The goofy logic of the pro-gun lobby

Before I get into this let me state, unequivocally, that I support the 2nd amendment. I believe I should have the right to own, possess, and carry a firearm. [For the record, I don't and I can see no good reason to do so; I'm not a hunter and am not skilled in discharging firearms...If I did try to defend myself in the extremely unlikely scenario that my life should be threatened, I'm likely to do more harm than good by brandishing a weapon. But I don't think the government should take this option from me and I'm increasingly distrustful of allowing the government to have a monopoly on lethal violence].

Now that we've got that out of the way... I was catching up on some old blog posts a few minutes ago and ran across Megan McArdle's tortured logic about Gun Statistics.

Exhibit 1:

A small number of) men like to murder their families with guns. But they also like to murder their families with knives, baseball bats, and their fists. Taking away the guns might somewhat reduce the number of homicides (it might also increase it; you're more likely to recover from a fatal-looking gunshot wound to the stomach than from having your head banged against the floor 80 times). But spousal murder is plenty easy without a gun.

Sigh... Where do we start.

(1) A firearm kills by propelling a sizable piece of lead at an extremely high velocity into the human body. Even a small caliber weapon (say, a .22) is an effective lethal weapon. The velocity is such that the victim has nearly no opportunity to defend him or herself.

In contrast, the speed of a knife, bat, bottle, or fist attack is considerably slower which increases the opportunity to: (a) evade, (b) counter-attack, or (c) call for help. I'm not saying that being attacked by an assailant wielding a melee weapon is safe... just that my chances of escaping death are greater in that scenario than encountering an assailant (who intends to kill) wielding a fire arm.

(2) McArdle seems to argue that a would-be assailant will kill with whatever is available. That assumption fails to recognize an important social fact: generally speaking, we suck at violence. Randall Collin's latest book on Violence makes a point that more criminologists should acknowledge. Contrary to popular belief violence is not hardwired into our evolutionary makeup and we are strongly socialized to to be violent. In consequence, successfully carrying out a physically violent encounter (unaided by a firearm) is exceedingly difficult. [Which is not to say that it doesn't happen...]. It takes much less effort to squeeze a trigger than it does to plunge a knife, or swing a bat.

Back to Ms. McArdle

On the other hand, many people who wave a gun at someone threatening, and thereby cause that person to go away, don't report it. How many? We don't know, because they don't report it. But I didn't report the mugging I foiled last January through strategically hunting for my keys in a well lighted portion of the street. I doubt I'd have been any more likely to do so if I'd waved a gun at him.

Now, it is possible that having a gun is actually on net dangerous to you and your family. But we have no evidence to support this notion, because all the statistics on the subject are crap. The denominator is what criminologists call a "dark number": one where there is no way to arrive at any reasonably credible estimate of its value.

I've seen Kleck's survey study suggesting that brandishing a weapon foils a large number of muggings. His findings are in line with Routine Activities Theory... by showing a weapon, I've just made myself a harder target. Most muggings are carried out by amateur or opportunistic criminals. But these same would-be criminals are just as easily scared away through other means (e.g., Ms. McArdle's fumbling for keys; an aggressive stance back at the mugger, etc). If you can defuse the attack without incurring the risks that come with holding a firearm, why not do so?

For the assailant that wouldn't be scared away... I'm not convinced that a firearm would make him back down. [McArdle disagrees with me here; there's no empirical data for either of us to rest our argument]. I hold to my earlier stated premise: most of us, were we to brandish a firearm, in such a scenario, are likely to be hurt. Or, hurt someone else unnecessarily.

On McArdle's dismissal of the Dark Figure; there actually is a credible way of estimating the dark figure. We take the estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey (which are properly sampled and weighted) and compare them to the official crime statistics. This suggests that violent crime is under reported by a factor of 3 or more. HOWEVER...

Homicide and Aggravated Assualt have fairly low dark figures. Most homicides are committed with handguns and perpetuated by someone known to the victim. [Eg., as I tell my criminology classes, most homicides are fights that go to far (many involving alcohol or other intoxicants) comparably few are carried out by premeditative cold-blooded predators... which is the image the pro-gun lobby advances as the reason we need to arm ourselves.

