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.

Gun Control, Disappointment, And Systems Theory

President Obama was in Minneapolis today, launching his initiative to limit shootings like the Sandy Hook Elementary slayings.

Everybody has an idea about gun control. Expect to be disappointed.

And not just the people who expect to forestall tragedy by limiting the kinds of arms citizens can own. I had a boss -- kind of an overbearing guy, and one who was two or three inches taller than I -- who gave me a lecture, with harrowing anecdote, on his Second Amendment rights. I hadn't expressed an opinion and he mistook what that opinion was.

What a dick. I hope I'm never in a crowded theater, with him, when some maniac pulls out a weapon. Caught in the crossfire.

Let's think about mass shootings like systems analyst Donella Meadows would have. Meadows wrote an essay, "Places to Intervene in a System."

The places (in increasing order of effectiveness) are:

Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
Material stocks and flows
Regulating negative feedback loops
Driving positive feedback loops
Information flows
The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)
The power of self-organization
The goals of the system
The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.

I'll go through the essay, trying to define each intervention point in terms of gun control. My next post will be a recap of Meadows' sidebar explanation of systems theory.