Summations Only

OK, here's another page of statistics.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I have trouble believing anyone would go to such trouble to make up stuff like that, let alone convince themselves it's a good thing to do.It would be nice if the gun cause could be based on statistics but if it can't it can't.

I'm back to simply not trusting statistics. I can't analyze them myself and even from the discussion between you and HBD it appears there are just too many ways to get things wrong whether fabricated or not.I can barely see the writing on that graph let alone even begin to have a way to interpret it. Sorry.Are all the terms even standardized? I mean, if a study is counting "homicides" do they separate real homicides or killing of innocents, from deaths of a criminal in the act for instance? Don't answer, that's just one of too many questions that need answering to make statistics meaningful. But my general question is whether they distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys, you know, my favorite distinction.Somewhere on that page it says that the UK only counts homicides if that's been established in court, but the US counts them at the time of commission. If so that would make for a discrepancy that renders all US-UK comparisons invalid.Is the lack of good statistics REALLY the fault of the NRA somehow? I don't trust statements like that either.I thought I'd found some decent information at FactCheck.org but then found a site that exposed it as a leftist site. That may or may not mean the information is bad but it means I have to do more research than I'm up to, in an area I don't feel I have any ability to judge.Then you ask how I can support my convictions without statistics? Well, I do what I can along these lines:1. It's a Second Amendment right. The buck stops there.2. All the people I know who have possessed and do possess guns have done so safely, taking them for granted as a part of life, and I don't want to see such people treated as criminals by gun control freaks.3. Accidents with guns are tragic but you can't use that against the majority of responsible gun owners. If there is any way to improve gun safety, say by more training or finding ways to keep them out of the hands of irresponsible people without penalizing the good guys, I'm for it.4. Homicides with guns are tragic but you also can't use that against the responsible gun owners, who are the vast majority. The fact that there are bad guys has nothing to do with the good guys who are only interested in valid uses of guns, including self defense and protecting others. Whatever statistics you find on this do not justify penalizing the majority of responsible citizens by the minority of criminals. Already the gun control laws have given criminals access to schools and other locations where they can murder at will because there are no good guys there to stop them, and that's the fault of gun control, not guns.5. I do believe it may yet be possible to put together a valid statistical picture that would support the claims of the gun owners, that we are safer with than without citizen possession of guns. Because there are situations that don't get into the statistics such as how many crimes were prevented by guns, and so on. I've heard many times of this area in the US where gun ownership is very high and crime just about zero and it's frustrating that I can't find information on it now.6. And please do remember that the foundational reason for the Second Amendment was the lesson learned in Europe, and in fact in the Colonies under King George, that if the people don't own means of self-defense it's their own government that will subjugate them. That is not something you can measure by statistics at this time, but the pollyanna insistence that we're silly to think it could happen in our modern civilized world flies in the face of the lessons of history. For all we know it could be the possession of guns by American citizens that has prevented such a situation here already, and it's been claimed by some that foreign takeover would have been attempted by now if it weren't for our citizen guns. There are still bad guys in the world you know, and this is still a fallen world where even seemingly benign leaders can become tyrants, because they think they know better than everybody else how things should be run, and are willing to make us all do it their way by whatever means it takes. The whole point of the American separation of powers is to keep all us potential tyrants from getting the upper hand over all the rest.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Rewrite: OK I'm going to apologize for losing my temper at you, NN, for your trashing of what I thought was a perfectly good post explaining how I don't trust statistics but how gun rights can be argued without them. You said nothing substantive that could be answered. I should have ignored you.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

To get your spreadsheet posted here I think you can copy and paste it into Paint and save it from there to post here. If necessary the Paint image can be posted to something like Photobucket first but I think you might be able just to post it straight with the img code. I keep forgetting the routines I've used. Or if copy and paste doesn't do it, try a screenshot and copy it into Paint. Or if you don't have Paint... I would copy mine into my blog and then to Photobucket but if you don't have a blog...Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Good to know.

I believe what I said about the issues without referring to the statistics is valid. I've been listening to arguments at You Tube, statistics are the least of the arguments.As for that question Do I think armed citizens could stand up against the government? Well, first, they did in the Revolutionary War. But the main point is I don't think the government would attempt such a thing as long as we're armed. We're scattered all over the nation, we're everywhere.It's only if we're so restricted in their use or they've been confiscated, which, remember, Hitler did before rounding up the Jews, that we'd have the problem. And besides, I think Americans would prefer to die defending ourselves against a corrupt government than let them tyrannize us without a fight.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I might have some if it looked like that was going to happen. Or even if I don't I'm with the ones who do.

