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when a scientific study ends by stating that there’s uncertainty about whether a correlation proves a cause, it doesn’t mean that correlations are meaningless in every circumstance. Everyone knows that creating false correlations between two unrelated elements is easy. But it can be that a correlation is so powerful and reliable that it may actually point to that rare thing in the social sciences, a demonstrable causal relation. As a wise man once said, “Correlation is not causation, but it sure is a hint.” When you can separate out a truly robust correlation between two elements in our social life, it’s a big deal. What makes a correlation causal? Well, it should be robust, showing up all over the place, across many states and nations; it should exclude some other correlation that might be causing the same thing; and, ideally, there ought to be some kind of proposed mechanism that would explain why one element affects the other. There’s a strong correlation between vaccines and less childhood disease, for instance, and a simple biological mechanism of induced immunity to explain it. The correlation between gun possession and gun violence—or, alternately, between gun control and stopping gun violence—is one of the most robust that you can find.

The difficulty of knowing other people’s intent is a classic philosophical problem. It is epistemological in that it involves the limits of our knowledge. We can’t really know what anyone else hopes to do, and sometimes, because of the subconscious and self-deception, we don’t ever know what our own true intent is. It is also an example of the problem of other minds. We can never really enter into the perspective of any other person nor can we ever really know what they think (or even if they think). We are discrete individuals and communication is unreliable. My point: the political and economic realities of running from gun activists is, yet again, founded on classic philosophical issues, and when we take positions on issues of the day, we are really taking positions philosophically. The gun-rights activists think that their intent is obvious and that everyone knows what they hope to do. They believe their minds are transparent. But this is because they are all extreme narcissists. It baffles them that we don’t all know exactly what they are thinking. It shocks them that we don’t know that Jim is a good guy, and that Sally would never murder anyone. But they are wrong. We don’t know them and we don’t know how they think. The only thing that makes us notice them at all is that they have guns and truthfully, that’s why they carry them in the first place. They want to be celebrities, heroes, and the centers of attention.

Medical ailments, such as cancer and heart attacks, kill considerably more people each year than either guns or automobiles, according to the CDC. But firearms and motor vehicles are among the leading non-medical causes of mortality in the United States. They kill more people than falls do each year, and considerably more people than alcohol.

5. The social science on gun violence is inconclusive.It will always be a given that it’s impossible to have real controlled experiments. The closest thing in this case would be to have two contiguous countries—both with similar “root” populations, and both subject to massive immigration from abroad.

“Just as with the physical world, where hurricanes, tornadoes, and other ‘acts of God’ just happen, the same is true of the social world,” he wrote. “Some people just do things. They assassinate world leaders, act on poorly thought out ideologies, and leave clues at the scene of the crime. Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists.”

He says conspiracy theorists rely on what he calls “errant data,” or random minutiae within a terror attack or major event that can—and maybe should—go unexplained in reality. Those pushing conspiracies, however, seize on that unexplained info and attempt to explain it in full.It is an effort to connect every dot on the map—every blade of grass on the Grassy Knoll—even if some dots have nothing to with the larger event at all

Crisis class theory is a weirdly hopeful, terribly reductionist coping mechanism, a way to explain a world that can be unjust and needlessly cruel—but wouldn’t be if the “bad guys” controlling it all were vanquished.“There is surely some psychological comfort in believing that a horrific event like a mass murder of schoolchildren never really happened at all—that it was all fake,” he writes.

The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr's blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”

A boy who dressed as a character from Fifty Shades of Grey was excluded from his school's World Book Day celebrations, according to his mother. Liam Scholes, 11, went to Sale High School as Christian Grey from the explicit novel, wearing a grey suit and carrying cable ties and an eye mask. His mother Nicola Scholes, a teacher, said the Greater Manchester school ruled the costume was "inappropriate" and excluded her son from photographs. The school is unavailable for comment. Ms Scholes said she feels Liam's outfit was actually more appropriate than some of the costumes worn by others. She said it was deemed "appropriate for a teacher to dress up as a serial killer" and "acceptable for kids to dress up as people that kill others" and "come in with [toy] guns".

Fear, arriving in layers in which genetic legacy converges with personal experience, is vital to our survival. When we freeze, stop in our tracks or take flight, it is a biological response to what we sense as near and present danger. All the same, it observes its own absurd hierarchy, in which we often harbor an abiding anxiety for the wrong things.

Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles

The biologist E. O. Wilson has observed that while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.