Last week I watched a gun advocate claim that household guns deter crime. Like most political claims, there is a small grain of truth behind this enormously misleading assertion, but in only one area.

Statistics from the National Crime Victimization study show that having and using a gun did reduce the loss of property against theft. Looking at crimes where the perpetrator’s intent was to steal, the victims lost property in only 38% of the incidents when using a gun in “self-defense,”compared with 56% of the incidents when taking other actions against the thief.

In all other crimes against households, having a gun seems to make little difference in the outcomes. Using a gun in self-defense doesn’t reduce the risk of injury in the case of a break-in or assault in the home. Just over four percent of victims were injured during or after a self-defense gun use — the same percentage as were injured during or after taking other protective actions.

Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicate there are fewer than one hundred burglaries resulting in a homicide in the U.S. each year. BJS statistics also show that there were only 1,600 defense gun uses in the U.S. in 2014, but there were more than 200,000 firearms stolen in household burglaries and property crimes each year.

Studies of all fifty states have also shown that the higher the rate of firearm ownership, the higher the rate of gun deaths. When firearms ownership goes down, so do gun deaths. Likewise, when firearms ownership climbs in an area, increased gun deaths follow, indicating that gun ownership creates more deaths, rather than the contention that people buy guns because they’re reacting to firearms violence.

Nearly two-thirds of the people in the U.S. live in homes without guns, and statistics show no evidence that they are at greater risk of being robbed, injured or killed by criminals compared with citizens in homes with guns. Instead, the evidence is overwhelming that a gun in the home increases the likelihood not only that a household member will be shot accidentally, but also that someone in the home will die in a suicide or homicide. In the case of sexual assaults, in less than one half of one percent of the assaults did the victim use a gun in self-defense.

So… given all these statistics, why is there such opposition to even modest gun control measures?

The first reason is fear. People fear being victims, and they want to take action so they won’t be, even if that action creates the certainty of greater gun deaths. It’s in effect a form of selfishness, of saying, “I don’t give a damn about what my actions do to other people; I want to protect myself and my family.” The problem is, as the statistics show, having a gun usually does just the opposite.

Over the years, I’ve seen people lobby and complain about seat-belt laws, initially insisting that seatbelts would trap you in a burning car and otherwise create more deaths. I’ve seen motorcyclists complain about helmet laws and claim that such laws restrict personal freedoms. Or companies complain about environmental laws restricting their emission of harmful pollutants because those laws would make them unprofitable or put them out of business. A tremendous percentage of the opposition to measures that make society safe comes out of the very human motives of fear and not wanting to lose control.

What the NRA and the gun lobby people don’t want to admit is that they don’t really care about anyone or anything else. Their crusade for “second amendment rights” is based on appealing to people’s fear of losing control and becoming victims. We all have that fear. It’s fundamental to human existence.

The problem is that more guns, especially guns with larger magazines and more rapid rates of fire, just make the likelihood of more people becoming victims even greater. And the more victims there are, and the more widely those shootings are publicized, the more fearful people become, and the more guns that are sold, if to a smaller percentage of households.

Fear based on irrational feelings leads to more guns and more deaths by than guns than is the case without guns, and that’s something that’s gotten overlooked in all the furor.

The other day I came across a summary compilation of health care data put out by Optum, which is said to track over a hundred different health metrics across the United States and which shows various regional differences in health problems.

Some of those differences are easy to comprehend, such as the high prevalence of hypertension in the “old South,” because a variety of associated other serious conditions also occur there, including diabetes and high cholesterol, most likely because of a higher level of rural and urban poverty, a diet higher in saturated fats, as well as other factors. Likewise, the incidence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) occurs in the states with both the highest levels of smoking per capita and the areas with some of the greatest percentages of deep shaft coal mining. For some reason that the Optum researchers can’t determine, lower back pain is the highest in North and South Dakota.