Yes, not only is it people and not guns that kill people, we can also identify differences among cultures or neighborhoods of people that make for differences in rates of gun crimes and gun murders. But that gets us rapidly into Political Correctness territory where we'll be accused of racial profiling at least, racism at worst, and all sorts of other perfidious violations of Political Correctness.However, the information, were it taken seriously and unemotionally, might tell us more about the questions related to gun rights and gun control than just about anything else we've discussed here.Washington D.C. for instance, with its enormous crime rate and homicide rate and gun problems in general, is 50% black. This is the sort of thing I had in mind when I mentioned different demographics of different areas having a big impact on the statistics. It isn't necessarily ethnic or racial, but it seems to be in Washington D.C. Other areas may have their own demographic explanations. But lumping these areas in with non-crime-infested areas and pretending to come up with a statistic that reflects America as a whole gives a false picture. Sometimes the general problem of different locations is mentioned in passing but I haven't seen it sorted out in any way that really tells us anything about guns in this country. \The argument in general, though, is about lumping together the bad quys with the good guys. It just needs to be made more specific if you want to get any meaningful picture of the gun situation in America.ABE: Didn't think to save the info but on one Wikipedia article concerning Washington D.C. I came across the information that one large area of crime is "hate crime" against homosexuals. Who commits this crime is not named, if it should happen to be predominantly blacks or whites or some other identifiable group for instance. Seems to me this might be useful information.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, I don't spend time trying to analyze statistical data no matter where it comes from. If I can't rely on the analysis given then forget it. This is true for statistics on either side, but yes I do particularly distrust those from your side, not because I think you all are necessarily any more devious but because bias affects statistics and it's your bias I oppose. There are too many different ways to put the numbers together to trust either side.As for the graph yes I did finally go and look at it yesterday and I see the problem but I don't understand the problem. It all looks screwy but I don't know if that's just a weird error, incompetence or intentional fabrication or what/But some of my problem looking at graphs has to do with their brightness because of my eye problem. I can't look at them very long.\Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Don't know how you're going to accomplish fewer guns except by confiscation then. Is that what you're suggesting? As usual that would only penalize the good guys for the problem caused by the bad guys. If the greater number of deaths by guns occurs in the crime-ridden areas and you take guns away from people in the areas with less crime you are accomplishing nothing. If the statistics are skewed by crime-infested areas why is the focus of gun control always on the NRA guys who are not responsible for those statistics? The Wikipedia article about crime in DC says they have been working to find ways to reduce it for years, and laws against guns have accomplished absolutely nothing. Except to penalize the good guys who don't live in DC.Although you say you aren't necessarily talking about more laws, that's what "fewer guns" normally means -- stricter controls which penalizes the good guys because the bad guys don't obey laws. There are already gun control laws that are making life difficult for the good guys when the problems they are supposed to solve were caused by the bad guys, who are not affected by the laws. My brother has told me about some that affect him in ways that are nothing but a hassle he doesn't deserve, all because of the information on his driver's license that he's a registered gun owner. Even if he left his gun at home they can strip and search his vehicle in some states because of that information on his license. Some people could have guns in every nook and cranny of their vehicle and not get searched because they aren't responsible enough to have that information on their license.
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Saw a You Tube interview of a fifteen year old girl who has been shooting since she was eight and hoped to get a shooting scholarship to Harvard, but some new stupid niggling law that restricts her practice is going to prevent that. You punish the good guys with your laws and you do not solve the problems which are caused by the bad guys.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

In your discussion with Percy you are at least asking relevant questions about the kinds of situations that are involved, such as where you ask this: What I've been pointing out is that this kind of information is not getting the attention it needs when discussing gun control issues in the US. To get USEFUL information about gun deaths you need to make this sort of distinction, and you may need to get into racial profiling as well, at least "culture profiling."I've been making ONE point: The good guys are being penalized for the problems that are caused by the bad guys and gun control is not focused on making the distinction. If a distinction was clearly made between the different groups then maybe we could talk about how to reduce gun deaths of the bad guys without penalizing the good guys.As for the "hate crime" statistic I don't know how it would affect the gun control questions, but I suspect it would affect the laws about "homophobia" which just like the gun control laws may be penalizing the good guys for the problems caused by the bad guys. In this case I don't know who the bad guys are because the Wikipedia article is very careful to avoid racial profiling or any kind of profiling, but I'm wondering if it's perhaps the large Muslim population in DC or perhaps the black population. I suppose it COULD be the white population but I'm guessing it's not. But it's the white Christian business owners in the west who are being penalized for "homophobia" although they aren't killing anyone.
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I am glad you are in on this discussion because you do seem to understand something about statistics. Percy was just going to throw out that whole site for lying but incompetence is less incendiary.In an earlier post to Percy you made a remark about how "Faith" supposedly wrongly understands that graph. But Faith had never spent time on that graph, Faith was interested in the analyses written in the article. I don't appreciate being criticized for something I didn't do. Thanks.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I thought I gave examples.Every time this subject comes up, which is usually when some crazy person kills a bunch of people, it's always the NRA guys, or people supposedly representing NRA thinking, who are interviewed on the talk shows and skewered by, say, Piers Morgan -- glad he's gone -- or Rosie O'Donnell, and when statistics are brought up such as on a thread like this, no distinctions are made between bad guys and good guys so that the higher gun crime statistics in the higher crime areas are all part of the argument to reduce guns in the country as a whole, and the people who get penalized for that are the good guys, such as my brother, or the NRA people. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And where have I done that? Seems to me I've kept my remarks general enough not to violate the "data," which in any case I've been saying are NOT trustworthy.As I said, I am not going to become a statistician. The problems are too much for me to take on. If I can't trust a particular analysis I simply don't trust any of the statistics.