I assert that many homicides would be avoided if a firearm was not present. Very few assaults advance to the point of death... (a) To take Ms. McArdle's example, it's awfully hard to bang someone's head on the floor enough times (say 12) to kill them. {Most victims will resist, obviously the scenario changes when we are talking about child abuse, or abuse of an invalid}. Anyone who has ever boxed will attest how tiring it is to throw punches. That's why boxers need to be in great shape. After 12 or 13 punches most of us are completely spent. Ever watch a bar fight? Don't blink, you'll miss it. Two drunk bozos through 12 punches between the two of them and they don't have the energy to go on. (b) The longer it takes to finish someone off, the more likely someone will intervene. Again, every bar fight that I've ever seen (not that I have a large N to generalize from) is broken up before anyone gets too messed up.

McArdle is right... I don't have hard data for the above paragraph. But she doesn't either.

The point is this. I think on balance, arming more people leads to more unnecessary death. That's why I don't keep firearms in my home. [Would be burglars, you're not likely to get a great return on your investment in burglarizing my house, soft target that it may be.] But that's a reality I think we need to live with. I don't begrudge anyone else the right to arm themselves if they think that will keep them safer. I think their firearm makes them less safe; but that's their choice.

The Barbarians are past the gate

I was advised by my dean of the pending lawsuit at Georgia State, concerning digital distribution of copyrighted materials for instructional purposes (see the New York Times, and Inside Higher Ed coverage for more details).

I'm mortified... my alternatives appear to be:

1. Rely on overpriced, dumbed down, glossy, pre-packaged, drek, sold by the major, for profit, publishing houses, which are funneled through the Barnes and Noble owned campus bookstore and their 34% markup or...
2. Put together a course reading pack that (upon imposition of the publisher's use fee) will cost as much as the overpriced, dumbed down, glossy, pre-packaged, drek, sold by the major, for profit, publishing houses, which are funneled through the Barnes and Noble owned campus bookstore and their 34% markup, but without being resellable.

.

When books cost as much as they do (sustained at a price that clearly reflects lack of real competition in the marketplace) they must be capable of resale. I'm at a loss to decide what to do... if the publishing houses put out more decent texts, I'd be inclined to select one and stick with it. As it is, it seems that I must choose between accelerating volumes of bad options.

"It was in the best interest of these chidren..."

So claims Marleigh Meisner, spokesperson for the the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services regarding the placement of more than 400 children into emergency state custody after removing them from a polygamous colony in Southwest Texas. On Friday, after a long and chaotic two days of hearings, the Judge presiding over the case signed an order validating this move.

Now the State of Texas has 400+ more children to place into a foster care system that most observers describe as already overburdened. One has to wonder if this move really is in the best interest of all these children.

For the uninitiated, this case presumably began with an anonymous phone call to State officials, allegedly made by a 16 year old girl, who claimed to be sexually assaulted and held against her will by her much older spiritual husband. Investigators have yet to publicly report that they've located this girl and few, if any, of the women brought out of the community match this description. Some now argue that the phone call was a prank, hoax, or purposeful lie used to justify the investigation. On that, I'd like to remain agnostic until more of the facts come forward. Once investigators entered the community (using a swat team to gain entry), they justified the remove of the children on the grounds that the women were being socialized to accept being raped, while the boys were being socialized to become rapists. From my vantage point, this case (which is already a mess) highlights serious problems in the ways in which the United States exercises "child welfare".

I've spent much of the last two years carefully studying the sociology of Child Welfare Services. By way of preface, I am sympathetic to child protective workers. They have a difficult (and perhaps impossible) job, which they are expected to fulfill their duties with limited resources, high caseloads, and generally low respect from those they work with. They are asked to carryout law enforcement policies, without the authority of a full fledged law enforcement officer. They are asked to make split second decisions regarding the welfare of children in high stakes situation. One does not need to look hard to find examples in the news media where a child, known to CPS, died at the hands of an abuser where the department had an opportunity for removal. When this happens, the CPS system becomes the whipping boy (which is probably a poor analogy in this example) of the news media, politicians, and the general know-it-all public. The same is true, however, when CPS officials remove a child from a home prematurely... Their decisions are second, third, and fourth guessed by others (often by lawyers who are predisposed to emphasize due process). In the majority of these situations where there are no clear right and wrong courses of action, the CPS personnel will be held responsible for making a wrong decision where no right decision was obvious.

