THE PUZZLE OF MURDER-BY-GUN STATISTICS
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This topic contains 91 replies, has 15 voices, and was last updated by Rebel 9 years, 6 months ago.
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July 26, 2015 at 11:00 pm #1497
It’s worse than that, Stutz. [Gallup is] conflating murder in general with all deaths (including suicides, defensive shootings, and accidents) using a specific type of device.
I am saying ‘murder in general’ includes gun murders, and the study specifies that gun murders are included as a gun related death. I have stressed and restated this at least half a dozen times.
1. Steve: Yeah, well Unseen said “murder rate” instead of “firearms deaths” so you haven’t in fact rebutted his point. Gallup: In fact, I have, unless you can demonstrate that the research excludes murder and only includes instances like non-criminal killings and suicides.
2. Steve: You’re still trying to equate firearms deaths…i.e., any homicide with a firearm, including self defense and suicide as well as murders, with murders committed by any means… Gallup: I’m equating the rate of gun ownership and murder rates with the rate of gun ownership and murder rates;
3. Gallup: You’re not suggesting that “firearm related deaths” exclude murder or that such murders are not part of the aggregate murder rate? Steve: I make no such claim.
4. My claim is that the study found higher rates of firearm ownership were “a strong and independent predictor” of firearm related deaths (including murder).
5. The study includes murder by type of firearm, specifying; “assault by handgun discharge (X93); assault by rifle, shotgun, and larger firearm discharge (X94); assault by other and unspecified firearm discharge (X95);”. See page 2 under ‘Sources’.
6. The explanation in the study includes murder.
To refute the “strong correlation” found in the study, you must either prove that a death due to “assault by handgun discharge” in the 27 surveyed countries does not count as a murder, or that the results found no corresponding change in murders committed using guns (despite a specific statement which includes such murders in describing what constitutes gun related death for the purposes of the study).
July 26, 2015 at 11:32 pm #1498I know the [poisoning the well] fallacy well enough to understand…
You really don’t. Poisoning the well is a preemptive ad hominem. My criticism was neither.
…that you’re basically criticizing the provider of the chart rather than the chart itself. I guess that’s a combination of an ad hominem and poisoning the well.
Ad hominem is fallacious in dismissing an argument on the basis of some irrelevant claim about the person making the argument. The operative word is that the criticism is irrelevant.
Lack of scientific qualifications and conflict of interest are valid criticisms and completely relevant. This is why it’s reasonable to refuse Uncle Goober’s offer to remove your appendix merely because he is not a surgeon, and why Exxon-Mobile is a poor choice to educate the public on the science of human-caused climate change.
July 27, 2015 at 12:38 am #1500I know the [poisoning the well] fallacy well enough to understand…
No…you’ve gotten this fallacy wrong as well..but in this case completely wrong.
July 27, 2015 at 12:40 am #1501You really don’t. Poisoning the well is a preemptive ad hominem. My criticism was neither.
Ad hominem is fallacious in dismissing an argument on the basis of some irrelevant claim about the person making the argument. The operative word is that the criticism is irrelevant.
Lack of scientific qualifications and conflict of interest are valid criticisms and completely relevant. This is why it’s reasonable to refuse Uncle Goober’s offer to remove your appendix merely because he is not a surgeon, and why Exxon-Mobile is a poor choice to educate the public on the science of human-caused climate change.
Well, obviously we disagree.
July 27, 2015 at 12:42 am #1502@Belle
It does matter. You cannot make a sweeping generalization on this issue. The problem (and the solutions) are not uniform cookie cutter that can be the same in all places. A more regional approach makes sense in tackling this issue AND in understanding it.
An incredibly obvious and sensible argument that has fallen on deaf ears too often. The answer in most cases would be that very few places in the world can currently handle relatively free and laxed gun laws (as for example Iceland [mostly] can).
July 27, 2015 at 12:43 am #1505Wow this is up to 6 pages already. I’m curious, have you actually graphed the two stats together? In your post you are pointing to some interesting data points but in no way is that indicative of the overall trend.
I.e. those few interesting points might just be outliers on a graph which may or may not support gun control. I’d like to see the graph, rather than be told about the points which support your argument.
Here’s one someone prepared earlier: http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-03-31-at-Monday-March-31-3.17-AM.png . And oh look, outliers. Interesting graph.
July 27, 2015 at 2:02 am #1511July 27, 2015 at 2:28 am #1514Yes, you’ve made it easy.
You continue to erroneously assert that a study showing a relationship between firearms ownership and firearms related deaths has something conclusive to say about a relationship between firearms ownership and the rate of any and all murders, excluding non-murder deaths by firearm, and including murders by means of other firearms. You’re not only generalizing from the specific, you’re tossing out a number of your specifics before doing so.
You NEVER refuted Unseen’s original point, you’ve misrepresented the study (I will concede that you may not have done so intentionally, but honestly, I thought you were smart enough to see the error) as supporting the opposite conclusion from Unseen’s, and then you’ve resorted to attempts to ensnare me in word games to fog this fundamental error on your part.
