomatic rifles in circulation.

57:34

Hogg drops the “rifle rounds do more damage than pistol rounds” argument. Spike responds relatively well by referring to his prior argument, but he could have dropped a real bomb by pointing out that pistols are probably more deadly on net than rifles in mass shooting scenarios:

Magically evaporating all the AR-15s would probably make school shootings worse. Most school shooting incidents continue until the shooter runs out of rounds or the cops begin returning fire. The shooting at Parkland ran six minutes until the attacker ran out of ammo. Had he been using a pistol, he could have carried more rounds in a backpack, and more of Hogg’s friends would have been killed. He also would have been able to conceal the pistol, and potentially even walk right past the cops like the Virginia Tech shooter did between sprees.

1:02:05

The moderator asks if Spike supports gun buybacks. Spike says they don’t work, and that’s true, but he could have trotted out another HWFO graph to bang that home.

Graph:

Bottom line, we’d be on the hook to buy back around 83 million dollars’ worth of guns for every single homicide averted by the buyback, which is more money than the annual budget of many major metropolitan police departments. Spike also could have quipped that owners of large gun collections actually love voluntary buybacks because they get to unload a bunch of trash guns they can’t sell anyway and get cash for better guns or more ammo. It’s likely that gun buybacks, on net, increased the number of AR-15s in circulation because gun collectors use them like a trade-in.

1:07:09

On the question about red flag laws, mandatory background checks, minimum age requirements, and required safety courses, Spike really misses a golden opportunity because he goes with “rights” over “facts,” and he also gets some of his facts wrong.

Spike is correct that multiple studies have shown minimum age requirements and required safety courses to no effect on gun crime, so those can be dismissed out of hand, but it’s not true that background checks have no effect. It’s also not true that a universal background check would require a gun registry, so his civil libertarian argument against registry-driven universal background checks is neither technically accurate nor necessary to rebut Hogg.

The “gun show loophole” was created by the government when the government only gave Federal Firearms License dealers (FFLs) access to the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS) system. If I as a private seller want to check to see if the buyer is legally allowed to buy a gun, I can’t. The government literally will not let me because they won’t give me access to NICS. I can’t even tell if I’m allowed to buy a gun unless I go into a gun store and attempt to do so. All that’s needed to plug the “gun show loophole” is to allow citizens to check NICS. No registry would be required, and the statistical gains from a universal background check system would be realized by a policy that does nothing more than enhance citizen engagement and provide additional transparency. Furthermore, a savvy gun community policy negotiator might trade that concession for a repeal of some or all of the laundry list of laws which are proven to have no effect. That entire analysis, including estimates of the numbers of lives saved by doing so, is outlined here:

https://www.opensourcedefense.org/blog/gun-policy-needs-a-decision-support-system

We could have this tomorrow, but the gun control advocates refuse to advocate this without a registry, which is something Spike could have thrown back in Hogg’s face.

Spike’s characterization of red flag laws being an unchecked civil rights violation is fairly accurate, but the numbers aren’t in yet on their efficacy, nor on how systemically they’re being abused.

The arguments Spike did use, about how registries lead to confiscation and confiscation leads to genocide often fall flat with an audience who doesn’t consider genocide particularly likely. It’s incredibly disingenuous for the anti-gun crowd to include gun suicide while not including genocide, especially in reference to European numbers. Europe is a genocidal shithole, and when you decide to throw genocide in with their murder rates the numbers are simply outrageous:

If we pretend that the delta in European and U.S. homicide rate was due to gun proliferation, and then correct the average expected value of European genocide deaths per year for population differences, then European genocide chance outweighs the homicide delta by a factor of fourteen. Stated another way, as long as ubiquitous firearm proliferation in the USA reduces our genocide chance by a fourteenth, we still come out ahead of Europe in death count. And as shown above, U.S. homicide rate isn’t actually due to gun proliferation anyway.

Thoughts

Spike is a sharp dude, and he handles a lot of the historical questions and legal questions better than I could because I don’t care about them. Having spoken with Gary Johnson, I’d take Spike in a debate over Gary unless the topic was effective governorship of a U.S. state. I’m not sure I would have been able to run the same debate format as well as him. I haven’t done policy debate since high school, and that format itself was very weird. If I were to participate in one of these things at all, I think I’d probably want to be the “numbers guy” on a two-person team while passing off the “rights” discussion to my teammate. I’m one of the few pro-gun commentators I’m aware of, possibly the only one, who thinks rights literally don’t matter in this discussion anymore because guns already won.

I’m not sure if Spike will see this article, but if you know him send it his way. And Spike if you do see this, hit me up in DMs. Let’s get a beer. Thomas Massie already owes me one.

.