Summations Only

Yes. I see the .22 LR cartridge in a picture of cartridges labeled "varmint rounds."That, I would say, lends support to my contention that the .22 LR is a varmint round. It says it throughout. Did you even read your sources? You don't seem to, you just blithely cut and paste seemingly without any recognition you're trying to contradict me with sources that actually prove me right.

If that were the issue, and "full-measure" gun control were the solution, then in places like New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, the homicides would be primarily from out-of-state guns.But they're not. They're primarily with firearms that are owned and registered in that state, that were purchased in that state. We covered this. They don't work. The UK didn't get rid of their guns; they preserved an already-low rate of gun ownership. These were all points that you declined to address, so I thought we were done. Now, 400 posts later you want to pretend like the discussion never happened. Like Percy says, you just can't get through to some people.

I'm only arguing against idiotic uses of statistics, and naive, irrational methods of risk assessment, like assuming that all Americans are subject to the same degree of homicide risk, and that that risk is identical to the national average homicide rate per 100,000 people. "According to me"? I challenge you to find even a single place where I said we don't need to compare claims against reality. We do need to compare claims to reality, but it's the insistence of Percy and now you that instead of comparing claims to reality, we in fact should be comparing them to statistical abstractions like the national homicide rate per 100,000 people.That's my point. There's no such thing as the "average person." Americans aren't subject to a uniform risk of homicide and gun owners and their families and neighbors aren't subject to identical risk, either. But banning handguns says "a handgun never reduces the risk of homicide more than it increases the risk of suicide or accidental shooting." And that's just not something you can claim on the basis of the evidence presented so far. Funny you should mention the lottery. When the jackpot is higher than the odds of winning the jackpot times the price of a ticket - for the PowerBall, for instance, that's roughly a jackpot of 126 million dollars assuming the tickets are still a dollar - statistics says you should spend all of your money on tickets because the expected return on a ticket is higher than the price of the ticket. A $300 million jackpot should net you more than a 100% ROI.Do you? I doubt it you did, because whether you implictly understand it, or you're just purposefully being obtuse out of an irrational need to contradict me, you understand the basic principle here - you don't win the "expected value", because that's a statistical abstraction of the odds taken to infinity. If you played the lottery forever. But you don't play the lottery forever - you have finite time and finite money, so the outcomes aren't continuous, they're discreet. You either 100% win or you 100% lose. The statistics help you model the likelihood but they can't predict the future, that's something you have to do with your judgement, and your judgement very rightly determines that no matter what the expected value of a PowerBall ticket, you're only ever going to lose money on it.

Yeah. Are you proposing a law that bans handguns for most people, or for everyone? I thought you were proposing banning them for everyone. How do you propose, in law, to tell the difference between the people who aren't in sufficient danger to require a handgun and those who are? Because by definition, not everybody is "most people." Some number of people are "a few people." And how do you propose to determine the difference between the "most" people and the "few" people?Because so far, the answer seems to be that you don't. You just assume that what applies to most must apply to all. I would say that NYC would be better if the right people were armed, yes. What's silly about it? Some people are paraplegics. Does your law make an exception for them, because they have self-defense needs they can't meet with knives or their bare hands? If so, you've not said that it does. I was under the impression you were talking about a law that you expect to apply to everyone.

But they don't. Sometimes they do make things better for themselves, and no worse for everyone else. It's only in the statistical aggregate that a single gun on the margin makes the entire nation worse off.But that's an incredibly naive statistical inference. Nobody's subject to the national average risk of gun homicide, gun suicide, or accidental shooting. Not even a single American. There's no such thing as the "average person." Everybody is subject to an individual risk of gun homicide, gun suicide, accidental shooting, and risk of homicide in general. Everyone is also subject to the law. Which means that the laws being talked about would apply even to those people for whom their individual risk of homicide is so high that it outweighs increasing their individual risk of suicide or accidental shooting. Particularly if they believe they can, by their own actions (like not shooting themselves to death!) keep those secondary risks low.That's not "faulty risk assessment." It's making a judgement about what's going to happen in the future, and that's not what statistics do. They can help, but they're not the only way or always the best way to do it. Ultimately, you have to exercise your own judgement.But you propose to exercise your judgement for everybody. And that'd be fine, but I don't think your judgement about my future is as good as mine. For one thing, I know a lot more about it than you do. For another, you're not the one with skin in the game.