Having said all that, what I've read about this case gives me pause. The New York Times has a series of stories that are informative and the Salt Lake City Tribune's coverage is extensive (you can follow the links above). While the Texas CPS officials are claiming that they have evidence to support belief that all 400 of these children were in danger, I don't think those claims pass a smell test. Put differently, the investigators and officials may believe they have evidence, but their position is clearly shaped by religious bigotry, the nationwide moral panic concerning pedophilia, and the dynamics of minority threat.

The invasive investigation was trigged by an anonymous phone call suggesting that this sect's religious practices condone rape. Since the case broke, all kinds of outlandish things have been said in the media (particularly on NBC's Today show) about this group's exotic religious behaviors (ranging from symbolism of their dress and hair styles, to theological doctrine supporting rape). Brooke Adams, a journalist with the Salt Lake City Tribune, has been covering these allegations and posting counter claims on her blog. I leave it to the readers to determine which set of claims are more believable. As I've read commentary on this case in the blogosphere, it's becoming increasingly clear that many people associate polygamy with rape... E.g., they're polygamists, therefore they must have been raping these girls (or were about to) and therefore these actions are acceptable. What little I've read about Polygamy (or Plural Life) suggests that, while the marriage of young women occurs, it's not that common. [I'm not an expert here, only reporting what I've read so far].

I have read nothing in the accumulated pool of news coverage to suggest that the investigators have evidence actual abuse. There are cryptic quotes in the papers referring to children in a certain age range who are pregnant (the age range being 14-17). A pregnant 14 year old may have been statutorily raped, but she may also have been impregnated by another minor. A reasonable reaction to this discovery, given the allegations of spiritual marriage of young girls to older men, would be to remove the pregnant girls into custody and question further. While this might even be objectionable, it would be responding in proportion to the evidence of abuse. Instead, they appear to be responding to the potential threat of abuse, filtered through a culturally ignorant understanding of this religious group and fueled by the nationwide panic over pedophilia. To remove 400+ children, the majority of whom, I'm certain, manifest no indicators of abuse or neglect, because of some ideologically motivated belief that they are being socialized into a deviant life style, strikes me as beyond the pale of what should be tolerable in a pluralistic society.

Law enforcement generally, and Texas in particular, has a habit of ham handed interaction with minority religious groups. Sociologist Nancy Ammerman provided a stinging indictment of the Justice Department's handling of the Branch Davidian siege of the mid 1990s. She suggests that had the authorities developed more cultural understanding of this group, they could have avoided the tragedy. Like that case, it appears that the actions of the State here are simply reinforcing group's persecution complex (which can hardly be called a complex when it's demonstrative!)

According to the series in the New York Times, the broader community in El Dorado Texas has viewed this sect with suspicion from the get go. In a 2004 article about the establishment of the YFZ compound, the local sheriff routinely watched their activities with suspicion and local residents went on record worrying that the new residents could quickly take over the community's government and politics. This is a clear example of minority threat. The existing community has been looking for a way to expel the threat and now they have one. Under these circumstances, benefits of the doubt are interpreted in a way that justifies further investigation and invasive state action.

Now that the children are in State custody, it becomes incredibly hard to reverse the process. Each will now be evaluated and officials will develop family plans for reunification. I have no doubt that these plans will be intolerant of the family's religious beliefs. The 1st amendment is fine and dandy, until it runs into the teeth of a moral panic. Then such niceties as constitutional protections go out the window. I'll be watching to see what happens next, but am not optimistic that CPS will come out of this looking good.

Why I like Stata... reason #9

I'm evaluating West Virginia's benchmark performance on the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (or ICPC). This compact establishes agreements between States so that one may place a child into foster or kinship care in another. It's necessary, because there are many steps that are required before a child can be placed (background checks, home studies, etc)... Intrastate placement is comparatively easy because the State law governs all agencies within the State's borders. If I want to place a child in an adjacent county & State law dictates that county social services will take care of the background checks, homestudies, etc, then we (theoretically) have no problems. But if I wanted to place the child in Pennsylvania, I'd have no means of compelling their social services to do this work and I wouldn't be able to do it myself, because I'm not licensed in that State. The ICPC facilitates state-to-state agreements.

