Guns and Broken Windows

The professor always has some topics to discuss, some more politically charged than others. Today was about getting plastic surgery and making sure you know about the doctor's past. Many people have died getting plastic surgery. Well, I am not going to beat a dead horse by commenting on that, but something was brought up in class that I thought was awesome.

We were talking about inductive and deductive logic. Deductive logic is something like the following.
All cats are cute.
Fluffy is a cat.
Therefore, Fluffy is cute.

Inductive logic is a bit different. That is where a whole bunch of little pieces of information are strung together to come up with a conclusion. For example.
- There is a broken window in your house.
- There is a baseball on the floor near the broken glass.
- The baseball was not there this morning.
- There is an empty lot next door where kids play baseball.
- There were kids playing baseball there today.
- They are not there now.
With all these pieces of information we can say that one of the kids playing baseball caused the broken window. That is were the awesome part comes in. A comment was made that one of the kids playing baseball "broke the window."

Dissecting this situation a little farther I have some questions.
The baseball flew through the window breaking it.
The bat made the baseball fly.
The kid swung the bat hitting the baseball.
So who or what broke the window? Was it the kid who broke the window? Was it the bat that broke the window? Was it the ball that broke the window? One might argue the ball broke the window but it was the kid who caused it to happen by hitting the ball with the bat.

Think about how you would answer that question, and honestly look at this next situation.
A bullet hits a person cause the death of the person.
A gun fired the bullet that causes the death.
Someone pulled the trigger of the gun which caused the bullet to be fired.
Who killed the person? How often do you hear someone say "that person was killed by a gun"? Do you believe it was the bullet, the gun, or the person pulling the trigger that caused the death of the person?

Relate what you say on this one to the baseball example. I bet you did not saw the bat broke the window. But did you say the gun killed the person? Being consistent either you said the ball broke the window which means you should have said the bullet killed the person. Otherwise you probably said the kid broke the window, therefore you should have said that someone killed the person.

Gun arguments often bring in emotions where the ball breaking a window would not draw the emotions. You can use logic on the ball/window situation where the bullet/dead person brings out emotions. Emotions and logic don't mix.

Why was that awesome? Well it was cool. Trust me on that one. I was sitting in class and I heard the professor said "one of the kids playing baseball broke the window." I then immediately thought about who someone would have said if it had been a shooting. The professor no doubt would have said that a gun killed the person.

Should origins mean anything to us today?

Our discussion revolved around "rule of thumb". That, my professor said, has a negative source. People use "rule of thumb" all the time to talk about the general rule of something. Last night at fire training the instructor was talking about building construction. He said "the rule of thumb is..." It is funny that I heard it the very day we talked about it in class. I knew where rule of thumb origins had come from but others in the class had not heard of it.

The rule of thumb came from the time when you could beat your wife with a stick that was no bigger than the husband's thumb. She said that is such a negative origin, that the phrase "rule of thumb" should not be used. She then joked that if she had lived back then she would have married a guy with no thumbs. I can say I will not stop using it. I don't think that it should stop being used only do to its origin. If we stopped using things that came from a bad situation, then there are other things that people should not use today.

There are some people that say the medical advancements that we have gained due to the Nazi experiments from WWII should not be used because they were unethical. I don't buy that. I don't believe the end justifies the means, however we should not discontinue the use of things because people apply our standards of life to a different generation. That might sound a little like cultural relativism. I don't believe in that either. There are rights and wrongs that transcend cultures. But that does not mean that we should ignore things that help people, or phrases that may have come from a bad beginning.

Letter to the Editor

Editor,

A religious war is not something I normally enter. I am not a Bible scholar, nor do I pretend to know a lot about the Bible. However, pulling one verse from the Bible as Bethany Prince did to prove a point is not a good way to win an argument.

First examine her choice. Leviticus 21:13 "And if man lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." The first question is the choice of words, "Man lie with mankind", how come the scripture chooses to say man then use mankind. Seems to me that two different concepts are being used.

Ignoring the point I made, and I will concede that what is written in the Bible is what it means. If that is the case, I would like to point out a few things within Leviticus 21.

Leviticus 21:5 "They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh." It appears to be wrong to shave your beard, to shave your head, and to get body-piercing.

Leviticus 21:13-14 "And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these shall he not take: but he shall take a virgin of his own people to wife." I hope no woman ever has sex before marriage. Sounds like you can not get married if you have had sex before marriage. If your husband dies, tough luck, your days of being married are over and you can't re-marry.

One other thing I would like to point out. Prince's choice verse from the Bible actually comes from Leviticus 20:13. As you can see from the previous paragraph Leviticus 21:13 has to do with a wife and her virginity. If you have a point to make, you can surely do so, but leave quotations from the Bible out of it. Anybody can pull one verse from the Bible and use that to "prove a point."