The area that has the highest rate of depression is, according to Optum, the “Rocky Mountain states,” and Optum opines this just might be because people there are just more willing to talk about their depression. I don’t buy it, at least not entirely. When I looked at the map Optum provided, the highest levels of depression coincide, from what I can determine, with the concentrations of LDS population. Now I can see why no health researcher would want to put that in print, but since I’m an economist by training and like looking into numbers, the coincidence was striking.

Also, to me, it makes sense. It’s a well-known and documented fact that the highest rate of Prozac use nationwide is by Utah women, which is hardly surprising, since Mormon women are under incredible social pressure to be perfect in every way, while also deferring, if quietly, to the males in their life. For whatever reason, they have, on average, more than twice the number of children women in other faiths, or no faith, in the U.S. have, yet married Utah women work at about the same percentage as other married women, and, as also documented, for lower wages and salaries than women elsewhere in the United States, and Utah is the state with one of the lowest, if not the lowest, percentage of adult women with a college degree. They’re also expected to be smiling and cheerful all the time.

This suggests to me a great deal of pressure, unrelenting pressure, and unrelenting pressure can often result in depression. This, of course, doesn’t mean all Utah women are depressed, just a higher percentage than women elsewhere in the United States. And, certainly, having more children in a lower-wage state with ten percent of your gross income going to the church might just add some stress to the men as well.

But I can almost guarantee that very few, if any, health professionals will dare to suggest that a particular religion or religion-influenced culture might just have an impact on the incidence of depression.

Once again, members of the U.S. Congress are pounding on the National Science Foundation, demanding that the agency focus on “useful” research. While there is a rather large difference of opinion about what might be “useful” research, there is, I believe, a question of whether any NSF research should be immediately “useful,” especially since the U.S. corporate sector has moved away from funding basic research to a great degree. Various studies over the last five years show that in all fields corporate funding of basic research has dropped to one third the level it was thirty years ago, although total corporate R&D funding has remained comparatively constant in inflation-adjusted dollars. This finding includes the acquisition of start-ups, as well, meaning that even when the basic research done by star-up companies later acquired by large companies is included, overall basic research remains at one third the level of 30 years ago.

Obviously, there are exceptions, such as Google and Elon Musk, but those exceptions are far outweighed by the bulk of corporations, which are far more interested in short-term, incremental research that results in immediate product improvement or new products that don’t require significant development expenses.

At the same time, U.S. federal funding for research and development has fallen significantly over the past 50 years, from almost 10% of the budget in 1968 to around 3% in 2015.

The problem with focusing on “useful” research is that no one, literally no one, knows what basic research will turn out to be useful… or when. Einstein’s theories are absolutely necessary for today’s GPS systems, but it was seventy years or so after he postulated them before GPS systems came into wide use.

When Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered CRISPR, the most powerful DNA editing technology ever discovered, described by the MIT Technology Review as “the biggest biotech discovery of the century,” they were studying the system that bacteria use to defend themselves against viruses, not looking for a world-transforming DNA editing tool, which is what it turned out to be.

Google, now a $250 billion corporation, actually got its start with an NSF grant to a research project.

Hunter Rawlings, president of the Association of American Universities, has been quoted as saying that “the iPhone depends on eight or nine basic technologies, none of which were invented by Apple. Those inventions were discovered at research universities or government laboratories, which were funded by the taxpayer.”

What’s troubling about all of this is that more and more basic research is being funded by governments other than the U.S., and that means that more bright young scientists go elsewhere, and that more and more of the basic research that underlies tomorrow’s technologies is going to come to U.S. corporations second-hand, if at all, and that some of them might also find yet another reason to move their operations and headquarters somewhere other than the United States.

In this world,for politicians, “useful” basic research translates into government-restricted research and far less future benefit for the U.S., a lesson not learned by the late Senator Proxmire a generation ago and still unlearned by senators and representatives today.

My fantasy books are often labeled as “epic fantasy,” but over the years, more than a few readers have complained that I don’t write epic fantasy. One even noted that the only thing epic about the Recluce Saga was the number of books and words. While I disagree somewhat with that description, that reader was on to something.