I received a bunch of data from our State's ICPC office a few weeks ago. I'm using these data to calculate performance indicators (mean or modal # of days from benchmark 1 to 2, estimates of variance, etc).

In this line of work delays are common. For that reason, the federal government has been trying to figure out ways to structure incentives to minimize delays. However, they drafted the legislation without really understanding the dynamics that contributes to them (shocking, I know). In this State, they've been proactive in gathering data to document reasons for delay. The spreadsheet that they sent me includes a column labeled delay and containing the following codes.

 delay 
          1 
      1 & 2 
      1 & 3 
      1 & 5 
       1 &2 
        1&3 
 1,  2, & 3 
   1, 2 & 3 
 1, 2 & 3   
   1, 2 & 4 
  1, 2, & 3 
 1, 2, 3 &5 
   1, 3 & 5 
  1, 3 & 5  
    1,2 & 3 
    1,2,& 3 
    1,4 & 5 
          2 
      2 & 3 
          3 
      3 & 5 
       3 &5 
          4 
          5 

There are six codes for delays (code 6 was never used in these data). To make these data analytically useful, I have to create binary indicator variables (0/1) for each delay condition.

Now if I were using SPSS bad software, I'd have to write approximately 25 IF/Then Statements with the proper substring parsing to convert these data into something that's useful. This is the sort of thing that we did a lot of at the old data farm (and it's one of the reasons I looked for employment away from the data farm, ugh).

But Stata has implemented regular expression substring functions. While regular expressions are truly cool, I don't need to use a complicated pattern match here. I simply need to know, for each of my six indicator variables, if the matching digit is somewhere in the string. Take #3. If you look at the list above, you'll notice that sometimes 3 is in the first position (3 & 5), sometimes it's in the middle (1, 3 & 5) and sometimes it's last. Moreover, there's lots of uneven text in this string field (spaces, commas, the & sign, etc). I just want to know if code 3 applies for a given case. Stata lets me do that efficiently and elegantly.

foreach x of numlist 1/6 {
  gen delay`x' = (regexm(delay,"`x'"))
}

This is a simple loop that cycles through a list of values. For more about the power of forloops in Stata, consult Nick Cox's excellent article on the topic. This particular loop initiated with 1, does what I ask it to do, increments to 2, does what I ask it to do, and continues to iterate until it reaches six. Below is my translation of what this concise little loop did.
Translation:
Dear Stata, for each digit in the series 1,2,3,4,5 & 6, please generate six new variables, one for each digit in the series. Name the variables delay1, delay2... delay6. Please use the regular expression match function to examine the original string variable (called delay) and indicate if the reference digit is present. If it is, please follow the rules of regexm (which is to return a 1 if true and 0 if false). Thank you and have a lovely day.

The results:

. tab delay1

     delay1 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        281       87.00       87.00
          1 |         42       13.00      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        323      100.00

. tab delay2

     delay2 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        262       81.11       81.11
          1 |         61       18.89      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        323      100.00

. tab delay3

     delay3 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        250       77.40       77.40
          1 |         73       22.60      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        323      100.00

you get the point.. it worked

So now, I have functional indicator variables that I can plug into my models and be all quantitative and stuff.

Why did I post this indictment of my geekiness? Because, I know many people are doing applied social research based on uncleaned administrative data. This is information often gathered for purposes other than analysis. If you get to know the programming capabilities of your statistics package of choice (yes, even SPSS) you can save yourself a heck of a lot of work. Avoid the impulse to use point and click menus. There is no GUI guidance from Stata on how to put together this loop; had I relied on the GUI I'd never get this thing done.

That is all.

An infinite regress of incompetence?

Via Meagan McArdle, I read this short article about some psychological research coming out of Cornell.

The gist... most incompetent people have no grasp on the bounds of their incompetence. Well, I knew this, for I once worked at... (those who know, know... those who don't can rather quickly discover this with an innovative google search).

But the more disconcerting finding:

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

Hmmm... if you have a penchant for identifying incompetence... does that mean you are more incompetent than the incompetents? Is this the rubber-glue effect in action?

The power of survey monkey

I'm doing a medium scale study of Child Welfare in West Virginia. My original protocol called for a mail survey of Child Protective Workers, Attorneys, and assorted support staff. Since the majority of these people now have access to the Internet at work, we decided to change the protocol to a web-survey.

