Quote of the Day
As a reminder, the field of psychology cannot predict homicidal likelihood well at all. The base rate is so low, it is an extremely difficult prediction.
If you are looking to us to predict who should not be allowed to own a gun, you are going to be disappointed. I don’t know.
Nicole Prause @NicoleRPrause
Posted on X, September 12, 2025
Prause is a research psychologist. Although she seems to be generally opposed to private gun ownership, I believe her to be reasonable honest following where the data leads.
There are other reasons not to expect psychologists to do a good job on determining the fitness of someone to own a gun. It would be extremely generous to call it an inexact science. Hence, when confronted with the responsibility to make that type of decision they would probably error on the side of “public safety” and deny far more people the right of gun ownership than is appropriate.
The appropriate way to address this is to remove guns from the question. The appropriate question to ask is, “Is this person a threat to themselves or others?” And if so, the response should be involuntary confinement at state expense with appropriate, if any, treatment.
Depends on the circumstances now doesn’t it?
“Dangerous!” cried Gandalf. “And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord.
We can all be the most dangerous thing in the world for a brief moment.
Valid point. I should have made mention of innocent life and due process as well.
Psychology has some very useful and interesting things to say about the human condition and society in very broad strokes. The problem is that people in general, including our mis-educated “leaders”, who should know better, take it as gospel truth most of the time. Psychology is NOT a science. It does NOT have experimentally reproducible results. The results are even less reliable as you start comparing one prediction tested against a large sample size of people from different cultures. There’s a reason asylums were nearly all closed back in the 1970s and it is a direct result of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the public’s awakening to the fact that at least some inmates consigned there were in a very sinister version of living Hell at taxpayer expense. It turns out that we threw the baby out with the bath water on that decision. An emotionally driven outcry from the public did NOT make good public policy. Who could have predicted such an outcome?
Sorry, unless you have a bone sticking out of the side of your leg?
The whole “prescription pad profession” is just about worthless.
These are the same people that;
“As of recent data, approximately 11% of Americans aged 12 and over are on antidepressant medication.”
(I think AI is low balling that number.)
Where do you think all these trans-murders get their drugs?
I wouldn’t trust one of those brainwashed morons to tell me the time of day.
Let alone give them authority over someone’s rights.
“As a reminder, the field of psychology cannot predict homicidal likelihood well at all. The base rate is so low, it is an extremely difficult prediction.”
Good ass covering their Nicole.
Your problem is that it says so right on the bottle of pills you prescribe.
Any psychologist worth his/her salt will tell you: The best predictor of future behavior, is past behavior. If someone is likely to be violent in the future, they’ve probably been violent in the past. If they haven’t been violent in the past, they’re not likely to be violent in the future.
Is that universal? Heck, No! Not even close! It’s most-consistent predictor we have without actually reading minds, and it’s not consistent at all!
That says much about the value of using mental health evaluations to determine a person’s fitness to exercise their individual right to gun ownership, but there remains a sizable cadre of politicians who think that adding mental health evaluations to the gun-owner-licensing process will prevent violence. It’s all B.S., and they know it, but if nothing else it adds expense and hardship to gun ownership, so they’re all for it.
I’ll go back to what’s been said before about politicians’ fitness for public office: Wanting power over others should be an automatic disqualifier. People who actively seek political power should be kept as far from it as possible. The problem is, how do we implement that?
Make publicly held office like jury duty with a caveat regarding how high up the political ladder one can climb based on education and work experience. No illiterate day laborers as senators or governors please, and likewise, no pampered rich poodles either who have never worked an honest day in their lives. How about we take a page from Heinlein and only allow honorably discharged veterans to hold Federal office? That should weed out many stinkers but may introduce new varieties
We do it for grand juries, too. Someone selected for normal jury duty has to report for one trial. Someone selected for a grand jury must serve a term — usually a few months to a year, though federal grand jury terms last 18 months — hearing a bunch of cases as they come up.
Yours is actually a reasonable idea. That plus term limits. We can still hold elections as required by the Constitution, but the primary-season candidate pool is selected jury-style from the voter rolls, a couple from each party, polled and vetted based on their education and life experience, and then submitted to the primary voters. The primary winners go on to the general election, just as in the current system.
As long as he/she is not termed out, an incumbent may campaign to hold the seat in the primary and general elections, but new names are always drawn to run against incumbents during primaries.
If a politician wants to keep his/her seat beyond the term limits or run for higher office, they must wait for their name to be called again. No more career politicians or political dynasties.
The more I think about this, the more I like it.
My biggest concern is that “luck of the draw” rarely gets you competent people for the task, but that’s why the primaries would pull multiple names — just like regular jury duty, which will draw a hundred names, sometimes two hundred or more, to empanel a 12-person jury — and looking at the past couple decades, at least, I don’t see how it could be much worse than what we’ve already lived through.