Consider: it seems to be exceptionally difficult to identify the people who become murderously insane, even when under a Psychiatrist's care. Any decision about who is too dangerous or not dangerous enough will be made not based on a rigorously scientific basis, but on "hunches" or "feelings" or other qualitative analysis. In short, it will miss a ton of people who should go onto the list (False Negative result) and will misdiagnose as dangerously insane a ton of people who really aren't (False Positive result).
For those late to the security geekery party, this is a layman's explanation of False Positive results:
Consider: Senator Ted Kennedy once found himself on the TSA no-fly list. Hilarity ensued. It seems that the quality of the Fed.Gov "security" databases leave a lot to be desired.
Consider:
So riddle me this, Mr. Gun Control Man: Suppose Sumd00d goes to Shrink #1 who thinks he's dangerously insane and wants to put him on the list. And then Sumd00d goes to Shrink #2 for a second opinion (that will be allowed under your nifty Obamacare thingie, right?) who decides that he isn't. Which Doc had the False Positive diagnosis? How does that play out under your new Gun Control proposal? If he's a U.S. Senator, it will get fixed, for the rest of us, what happens?Todd Brown is the proud dad of an adorable little girl. A little girl that he found out, is on the TSA's list of potential terrorists.
It seems that if you're willing to do a fair amount of leg work, this sort of silliness actually gets cleared up. So well done to Mr. Brown, and I guess to the TSA for making the skies safe for cuteness.
Mr. Brown makes a good point, that there's nothing to tell you that you're on the list, and need to grovel your way through the TSA's unhelpful web site to find the required form. You could plausibly claim that this is a security feature - if the special someone on the list actually were a terrorist, you wouldn't want to let them know.
Which ignores the issue that it's idiotic to have someone so dangerous that they shouldn't be allowed to fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. That's a discussion for another day. Today, the issue is false positives, the erroneous report that someone or something matches a particular categorization, when they actually don't.
This is why you get a second opinion when your doctor tells you that you have a serious disease. Any diagnosis will be less than 100% accurate, and you don't want to go on an expensive and invasive regime if you're one of the 2% that don't actually have the disease.
An anonymous commenter left this, over in Brown's comments:
They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.Bingo.
I keep saying it: adding crummy data to databases makes the databases crummier. But well done shifting the cost of fixing the false positives from the Government to the innocent citizen. Here's an idea: make Doctors who report false positive results to this database subject to medical malpractice lawsuits. That'll drive down the cost of health care, right?
* So far I've been too busy/lazy to read the text of the legislation.
5 comments:
Well, I, for one, have complete faith in our government rulers, so what could possibly be the problem?
For those who have been paying attention, the most recent multiple-shooting events - Aurora and Sandy Hook - were committed by individuals who, mental illness or degree thereof aside, spent months and years in the planning stage of their atrocities. It's long been said that crazy does not equal stupid; in fact, one trait of this sort of individual is high intelligence (that cogent application of such intelligence may be partially impaired by "teh crazy" is a separate issue).
It has been reported that the Sandy Hook criminal had performed what was termed "Phd-level research" on previous similar events; that level of planning is difficult to defeat, and I suspect that a substantial number of persons who are capable of such planning may have multiple avenues of plan execution, to wit, easy and non-easy means of acquiring the means to commit an atrocity.
Unless the word of a "mental health professional" is sufficient to incarcerate such individuals, which is an extremely scary prospect for anyone not in the absolute center of the bell curve, I don't see this being too productive an enterprise. And, should incarceration be an option, we're back to my first paragraph: incompetence, obfuscation and bureaucratic inertia on the part of whomever is in authority will guarantee a substantially less than optimal outcome.
Which is to say we're all going to be sexual battery victims on this, because societal (and individual) structures will become dependent upon successful operation of a process that cannot operate with the degree of success, both positive and negative, necessary.
We're right back to The Basic Fact: If I'm carrying a .45, and reasonably skilled in its use, as long as I'm not the first one shot I have a chance. My ass belongs to me, and I'm the one with the ultimate responsibility for its health and happiness; if I'm stupid enough to accept anyone else's promises to successfully perform that function I deserve whatever pain I get.
"So far I've been too busy/lazy to read the text of the legislation."
Yea, you and the people that voted on it.
@ASM826: To be fair (which is difficult, as I'm not terribly inclined to do so in this case), they weren't voting on the legislation itself, they were voting on whether or not to debate and vote on it.
They still should have voted "no", but this is one reason I'm spitting mad at Toomey - his "compromise" (*spit!*) not only convinced our first line of defense to stand aside instead of making the enemy fight for every inch of ground, but it makes it easier for the anti-Rights cultists to take away more of our freedoms, because the amendment appears "reasonable" to the uninformed voters that the politicians depend on.
I blogged about this:
we're headed towards a future where the government wants to label every single one of us as mentally ill in some form or another. From the perspective of a long term strategy it's clear that this would eventually disarm the entire population.
Well that seals the deal.
I've always thought that going to the doctor was a bad idea.
They always tell me stuff I don't want to hear. ;)
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