Nowhere. Where does it say that the list is comprehensive? At last, something you're prepared to agree with me on.

And yet, despite the superiority of statistical "reality" (surely you realize that's a contradiction in terms, statistics is a form of modelling and models are, by definition, not reality) we don't, by law, force all American children to get vaccinations - because the vaccinations would kill some children. And it's not at random; the risk of dying from vaccination is not evenly and therefore unpredictably distributed among children.Similarly, the risk of dying in a situation where a gun might have saved your life is not evenly distributed across all Americans. Therefore it makes no sense to mandate that no American can use a handgun in self-defense. No sense at all. That's just an incredibly naive statistical inference.

It's mentioned throughout, and featured in the picture, which is captioned "varmint rounds." Did you even read the article? Or did you just read one non-comprehensive list and misinterpret it, because you thought you found something you could contradict me on?

No, plenty of statistics in support of positions I agree with are also bullshit. I've done it in several posts now, but I guess you weren't able to reason from the general to the specific. "Households which contain a gun" is an incredibly broad variety of households, located in an incredibly broad range of regions, containing an incredibly broad range of weapons secured under an incredibly broad range of conditions, etc., such that it makes little sense to base individual decisions about whether to own a gun solely on aggregate statistics. For instance, how am I supposed to apply the statistic about the risk of a gun injuring a child to my own household, where there are no children? Percy's the first to tell you that a gun that isn't present can't cause an injury, but for some reason, the idea that a child that isn't present can't be injured just never occurs to him. Somehow, that idea doesn't count. Are you saying that correlation and causality are the same thing? Yes. Just like the "national average rate of homicide per 100,000 people." So don't hand me an abstract statistical concept and then tell me I'm ignoring "reality." "Reality" and "abstract" are two different things. In fact, they're two opposite things. Yes. It's an incredibly naive interpretation of statistics. That's my point - naively interpreting the statistics in aggregate and assuming continuous outcomes, instead of making judgements on the basis of the recognition that outcomes are discreet, is incredibly fucking stupid. Did you just stop reading halfway through, or something? It's exactly the same with gun-related deaths. Even within the US, state to state, homicide rates range from DC's 25 or so per 100,000 people to New Hampshire's 0.8 per 100,000. They're incredibly unevenly distributed. Except that it's not true.That's the problem we're having, here. I know what you guys are saying. I just think you're wrong. I'm not convinced. I told you what I needed to be convinced - show me even a single country that went from 80 guns per 100 people to 15 guns per 100 people, and thereby reduced homicides (not just gun deaths, but all homicides) per 100,000 as a result - and 600 posts later, you still haven't even tried to do that. Instead you and Percy have just tried to pretend that I don't know how to recognize the Ecological Fallacy.So why would you expect me to be convinced? Why would you expect anyone to be convinced, if you can't provide any evidence that homicides can be reduced by banning guns, not just that homicides stay low in places where they were already low when an already low rate of gun ownership is preserved by a change in the law? But it doesn't prove him wrong. Especially if you don't take into account that Jim is a well-trained gun owner who takes steps to reduce his risk of accidentally shooting himself. If you don't take into account that Jim lives in a high-crime area and might be a target for criminals. Especially if you don't take into account that you're committing the Ecological Fallacy by assuming that Jim's individual characteristics and the circumstances of his life are broadly determined entirely by his membership in the statistical class "gun owner."You would actually be 100% wrong to think that you'd proven anything at all about what's going to happen to Jim. You know, wrong like you've been this entire time.

