Gun Control Article in Washington Post

do you find the data sketchy and outdated because it conflicts with your views on gun ownership? I guess i'm trying to figure out why these debates escalate into meaningless banter over who's right and who's wrong. the right is equally as guilty of posting statistical data rooted in lies and falsehoods
 
Statistics and data used to say the world was flat. Data can be manipulated to say almost anything.
 
The data doesn't seem old, at least not terribly so (2010 in many cases).

Does seem misinterpreted in a few places. Such as Part 3 on gun ownership. How can that data even be reliable just based on the graph. It is tracking new purchases (note the 2008 spike if so;))? Is it reporting voluntary survey results?

Nor does it acknowledge many of the bans and regulations that went into place during the '90s

5. States with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence.
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Of course they do! If you really want to kill someone bad enough, you will simply use another tool. Heck even a chimp that uses a stick to catch termites knows how to adapt if no sticks are nearby:confused:
 
UN-BE-LIEVABLE! Item 6. in the article actually reported the long-term shift in public sentiment away from favoring more gun control.

The other five items in the article just reflect the fact that you have to be careful about the conclusions derived from statistics. For instance, if you looked at statistics on the number of people trampled to death by cattle, you might conclude that Texas cattle were much more dangerous than New York City cattle - and, of course, you would be wrong.
 
Klein has been prone to histrionics in the past, and this is actually somewhat temperate for him.

Are we more violent than, say, Belgium? We are. Is that due to the prevalence of guns? Impossible to prove. Anyone with a decent education knows that many societal factors contribute to violence and crime, and blaming any one factor is a cheap and dishonest answer.

FWIW, the data suggests that public shootings are on the wane here.
 
Just a counterpoint to "fact" 1., even though the USA is more violent than other similar nations, the USA violence rate is decreasing. Consider that the AWB was allowed to expire in 2004 and the both gun sales and CCW license holder are at all time highs, it seems that more guns equal less violence.
 
do you find the data sketchy and outdated because it conflicts with your views on gun ownership?
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did not have time to read through all of them but certain things did not seem right

America is an unusually violent country. But we’re not as violent as we used to be.
• There is no indicator here as to what has caused the decline. Nor which portions of the country are better than others. Nor does it specify the vehicle of assault. Intrestingly enough though the expiration of the assault weapons ba does not seem to have boosted assaults as per this graft.

States with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence.
vermont is shown as high gun control?
 
It's nice that the author was more "honest" about their statistics than most pro-gun-control activists. He was careful to mention that correlation does not imply causation, which is an important observation. It is, however, a little misleading to represent statistics about "assaults" as arguments for the restriction of gun ownership.

I wouldn't say that there is anything factually "sketchy" about the article, but I wouldn't say it's a particularly convincing piece of journalism. Items three ("Gun ownership in the United States is declining overall.") and six ("Gun control is not politically popular.") seem to be pretty decent counterpoints to the expansion of gun control regulations. If firearm ownership is declining, then why bother to introduce new regulations? Last I checked, the US is a representational government, so if the people aren't clamoring for gun control why is it the government's business to impose it?
 
OK - sports fans. Anyone who starts the liberal rant fest - gets infracted.

Go somewhere else if that's your issue. We discuss pro and anti positions and other politics and short hand insults are not allowed.
 
Check out www.guncite.com if you haven't already. It has been around forever and some of the links are dead/dated; but a quick read of the international crime comparisons will explain some of the common ways those statistics are twisted.
 
Louisiana

The state-by-state statistic rightly documents Louisiana as one of the most gun violent states. However, do not conclude that the entire state is trigger happy. New Orleans and Baton Rouge homicide rates skew the overall violent nature of Louisiana. Most of Louisiana is peaceful.
 
The state-by-state statistic rightly documents Louisiana as one of the most gun violent states. However, do not conclude that the entire state is trigger happy. New Orleans and Baton Rouge homicide rates skew the overall violent nature of Louisiana. Most of Louisiana is peaceful.
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I would assume it to be a given that all states will have "hot spots" - kind of the nature of large population centers
 
Statistics and data used to say the world was flat.
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What data and statistics were used to for this?

Data can be manipulated to say almost anything.
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As indicated by your first statement?

The data in the article may be 100% correct, but some key information is missing and giving people the wrong impression.

"Assault mortality" which is the basis of 1/3 of the the study (2 of 6 tables) is not defined in the study. We tend to think of "assault" as being a bad thing, like "homicide" but like "homicide," "assault mortaility" seems to be about those who died from the violence of others, for reasons good and bad. Healy did not go into this either in his data presentation that was used for this study.

So sure, we have violence and we are apt to have more gun deaths in the south than in some other areas and the south tends to have less gun control. Strangely, the key statistic not addressed is how many of those gun deaths justified self defense shootings. You will find a higher percentage of gun deaths that are justified in places with less gun control (I would bet) than with places with more that have less people legally owning guns and hence less legally defending themselves with legally owned guns. Look at countries like GB where justified used of guns in SD is dramatically down with legal gun ownership and as such the percentage of illegal gun deaths is higher relative to legal gun deaths (self defense uses).

No doubt Samuel Williams shooting of two robbers will go down at 2 incidents of gun violence because two people were injured by a firearm, though they were two bad guys with lethal weapons of their own and threatening to kill people and so the 2 incidents of actual gun violence here were perfectly justified by law as self defense. This seems to be rather ironic.

Violence is not always bad. It may not be an ideal, but sometimes is necessary.
 
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New York City which has very strict gun laws also has one the highest gun crime rates in the country. Very few citizens have a gun but all the criminals have them. So much for gun control there. How is that working for you ?
 
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