My fantasy books are largely about protagonists, as individuals, who are involved, or often caught, in epic events that go far beyond them. I write about their conflicts, beliefs, and struggles as they’re caught in times of great change.

Admittedly, in some cases, those individuals are in positions of power, or attempting to get into such positions, but even those who do gain power find that many of the events with which they must contend or endure are indeed beyond their powers. Creslin, in The Towers of the Sunset, discovers that he cannot change the mechanics of basic economics, and he doesn’t create a powerful land from scratch, but rather a small outpost of order that’s just strong enough and tough enough and worth little enough that the major powers don’t want to bother any longer. Cerryl, from Colors of Chaos, discovers that he can either have the woman he loves or children, but not both, and that even as High Wizard, he’s definitely constrained. Dorrin, The Magic Engineer, cannot change the culture of Recluce single-handedly, although what he begins will in fact do that. Even Lorn, who achieves great power, is limited in what changes he can make… and how long they will last.

Part of that is because, for better or worse, what I learned as a junior officer, a pilot, an economist, a political staffer in national politics, and as a consultant is that the sweeping changes and great battles that dominate much epic fantasy seldom happen that way in real life, not that there aren’t occasionally sweeping changes and great battles. Also, societies and their cultures are far more powerful than most people think, and what a single individual can accomplish is anything but unlimited, and that the greater the accomplishment, generally the higher the price.

That doesn’t mean I don’t write about protagonists that don’t accomplish a great deal, just that the focus is more on them, and what they do within the framework of the world in which they exist, whereas, so far as I can determine, “epic” fantasy revolves around great battles that determine the future of the world, or at least a significant part of it… and sometimes the universe. By that definition, I don’t write epic fantasy, and I have no desire to write that kind of novel or series.

Every so often I run across a commentary or published letter to the editor that both infuriates and saddens me. The great majority of them are along the lines of the most recent one I saw, which is why I decided to comment on it and what it represents. The letter in question asked why we’re spending so much money on space programs and research when so much needs to be done on earth. Besides the point that a tremendous amount of good for those of us on earth has come from such programs, the other point is that the amount spent on space programs is a tiny fraction of the U.S. federal budget. In fact, right now NASA spending is one half of one percent of total federal spending.

In past years, the same complaint has been leveled at foreign aid. Even today, polls show that Americans believe, on average, that 26% of federal spending goes to foreign aid, when the total is actually less than one percent.

Americans believe that ten percent of federal spending goes to pay non-defense federal employees. The real amount is a third of that. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is another area. Americans believe it takes up five percent of federal spending. The reality is one tenth of one percent.

Interestingly enough, popular estimates of spending for the programs that most people find “worthwhile” are far more accurate, as in the case of Social Security, where people believe, again, on average, that Social Security takes up twenty percent of total federal outlays, which it does.

In short, the figures that people use are the ones that support their beliefs, despite the fact that the correct numbers for foreign aid, for instance, have been published for years. And even when “everyone” knows the correct numbers, they can’t or won’t do the figures. An example of this is immigration. The figure of eleven million illegal immigrants has been printed, denounced, graphed, and presented in almost every way possible over the past several years. The U.S. population is now roughly 320 million people, and “legal” immigrants comprise just over ten percent of the population, so that all immigrants, legal and illegal, comprise less than 14% of the total population of the U.S. – as opposed to the 33% that Americans, on average, believe. [Of course, both the correct and the “popular” figures ignore the fact that everyone in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants, and that includes Native Americans, although their ancestors arrived some 15,000 years before everyone else’s.]

Such distortions abound everywhere politically. One “liberal” group has been declaring that 57% of the U.S. budget goes to defense spending, except a look at the fine print reveals that’s 57% of federal “discretionary” spending, which doesn’t include the bulk of federal spending. Defense spending amounts to around 21% of total federal spending, possibly as high as 24%, given which recent fiscal year’s data is used.

It used to be said that people were entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Apparently, now, everyone is also entitled to their own facts.