Rahvin, if you don't know how to make judgements, I'm not going to be able to explain it in a post.

Try to follow the logic of "most" not being the same as "all." Yes, but again, most is not all, and I haven't heard you propose policy that applies to most but to all. What about that aren't you getting? No, many of them are not in law enforcement. Many of them are private citizens who need to walk around with a handgun for their own protection. Maybe they don't need it all day. Maybe they only need it a few hours during the day. Regardless, your proposed policy is that they shouldn't be allowed to carry it any hours during the day, even the hours that they need to.

quote:

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- People with disabilities are 50 percent more likely to be victims of violent crimes than are people without disabilities, according to a government study released Thursday.

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The first national study of its kind found that a wide range of disabled people -- including blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, and others with physical and mental limitations -- were victims of assaults, rapes and robberies in 716,000 cases in 2007.

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The study by the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics said instances of violence against disabled people occurred overall 1 times the rate of those without disabilities, but the numbers varied by age group.

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That's from http://www.cnn.com/...CRIME/10/02/crimes.disabled/index.html. The actual study is http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4574

Sure, but we don't make decisions in the statistical aggregate that apply only to the nonexistent "average person.' We make decisions that apply to real people's lives, who experience conditions as a result of individual circumstance and not aggregate statistical inference. You're committing the Ecological Fallacy and hoping none of us will notice. But I did notice, because like you I'm familiar with the act of lying by statistics. Excuse me, unintentionally misleading by the act of statistics. I don't disagree with this position. My point is that, regardless of this position being true, it doesn't follow that a lack of gun ownership makes everyone more safe instead of less. Under some circumstances, not owning a gun will make you demonstratively less safe. And that these circumstances are statistically significant enough not to legally preclude gun ownership.In every way it's similar to the principle that forgoing vaccinations makes you less safe, not more; yet that lends no support to the contention that mandatory vaccination would make everyone more safe, not less. And for that reason, even though in the statistical majority of circumstances vaccination is a good idea, we don't force everyone to have vaccinations. Neither, then, are we justified in forcing everyone to disarm.

Only if you can't tell the difference between a function and its first derivative. I can, which is how I know you're wrong.

We on the "pro-legal gun ownership side" (if Coyote, Faith, CS, and others won't object to that description) have, I think, largely stipulated that armed teachers is likely to injure or kill more students than would be protected. I think that's pretty obvious.But, you know, nobody ever hurt anybody with a kevlar backpack. Or with kevlar basically anything you could wear. So I'm always surprised when I see posts like yours, or the sentiments I saw after Aurora, where people wondered not only why a private citizen could buy an assault rifle but why they could buy a kevlar vest.Really? Because you have a right not to be shot, is why. Because you have a right to prevent bullets from passing into your body. I understand the sentiment that private citizens shouldn't have weapons, even if I disagree with it, because we're talking about a form of defense, there, that involves aggressive injury of an assailant. Well, weapons don't discriminate like that.But kevlar? The notion that private citizens should be forced by their government to allow themselves to be shot is absolutely insane, and just another example, in your case, of the meek, learned helplessness that attends UK-style utter disarmament of a people against criminal predation. People should just be able to break into your house. People should just be able to shoot bullets into your body. People should just lie down and accept all of that, bear all of that physical risk, because it's the cop's job to do something about it, not yours; yours is to lie down and pray that they get there in time. If not? Well, that's life, I guess.So why not kevlar backpacks?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Faith, there's a well-known web browser you can use on the Mac, Linux, and PC called "Lynx"; what's well-known about it is that it is text-only. Doesn't show images at all. Traditionally it was used for viewing web pages through text-only, command-line interfaces, back when those were more common, but you may find it of use if you're still on dial-up (or an ancient computer) and modern web pages are a bit too much.Just a suggestion. Lynx.browser.org is where it can be downloaded.