This morning a link to the survey was sent out to all Child Protective Services personnel in the State. After 4 hours, I have approximately 25% of our anticipated responses in. Since we used a web-based data collection strategy, these responses come to me pre-coded and ready to analyze. In these 4 short hours, the $200 I spent for full access to Survey Monkey has more than paid for itself.

I am a fan of Survey Monkey.

Bibliomancy Meme

Eszter at Crooked Timber posted an interesting exercise. The task: Grab the nearest book that is at least 123 pages long, open the book to page 123, find the 5th sentence on the page, type the following three sentences, then tag five people. I'm not going to tag anyone, but welcome the three of you who read this blog on occasion to do the same exercise.

I looked above my monitors and the first book on my shelf is, Erving Goffman's Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Page 123 takes me to the essay, "Alienation From Interaction."

What the individual takes to be immodesty in others may present itself in many forms: immodest individuals may seem to praise themselves verbally; they may talk about themselves and their activity in a way that assumes greater interest in and familiarity with their personal life than the individual actually possesses; they may speak more frequently and at greater length than the individual feels is fitting; they may take a more prominent "ecological" position than he thinks they warrant, etc.

One interesting source of other-consciousness is to be found in the phenomenon of "over-involvement." During any conversation, standards are established as to how much the individual is to allow himself to be carried away by the talk, how thoroughly he is to permit himself from becoming so swollen with feelings and a readiness to act that he threatens the bounds regarding affect that have been established for him in the interaction.

< $50 will get you five and other wisdoms of our criminal justice system

So I'm reading an opinion issued by the West Virginia Supreme court of Appeals. This case involves a young woman who voluntarily relinquished her parental rights to her newborn son (who was born with Cocaine and Marijuana in his bloodstream; the mother's parental rights to three older children had been involuntarily revoked by the Court.

It's standard policy here for the State to petition a court for emergency custody when a parent, previously found to be unfit, gives birth to a new child. The process involves an initial petition, followed by a finding of fact and adjudication. The respondent may file a petition with the court for an improvement period. In this case, the parent was preparing to do so. She checked herself into a treatment facility to demonstrate to the court that she's serious about making changes. However, upon admittance to the treatment program, a background check turned up warrant for her arrest.

The mother had been convicted of check fraud in Virginia. Although she served her sentenced time (the opinion does not indicate how much time she served), she never paid a $50 fine. Accordingly she was arrested, extradited, and re incarcerated. I wonder how much the State of Virginia paid to have her transported from Beckley, West Virginia to where-ever Virginia and then reincarcerated. Certainly more than the $50 fine that they imposed on someone who is indigent. (The reason most people write bad checks is that they lack the resources to pay for goods and services the legitimate way). Well at least justice was served.

I haven't finished reading the opinion, but the from the Syllabus, I know that the Supreme Court ruled against her. While she was incarcerated she voluntarily relinquished parental rights. The appeals indicates that she felt coerced into this decision. West Virginia's Supreme Court concurred with the original decision (that this was a voluntary action).

Graduate Schools must hate recommendation writers

It's that time of year when undergraduate students are busily preparing dossiers for graduate school admissions. I was asked by one of our best students to write a letter of recommendation for her. This, being one of the things I'm paid to do, I happily obliged. But then, I started looking at all these forms. It used to be that one could substitute a letter for the official form supplied by the institution. But in today's world of online applications, more schools are requiring the recommender to use their STUPID bothering (Jeremy, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery) form. So I have a student who has applied to 4 different programs and must fill out 3 different forms, each asking slightly different questions. I can can cut and paste from my 500 word letter of recommendation, but must do so differently for each school (not to craft the recommendation to fit the school, which I would do with a letter anyway, but to satisfy the stupid freaking administrative layout of the stupid bothering form).

Nimrod Nation vs. Friday Night Lights

I just finished watching Nimrod Nation, an 8-part documentary series on the Sundance Channel. The series follows a group of people from Watersmeet Township Michigan, a rural community in the western U.P. of Michigan. The primary story arc follows the boy's basketball team as they make a run at the state playoffs. But secondary storylines focus on the stark economic realities of rural America; rural cultural practices (hunting and fishing); and snow.

