Summations Only

And Norway? Sweden? Cyprus?If the red line Y=X wasn't simply drawn on the chart, would you honestly see a trend at all? Also, shouldn't we be suspicious of the fact that as a result of how the axes are misaligned, the trendline indicates that the only way for a society to have zero gun deaths is to have a negative number of guns?Anybody can draw a line on a chart inside a cloud of points, and the power of suggestion will cause you to believe that you're seeing a trend where there isn't one.

Well, I can respect that and disagree. I think under almost every possible circumstance it's a bad idea to have someone carrying a firearm in a room with children - but, the idea of an armed non-teacher, perhaps someone selected that day out of a rotating pool of staff and equipped with a concealed gun, strikes me as a reasonable compromise. As they say, the gun-wielding guard at Columbine couldn't stop the shooting, though he may have nevertheless saved lives by buying others time to evacuate; on the other hand, the gun-wielding principal of Pearl High School certainly did, and saved the lives of dozens of his students. (The weapon he used to do so would have been made illegal under many of the policies advocated in this thread.)Regardless what we definitely need to do is stop putting up signs that say that a place is a gun-free zone. How completely fucking stupid is that? Crazy people are bringing guns to these places because they know that they won't meet armed resistance, because the signs say so. Can anyone make that make sense to me? What's the point of announcing it?

Right, and as a result most people don't carry handguns. In fact, increasingly, less and less people have guns at all.So, problem solved. What's the issue? For them? No, of course not. As a result, they don't. Well, then I guess I can reference your security person, because now he needs to carry a handgun while walking around to do his job.But it seems inefficient and expensive to hire someone to carry the gun, and if your law now allows people to carry handguns if it's their job to do so, I would wonder why the jewelry store owner wouldn't simply change his own job description from "jewelry store owner" to "jewelry store owner and private jewelry store owner security guard", thereby obviating both your proposed law against firearms carrying-around and the need to hire a security person to stand there with a gun. Probably not. But they shouldn't be carrying knives or be trained in MMA, either. In fact we can't give them any tools for self-defense. But the people who care for them should be allowed the tools they need to defend them.

So disprove it. Try to remember that I've been to the UK a dozen times in the past two decades, all over the country, talked to citizens of Great Britain from all walks of life. How often do you visit the States? Try to remember that of our two countries, only one of them parks missile batteries on the tops of city apartment buildings and exposes its citizens to video surveillance any time they're outside of their homes - most of it privately owned and subject to no privacy protection whatsoever. Try to remember that stuff when you try to tell me that disarmed cops are worth not even being able to buy pepper spray, and that a disarmed people have nothing at all to fear from government intrusion into their lives.Try to disprove any of the above. I fucking dare you. If you could, you would have done it by now. Instead it's obvious you're full of what you people call (I think) "complete bollocks." What's wrong with kevlar? My wife has some here at the apartment, part of her Army kit. I had a spool of it as a kid my mom got from Edmund Scientific, which was sort of the Sears-Roebuck catalog for me as a kid. Seems perfectly safe to me, durable as all hell. Why wouldn't kevlar be good for a backpack?

Well, we can't all rise to the soaring eloquence of "you don't half talk a pile of absolute, unequivocal shite." No, I'm expecting that we can't just wave a magic wand and not ever have another school shooting ever. But for some reason you find it risible to recognize that reality. Why is that?

