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Old 2012-12-21, 08:44   Link #863
Ledgem
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Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Northeast USA
Age: 38
Quote:
Originally Posted by GundamFan0083 View Post
That is quite complicated (since they're not reporting it) so I'll direct you to this study/article which makes an attempt at showing how we know (or strongly suspect) the reporting was greatly reduced after the GCA of 1968.
I accept that, but two things:

1) I don't like that website. The opening paragraph at the top of the main homepage makes it very clear where the page maintainer's bias lies. I still read through one of the other articles that you linked from there, but I don't trust his take on things. It may still be useful for reading through the data and websites that he references, though.

2) Any collected data is bound to be inaccurate, and poll data even more so. However, trends are still useful to compare. Unless you want to claim that people in the South are more honest that people in the Northeast, the Gallup poll indicates that there are more guns in the South than the Northeast. The exact numbers ("20 percentage points") is meaningless, but qualitatively the data is still valuable and we can use it for further comparisons.

Quote:
Originally Posted by GundamFan0083 View Post
If your position is that they are useless in self defense, then why do the police have them?
"Useless" is not the assertion I was making, because you can easily disprove that by posting one of your stories about how one person warded off an assailant with a gun. That guns aren't proving to be the defensive force that people are claiming is what I was getting at. If this were true then regions with more guns should have less deaths by assault. Or, if we try to factor in the greater poverty of the South (and with it, greater crime and violence), we should expect that guns - if they provided a protective benefit - should mean that the South would be equal to, or at least only slightly above, the Northeast. The South isn't a third-world country, after all; it may have greater poverty, but it isn't that different from the rest of the country. Yet the data from the CDC speaks for itself: the South is way above the Northeast. And why limit ourselves to comparing the South and Northeast? Are the Midwest and West also in poverty compared to the Northeast? They have greater gun ownership than the Northeast and probably less than the South (but we can't say by how much), and yet they still have greater deaths by guns in assaults. Greater poverty in the South can explain why the South's deaths by assault are so much higher than the Midwest and West, but it is extremely unlikely that guns have nothing to do with these trends.

kyp275 didn't disprove this theory, but correctly pointed out that there's weakness with this reasoning. In order to say exactly how useful or useless guns are when it comes to defense, it would be helpful to know how many of those killed by assault were armed, and it would be helpful if we could find data about failed assaults and whether the victims were armed or not.

Quote:
Originally Posted by GundamFan0083 View Post
Overall the fallacy of "more guns, more crime" has been weighed, measured, and found wanting by John Lott, and Gary Kleck who did an extensive study of it.
We had this issue last time, so I want to remind you that I have never and am not making the argument that guns are related to crime. My stance is that guns are unrelated to crime - they don't cause it, and they also don't prevent it (from a statistical standpoint - I don't doubt that you can find me a handful of stories about a shop owner protecting themselves with a gun).

Quote:
Originally Posted by GundamFan0083 View Post
However, even without that study, if you are of the mindset that guns cause crime, then you must FIRST push for the demilitarization of the police in the United States, because you are 8-times more likely to be shot by a cop than a fellow citizen. As the Michael Nida case clearly illustrates.
The article that you linked to is titled "You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist." Since you linked to the article I know that you saw that, yet you still provided the link and then used the term "fellow citizen" instead of terrorist.

"But a fellow citizen could be a terrorist!" you might want to argue. Yes, you're right, but I'm pretty sure that you know what you did here, and I'm pretty sure you know that it was twisting the article to try and support your point. Can we please not go the tabloid route?

Quote:
Originally Posted by GundamFan0083 View Post
The factors you've listed are only partially indicative of what contributes to violent crime, though it does not translate into violent crime with a firearm.
...
If you want to better understand how guns are the best deterent during an assault. I strongly suggest you read Lott's book on the subject.
"More guns, less crime"? The data does not support that in any way. Here's the page on violent crime vs. gun ownership that I've provided before which disproves a link between gun ownership and crime (whether positive or negative).

Edit: It also looks like there are some issues with data fabrication on Lott's part (also from another source, although that one seems to have an agenda). That may not be an author whose data you want to rely on.




In trying to keep my posts short, I'll end it here. The rest of your post would have just involved me criticizing you for trying to bring an "anecdotal knife to a statistical gunfight." However, I will remark on the data falsification claim: claims made with no evidence are often made up, interpretation of data can be wrong and biased, and data collection is imperfect; however, outright falsified data isn't quite as common. Thus when I present numbers, I'm interested to hear your interpretation of the data.
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Last edited by Ledgem; 2012-12-21 at 11:20.
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