Gun Violence And Numbers As A System Levrage Point

I put off writing this post, worried that I might be missing something. This one's supposed to be about Donella Meadows' least effective leverage point for intervening in a system, numbers, and numbers as a way of reducing mass shootings.

Meadows uses her bathtub analogy to illustrate the effect of numbers -- or parameters -- on systems. How far do you have to turn the handle to get how much water. Is the drain open or stopped. Then she switches to the national debt, which despite changes in taxation and spending, continues to rise. She includes personnel changes under the jheading "Numbers," as well. Bill Clinton had a slightly different effect from George Bush, but only slightly. (Meadows was writing during the Clinton administration, and much concerned with the effects of overshoot on the economy.)

In the case of mass shootings, proposed changes in the debate seem to be about numbers. How fast can a gun shoot, and how many rounds can it hold? Can we get more honest people to carry concealed weapons, and hire police to patrol all schools? Can we eliminate fire arms sales to criminals and the delusional?

Meadows writes, "If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it." She uses the phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

Prohibiting all firearms except, say, black-powder muzzle-loaders might have reduced the heartbreak at Sandy Hook by 96%, but that would have been twenty-five lives saved. The president says we can't eliminate the danger, but we shouldn't let that stop us from eliminating some.

Maybe we can do better, if we move up the list. The next post will be Daonella Meadows' eight-most effective leverage point, "Material stocks and flows."

Donella Meadows And Leverage Points

Donella Meadows begins her famous essay, Places to Intervene in a System, by defining leverage points as "places within a complex system (a corporation, and economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything."

She quotes her teacher, Jay Forrester, as saying that people intuitively know what the leverage points are, and consistently push them in the wrong direction. The classic example of this is economic growth, with people always wanting to remedy the problems cause by growth with more growth.

The nine leverage points she discusses in the essay came out of a meeting about NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO at which she impulsively, and out of frustration, listed them on the easel on the dais.

Gun Violence And Systems Theory: Thermostats and Bathtubs

The standard example of a "system" is a house thermostat. It's a heater on-off switch connected to a themometer. Somebody decides that the house should be at 68 degrees -- the "goal" -- and sets thermostat to turn the heater on if the temperature falls below that, and off when the temperature goes above. The heater is only either off or on. You can't really crank it up; it's just on more if you make the goal 75, and less if you set the thermostat at 60.

Donella Meadows uses a bathtub as her system example. There's water going into the tub from the faucet, and leaving by the drain. (Let's say there's a leaky plug.) The bather decides the goal of the system is six inches of water and adjusts the flow from the faucet to keep it at that level. The flow down the drain is "negative feedback," and the flow from the faucet is the "positive feedback."

The bather also has a goal for water temperature, and has a hot water valve (positive feedback) and a cold water valve (negative feedback), and a water heater, with a thermostat, in the basement.

A tub containing more water will hold its temperature longer. It will drain at the same rate, but be useful longer than a tub with less water to begin with. The capacity for water and the amount of heat in the water are both examples of "material stocks."

Meadows also mentions other systems connected to the bather and plumbing. There's the well or municipal water utility, the hydrological cycle, the bather's checking account, and the economy. This is interesting to me as an analogy for the system that includes gun violence.

I really don't have an agenda for or against gun control. (Alright, I'm tepidly pro-gun.) But I have a sneaking suspicion that the system that includes mass shootings is complex enough that the place where society can intervene is remote from gun ownership.