No, that's exactly what you're doing. You're saying that any individual should make the choice not to own a firearm, because that will make them safer. And you're basing this conclusion on the statistically aggregate fact that gun ownership is positively correlated with injury or death due to guns.But that's the Ecological Fallacy. It's exactly the Ecological Fallacy. Right, and I fully agreed with it. See? It's up there where I said "Sure." You even quoted my agreement, but here you are, repeating it like it matters.But my point is that it doesn't matter in the specific situation of an individual deciding whether to own a gun, because just as one doesn't choose whether to bring one's umbrella based on the national chance of rain, one really can't make that decision purely on a national statistical aggregate risk level. It's just too imprecise. For instance, there's no reason to consider the national average risk that your child might shoot themselves with your gun if you, in fact, don't have any children.Assuming that, because the national average person increases their risk of death by X percent by getting a firearm, you as an individual will increase your risk of death by X percent by getting a firearm is absurd. It's an incredibly naive act of statistical inference. You may reduce your risk of death - yours, not the national average person's - by owning a firearm. You're the one who has to arrive at that decision. Percy, I don't own a gun, I've never owned a gun, and you have no way of knowing how or what I feel about them. I'm not talking about feelings. I'm talking about judgement. Which is why I agreed with it. But again, I'm not talking statistically. I'm talking individually. How is it that after over 900 posts you don't yet get that? Made up? Here's what you said:

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But since a significant source of guns used in crimes is stolen guns, reducing the number of armed citizens should also reduce the number of armed criminals.

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How is that not you not being able to tell the difference between a function and its first derivative?

Hardly anybody carries handguns. You've stipulated that hardly anybody needs them. What should I conclude from that except that it's likely that the people carrying handguns are the people who need to carry them? If not, why should I accept that, of all people, it's you who knows exactly who needs to carry a handgun and who doesn't? What's your particular expertise on their needs? And that claim is probably one that we can reject, since it's inconsistent with the evidence. Well, ok. Then answer the question. What's the issue? Well, ok, but again it seems like in that situation, where we have some policy or law that prevents anybody from carrying a weapon except the people whose job it is to do so, people would just hire themselves to carry weapons so they could carry weapons. They would make it their job to carry weapons. Your jewelry store owner would have new business cards printed that say "Jewelry Store Owner and Professional Weapons-Haver." Well, then it sounds like you're reasoning your way over not to a handgun ban, but to a training requirement to receive a concealed carry permit. That's something I'd be in favor of at the Federal level, but that's already the law in most CCW "shall-issue" states. Look, Oni, is this how it's going to be every time, where you can't tell the difference between "most" and "all"? Where I can't assert that some non-zero number of individuals need to protect themselves with firearms without you responding as though I've asserted that all individuals everywhere should be defending themselves with firearms at all times? Do we have to keep going over the difference between "most" and "all" in every single post? Why on Earth do you think I was asserting it was rational to hire a trained security guard for every mentally disabled person? Where did I say anything like that?

Well, yeah. It included countries that had a really high murder rate but a really low rate of gun ownership. That's what was "dramatically different" about them. You've produced a different sample, that has roughly only those countries where the homicide rate is proportional to the incidence of gun ownership.And what you mean by "poor baseline for comparison" is that all the countries you didn't include didn't have a homicide rate proportional to their incidence of gun ownership. A quality you roughly defined as "being Western-style."Well, so yes. When you compare only the countries with a coefficient of correlation between homicide and gun ownership within a certain range that is greater than zero, you will find a positive correlation between homicide and gun violence. Obviously. Right, but the line in your graph rises from -1, -1 and doesn't even pass through 0,0.

Wouldn't a high homicide rate negatively impact one's rating in the Human Development Index? (Answer - yes it would, by depressing life expectancy, which is a term in the HDI.)

And your policies would send them to those places as well, only with bombs instead of guns. Guns aren't causing people to become angry and insane. The cause needs to be addressed. But the cause isn't the availability of firearms. The cause isn't a "mental break" when we're looking at incidents that reflect months or even years of planning.I don't know how you get people to stop doing bad things, forever. It's clearly not a problem the UK has solved. I don't think it's solvable.

