Guns Part 4: Moral Hazard | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

I really enjoy this series but as a Neurosurgeon with lots of experience treating trauma, there are numerous holes in this piece regarding the RFK assassination. Most important is that today, the assassin would not use a .22 caliber handgun; he would use a .9mm, which would have blown the back of RFKs head off and he would have died immediately. I lived through the transition from .22's to .9mm's in the late 80s during the crack wars in NYC. The improvements in trauma outcomes that Mr. Gladwell reports are for chest and abdominal wounds, NOT headshots. Including the RFK case made this piece more intriguing but is not at all representative of the data that Mr. Gladwell was trying to highlight.

Brilliant analysis of insane circumstance. How many of those successful surgeries lead to lives that faced brain damage so severe, the victims were unable to function fully in society again.

Brilliant. Again. Again!

I really enjoy these and I listen more and more to the whole Revisionist History podcast. I don’t want to geek out over this, but for enlightenment, the illustration of driving recklessly because of a belief that SUVs are safe, is not Moral Hazard — it is another concept, ‘Consumer Effect.’ You need moral conflict to create Moral Hazard. Consumers modifying their behavior consciously or subconsciously because of beliefs about a product is not considered moral conflict — they are not making a ‘moral’ choice. Staying in your example of SUVs: An auto manufacturer who decides to produce SUVs because they are on truck chassis and so in the US have less safety requirements (being ostensibly a commercial vehicle and therefore less costly to build), is a moral conflict between extra profit and less safety. The systemic system pressures the manager to choose short-term profit over the long-term reputation of the company even though he’s been hired to help that company. This moral conflict invokes Moral Hazard (meaning the artifice that creates moral conflict). Keep going! Love these stories and thoughts. 🙂

Malcolm must not know about the Dickey Amendment. It was a congressional rider attached to a 1997 spending bill that forbids the CDC from studying gun violence. 15 years later, Jay Dickey said it was the worst thing he ever did in congress and wished that it would be repealed.

As a sociologist he's a great trauma surgeon!

Two parent home The trauma surgeon was on point

History is shaped by randomness.

The bullet Reagan caught was unique. It was an exploding (frangible) bullet made only to be used by air marshals so that the bullet would not penetrate an airplane hull. This probably worked in Reagan's favor as it limited the penetration of the bullet. This incident should not be used as an example of gunshot wound. Maybe without Reagan humiliating Russia after the iron curtain fell would mean a Russian leader that could be negotiated with and who wouldn't try and resurrect the Soviet Union City of counter Reagan's humiliating them.

Munk Debate you got OWNED!!!! LOL

Swelling of the brain to release that pressure of fluids

Good episode. It’s really crazy to see how many lunatics you have in the comments section looking to attempt to rewrite the bill of rights. I’m really glad most of the country is educating themselves on the ratification of the constitution and the bill of rights so this level of ignorance can be slowly burned out.

Sibling died from brain trauma and of things have a member studing to be a surgeon.

Rfk doesn't advance the moral hazard argument its the gun owners . They advance at their peril.

Yet the data not provided by

Suggesting, the response data provided not?

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ lots of fudging…… Let’s all go to sugar rock Candy Mountain

The bigger question is how we went from RFK to Trump? So sad.

Disparities

Hope this series gets Gladwell a pulitzer. Hope also that his marketing team finds a way to send links to the series to every member of the US House, US Senate, Supreme Court Justices, every Governor's office in every state and every big city Mayor. With news that Drug Cartel Violence is largely fueled by guns EXPORTED from the USA to Mexico, my sincere hope is that Revisionist History future parts of this series addresses that aspect of the gun problem. I am old enough to remember sitting in front of the TV watching the coverage of the JFK murder, as well as that of MLK, and RFK...and yes, the attempt on Reagan....etc. But every morning, I wake up to the morning news and hear about yet more gun violence in my own community. Senseless stuff like guns left in a car with children who get ahold of it and kill one of their baby brothers. Or people who leave guns on the front seat of their fancy vehicles and cry and moan when the gun gets stolen -- as though they are the victim. They are at least the victim of their own blatant stupidity. Americans, for some reason, have brains on fire. Brains that feel as though the best answer to a problem is pulling out a gun and pretending they are on movie sets. And BTW, I don't think guns are the problem. Bullets are. Fact is, if most of the bullets were blanks, you couldn't tell which you had, you'd be a lot less likely to play that game of roulette. Bullet manufacturers should be rationned in what they cannot produce, making ammo more difficult to come by. Wouldn't stop the cartels, by it might stop the stupid street bloats.