Reply To: THE PUZZLE OF MURDER-BY-GUN STATISTICS

[Simon Mathews]

Gallup’s Mirror wrote:

The fantasy figures you provided indicate the overall murder rate increased due to “gun control”, which shows a relation between them, not the lack of any relation whatsoever.

The figures, as I took great pains to point out, were simply to illustrate the point. I could just as easily have the overall murder rate decrease and make the same point. The point being that whilst a change in gun murders is necessarily a change in overall murders (as you rightly point out) this does not indicate a relationship in the sense that @unseen was using it. A relationship would indicate you could in some way use A to predict B. Not just that B necessarily changes (but in some unknown way) as A changes. That kind of relationship doesn’t really tell us anything and is not how we commonly use the word in statistics.