And I keep repeating that it's not what I'm missing about statistics - I have a minor in mathematics, after all - it's about what you're missing about statistics. Like the limitations of statistical inference. Like the way that sample selection can be used to mislead. Those are all things you don't seem to know anything about, so when I see you produce statistics and draw improper influence via the Ecological Fallacy, when I see you flaunt a clearly cherry-picked statistical sample, it seems unlikely that I'm wrong and you're right. If you're right, it would be by accident. And why should I accept that you're accidentally right?If you expect your arguments to be convincing then not making elementary statistical errors would be step one. I don't expect anything, I simply expect your description of the graph to match the graph. You said that "the line must rise from 0,0." But it doesn't. It doesn't even go through 0,0. It rises from an origin you defined in the software as "-1, -1." I know you did that because what you posted is a screencap of your software. But we don't know that. There's no reason to assume that. At the margin, assuming 0 guns in the United States, some person in the United States could eventually be shot by a Canadian from their side of the border, and that'll be one gun death associated with zero guns (since the gun never was in the United States.)And you're still describing a line that rises from -1, -1 as rising from 0,0. But it doesn't. The mechanism is obvious - people using firearms to prevent themselves or others from being murdered. Since only the rare self-defense situation requires the gun to even be fired, it's not unreasonable to expect the overall rate of gun deaths to be reduced. Is it true? I couldn't say. None of the data supplied so far has been relevant to that. There's no statistical measure of "people that would have been murdered but weren't."

Why do we need a criterion for affluence at all? I don't understand why you think there's justification for bracketing our sample around a specific range of "affluence" except to exclude by definition those countries with incredibly high homicide rates and low gun ownership.

Great, but all of Percy's arguments about feelings versus statistics apply, here. The cameras haven't had any reductive effect on crime in the UK. They're not even useful for catching criminals after the fact.

So, you admit, it's just cherry-picking.

No, you don't seem to grasp the difference between real world data and ideal mathematical relationships, in that you're the one insisting that correlation is causality, that a logical inference logically implies its inverse, that broad group characteristics can be applied to individuals (the Ecological Fallacy), and other elementary errors.I appreciate that you're trying to make this a teachable moment for me, but you need to understand that this has to be a teachable moment for you about reasoning properly from statistical information and using statistical tools. For instance: No, you did it, perhaps by accident, and I know that because you posted a screencap of the software you used. Xmin and Ymin are user-editable fields in your screencap, and they're both set to -1 - thus, defining the origin at -1,-1. Whether or not you did that intentionally or unintentionally, you didn't fix it and therefore it's your mistake, and a discrepancy between your model and your description of your model. You either didn't notice, or assumed we wouldn't. But the thing is - I know more about statistics and model-fitting than you do. So I did notice because I went looking for the kind of common errors people make in stats work when they don't know what they're doing. Yes. Your failure to understand the difference between a function and its first derivative, as you did when you said:

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But since a significant source of guns used in crimes is stolen guns, reducing the number of armed citizens should also reduce the number of armed criminals.

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You maintain that the accusation is "false" but false in what sense? Did you not make this statement? It appears in your post, presumably not by accident. Do you contend that the statement doesn't represent you mistaking a function for its first derivative? If so you're obligated to explain how, mathematically, reducing the rate at which criminals can acquire new guns would somehow deprive criminals of the guns they already have. If you didn't think you had to do that because you didn't realize that's what was being asked, then again, my accusation holds because anyone who understands how a function differs from its first derivative would see that as an obvious and unaddressed counter to your proposition that "since a significant source of guns used in crimes is stolen guns, reducing the number of armed citizens should also reduce the number of armed criminals." I don't expect real world data to go through 0,0. You expect real world data to go through 0,0:

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mathematically in an ideal isolated region far from any crazed Canadians shooting Americans from across the border, 0 guns must correspond to 0 gun deaths. The line can only rise from there.

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Again, I make no expectations about your data except that it be accurately described when you attempt to describe it. But it doesn't. The line you show doesn't rise from 0,0, it rises from -1, -1. And 0 guns doesn't necessarily correspond to 0 gun deaths, for a myriad of bizarre corner-case reasons. I do have such a mechanism, which I described in my last post. Asserting that I don't is a misrepresentation.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.