Note the title of this article by NewScientist:
Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed
Well. That sounds pretty definitive. It also reads as “here’s a bullet-point for youto use when arguing in favor of more gun control.”
But what did the study actually present?
Packing heat may backfire. People who carry guns are far likelier to get shot – and killed – than those who are unarmed, a study of shooting victims in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found.
It would be impractical – not to say unethical – to randomly assign volunteers to carry a gun or not and see what happens. So Charles Branas’s team at the University of Pennsylvania analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity. The team also accounted for other potentially confounding differences, such as the socioeconomic status of their neighbourhood.
Note that it does not say whether the people who got shot were themselves criminals.
In any event, hopefully within the year the USSC will rule properly on McDonald vs. Chicago, and the dumbass gun bans that have helped turn numerous urban areas into criminal cesspits will be overturned. And if things go *really* well, citizens who ahve suffered under these bans will be able to sue the pants off not just the cities and states that have enacted these bans, but also the treacherous scumbags who passed them in the first place (though most of them are probably worm food, given how old these bans are).
One Response to “Here’s how to lie with statistics”
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You know? Its funny, I been bearing arms all my adult life, in the military and as a citizen, and never, not once, accidentally discharged a round. Never gone on a binge of senseless murder. Have not robbed anyone. Never committed suicide. And yet these pointy headed morons want me to believe that because criminals who have guns and die at a higher rate than other people that all guns must be destroyed. Except for the ones used to protect them, that is.
As for the methodology of this “study”, they concentrated on the highest crime areas of Philly, and the majority of their “subjects” were criminals killed during either the commission of crimes or killed by other criminals or police.
This is also the same group of over-educated idiots who claimed that adults killed by violent means were in fact “children”. They did this by including people as old as 30 in their “study” of child gun deaths.
‘Nuff said.