Anyone like to shoot?

[SteveFoerster]

My favourite, I think, is Ice-T's appearance on CNN, where he seems not to grasp the concept of laws. ("I'll give up my gun when everybody else does," he says, with a wry, superior glare. Well, ah, yes. That's how laws work; they impose the same rules on everyone, all at once, to overcome prisoners' dilemmas like this one.)

Perhaps the more important concept that Ice-T grasps is that just because there is legislation against private gun ownership doesn't mean that everyone obeys that legislation, and that for those who live in high crime areas, slavishly obeying such legislation literally means bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In practice, 0.8% of victims of gun violence say they responded to their attackers by either using or threatening to use a gun. Not much of a risk for the criminal, it seems.

The assumption here is that those victims believe they're safe to answer this question honestly.