I found the show both interesting and refreshing. It didn't sanitize, romanticize, or infantize, the poor rural folk depicted in the story. The editing seemed to let the townspeople speak for themselves. The final episode of the series emphasized an important reality (part of life is dealing with disappointments), etc.

In contrast to my take on this show, Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times argues it is a reason why we should be watching NBC's Friday Night Lights. I offer this as exhibit A demonstrating why Ms. Bellafante is an ignorant snob, out of touch with reality. Friday Night Lights is a (poor) adaptation of a (poor) movie, which itself was an adaptation of an (excellent) book. The book's storyline focuses on highschool football in the late 1980s in Odessa Texas. It followed the real working class boys who played football, some of whom hoped to use athletics as a ticket away from the oil fields of west Texas, while others played for the reasons that most of us played sports (because it's fun and it helps you meet girls). The television show adaptation (in so far as I can tell, I suffered through three episodes last year and deleted the tivo season pass. The storyline was cliche, the characters plastic, and the writing droll. In short there was little of redeeming value.

Ms. Bellafante suggests that the creator of Nimrod Nation borrows conventions from FNL so much that "it almost seems to be rampaging on intellectual property." Her examples: focusing on high school sports in rural America, and splicing radio commentary over game footage). I suppose she has not seen one of the dozen sports based documentaries produced over the last two decades.

Anyway, while I am not an ivy league trained cultural critic for the New York Times, I can wholeheartedly recommend Nimrod Nation over Friday Night Lights.

amusement in other's outrage

The newspaper from the hometown of my youth has a story today about the conviction of a 21 year-old man who forcibly raped a young woman in the center of town. Thanks to the greater equalizer of the inter-tubes any and all may publicly comment on the story.
Apparently someone is discusted.

discusted wrote on Jan 25, 2008 6:15 AM:
" Why only 13 years? He gets off easy. The victim will suffer for her lifetime! Twenty five years should have been the punishment! "

Sociologically, I think these sentiments are important. Though the case described in the story is a statistical outlier (most rapes and other sexual assaults are not perpetrated by strangers; they often occur in situations that lack hard-edge concreteness for making decisions; and the meanings associated with the sexual conduct are contested), it serves as a lightening rod to absorb public outrage. This case lacks those ambiguities and murky waters that make this topic controversial. As such, any and all are free to vent away.

What's dangerous, however, is for positional advocates to turn to this story as the exemplar of all rapes/sexual assaults. Sociologist Joel Best has built his career showing how advocacy groups count phenomena using the most inclusive criteria possible and then marry the measurements to a-typical but compelling stories. This may help social movement organizations mobilize resources, but it also leads to policies where 17 year old boys are placed on sex-offender registries because they had relations with their 15 year-old girl friend, whose parents found out and contacted the authorities. (Which is not to say I am supporting adolescent sexuality... but I question the wisdom of administratively labeling a hormonally normal 17 year-old as a sexual predator. Sex offender registries evolved through this very process).

In the, MY GOD, READ THE TEA LEAVES, department

I'm reading through my RSS feeds this morning before heading off to the State capitol for a fun filled day of meetings. The first paragraph of this Inside Higher Ed article caught my eye.

A law student received a 1.948 grade point average her first year, just below the 1.95 GPA students need to guarantee their spot at Southern Illinois University’s School of Law for a third semester. The student, a white woman with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia and type II bipolar disorder, petitioned for readmission, per the law school’s policy. The student says she is one of six who applied for readmission. Among the others, none were disabled, four were racial minorities, and two had such low grades that were only eligible to petition for readmission after the law school allegedly changed their grades. Only Lisa Dawn Rittenhouse, who claims that she had the highest GPA of the six, was denied readmission.

Ok, call me insensitive but...

Speaking as someone with some documented cognitive challenges (so I am sympathetic), it appears that this student is attributing her performance (< 2.0 gpa) to cognitive deficits. If it's truly her cognitive capacity that is making it difficult to perform well in the classroom, how in the world does she expect this to remedy itself when she starts to practice law? I for one don't want her representing my fiduciary interests, or protecting my legal rights.

Grades mean more than a ticket to employment. They're supposed to be an assessment of mastery... an indicator of competence. If you're not doing well, it might be because you are in the wrong freaking field.

Sigh..