I’ve attempted to explain, three or four times, why this is an error, and I’ve even drawn a diagram, which you ignored.
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This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by
SteveInCO.
July 27, 2015 at 4:58 am #1519@gallupsmirror My take on this thread can be illustrated by the following simple figures that I have clearly made up for illustrative purposes.
Before gun control:
Gun murders: 10
Knife murders: 5After gun control:
Gun murders: 3
Knife murders: 14These figures are consistent with the conclusion that gun control reduces gun-related murders but does not reduce the overall murder rate.
If I’m not wrong I think that is the point @steveinco is trying to make.
July 27, 2015 at 2:03 pm #1525I did NOT claim that the “study references non-murders only.” Furthermore the diagram doesn’t make any such claim either. It appears that you don’t know how to read a Venn (or Euler) diagram.
Set A: All Firearms Related Deaths. The circle on the left. This is what the study addressed, and they painstakingly list all the codes and categories that are included, SOME, but ONLY some, of which are murders.
Set B: All Murders. The circle on the right.
Firearms-related murders is the darker-shaded overlap between the two circles (the intersection of A and B, written A∩B) and is CLEARLY included in Set A, the subject of the study. (The intersection of two sets is by definition part of both sets.) I NEVER said otherwise.
Let me rephrase that for clarity: Far from excluding firearms related murders as you seem to think, the diagram I produced specifically calls that category out and shows it as included in set A.
Firearms related murders (the darker overlap) is also a part of B, murders, by definition.
The study does show that the aggregate total of everything in A increases with G (gun ownership). They very carefully and accurately phrased their conclusion: “The number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death [i.e., the per-capita size of set A] in a given country” They aren’t talking about set B, or even the intersection of A and B, A∩B. They’ve accurately described what they’ve shown.
[That study reaches other interesting conclusions as well.]
The problem comes in claiming that a conclusion about a correlation between set A and factor G (Gun ownership) necessarily implies that there is one between set B and factor G. You can’t do that, because there are elements in Set A that aren’t in set B and vice versa, and they could all vary or not in totally different ways with G. Yet on multiple occasions you’ve characterized this study as having something to say about a correlation between G and B, or simply treated A and B as equivalent sets.
You cannot even conclude that showing that G affects A necessarily even affects the size of the area of the intersection; it’s a logical possibility that ALL of the growth of A as G increases occurs in the area outside the intersection. (Mind you, I doubt that’s actually the case, but until they produce a study that does NOT include firarms-related accidental deaths, assaults, suicides, etc. and ONLY includes firearms-related murders, A∩B, we don’t KNOW.)
And that, explained for what must be the fourth or fifth time, is your error. This study has nothing conclusive to say about Unseen’s original contention that the murder [by all methods] rate doesn’t correlate to firearms ownership, because it simply does not address the murder [by all methods] rate, and only includes part of that category in the data that it does aggregate.
July 27, 2015 at 5:38 pm #1530Of course the study refutes Unseen’s claim that there is NO RELATIONSHIP WHATSOEVER. The study concludes that more guns “strongly and independently predict” more deaths with guns (including more murders with guns, more accidental deaths with guns, more suicides with guns, etc).
Is that what it really says? What does it have to say about how many of those supposedly gun-caused deaths become death by knife, death by pummeling, by strangulation or suffocation? What I’m getting at is that the goal appears to end at causing deaths by gun and not death itself.
A suicidal person in particular has many options. It’s not like “I want to kill myself. Oh, I forgot: I can’t get a gun. Well I guess I’d better mow the lawn instead.” If someone’s going to kill himself, he’ll kill himself even if he just takes his car out on the freeway to 80 mph and then aims for a bridge abutment.
July 27, 2015 at 5:42 pm #1531BTW, GM, I’ve actually been looking for a chart which embodies a different result from the chart I put up. So far without much success. I haven’t found one which shows a functional relationship between gun ownership and gun homicide to pair up with the one I have been showing. As a reminder:
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This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by
Unseen.
July 27, 2015 at 7:26 pm #1539The 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.
July 27, 2015 at 7:54 pm #1541A 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.
I found that if you look at the broadest possible picture, there is no functional relationship (not even a loose one) between quantity of guns in a country’s populace and the gun homicides. Some countries have very high rates of gun ownership and low rates of gun homicide whereas in other countries the homicide rate is unusually high whereas gun ownership is relatively uncommon.
In the US, while the disparities are not so great, you have, for example, The District of Columbia with an extremely low rate of gun ownership, 3.6%, but the nation’s highest murder rate, 16.5/100,000, whereas Wyoming has the highest rate of gun ownership at 59.7% and one of the lowest rates of gun homicide at .09/100,000. (source)
Even in the US, there is no justification for saying or even implying some sort of functional relationship between ownership rates and gun murder rates.
July 27, 2015 at 9:17 pm #1546With over 16 million residents, Florida and the easy access to concealed gun permits might serve as a way to correlate increased guns to gun related deaths
http://fcir.org/2013/04/21/as-firearm-ownership-rises-florida-gun-murders-increasing/
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