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Re: DON'T BUY A GUN!!! » detroitpistons

Posted by bleauberry on January 30, 2010, at 13:00:15

In reply to Re: DON'T BUY A GUN!!!, posted by detroitpistons on January 29, 2010, at 16:32:54

Hey, sorry to have sparked a hot spot with you. Wasn't intended. Please accept apologies.

We do agree suicide rates are higher with gun ownership. Indeed I found stats to prove that this morning.

Being kind of bored I decided to do some googling to see what I could find on the topic. Here's what I found:

1. Someone can make a scientifically supported case that high gun ownership is positively coorelated with high gun crime.

2. Someone can make a scientifically supported case that high gun ownership is negatively coorelated with high gun crime.

3. Stats and interpretations of available data appear sound on the surface, but are skewed and flawed when looking at the details and unconsidered variables.

4. There is enough scientific evidence on either side of this debate to make a case either way. We as humans tend to "cherrypick" what we read. You did that to support your views, and I did with mine. In reality, a sound case can be made to support both views, which brings me full circle to a previous statement that our best evidence means whatever it means in the eyes of the stat collection method, the variables not included in the stats, and the interpreter's perception. This morning I searched for evidence on both sides and found equal amounts.

5. Some areas of high gun ownership did have the least amount of gun crime, while others had the highest. Geography matters. One size doesn't fit all. A blanket statement by either you or me is false.

6. Some counties without guns had higher suicide rates than USA per capita. See here how one could interpret that several ways, and how other likely important variables are needed to get a better picture of what it means.

Bsically what I came away with is that you and me were both arguing correctly that gun ownership contributes to suicide. In our other debates, we were both partially correct and partially wrong.

This article by the University of Florida summed it fairly well:

"Valid measures of macro-level gun levels are essential to assessing the impact of gun levels on crime and violence rates, yet almost all prior research on this topic uses proxies that are either invalid or whose validity has been assumed rather than demonstrated. The present study uses city, state, cross-national, and time series data to assess the criterion validity of over two dozen gun indicators. The criterion measures used are primarily direct survey measures of household gun prevalence. The results indicate that (1) most measures used in past research have poor validity, making past findings uninterpretable, (2) the best measure for cross-sectional research is the percentage of suicides committed with guns, and (3) there are no known measures that are valid indicators of trends in gun levels, making credible longitudinal research on the subject impossible at present.

A final interesting thing I discovered that none of us had mentioned yet was that the color of the skin of a geographic region, as well as the population density of a region, were potent players that could sway the results far one way or far another way.

All that said, I hereby apologize for making my statements as boldly as I did. As is common in almost everything in the world, "More research is needed."



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