When will we learn?

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

Comments

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Your gun restrictions have had no effect on homicide. . . .

Quite true. It's time to end this silly discussion about guns being the problem, and start focusing on the real culprit, income inequality (http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/research/violence).

Of course, when you combine massive income inequality with ubiquitous firearm ownership, as you can see the graph spikes a bit from the trend line.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

*like*

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Violent crime drops in the US while income inequality supposedly rises? Sounds like we need more income inequality!

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

You're going to ignore the environmental lead effect just to take a cheap shot?

I can respect the giggles behind that.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I'm more going to say that the conclusion being drawn is more than a little suspect, and is outright false in the United States in particular assuming income inequality is actually a problem here.

The link between crime and poverty hasn't been the case for some time, if ever. There's no reason why a link between income inequality and crime should exist, either, especially since inequality tells us nothing about the status of the upper and lower levels.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Interesting. You went from "assuming income inequality is actually a problem here" to the "link between crime and poverty" in subsequent sentences, almost as if you were discussing the same phenomenon. They aren't. They are, in fact, two very different discussions based on very different assumptions.

Which makes your following fallacious declaration, "There's no reason why a link between income inequality and crime should exist" even more interesting. Why is that fallacious? You declare that there is no reason without providing a shred of evidence to support the declaration. (Yes, if you were wallowing in assumptions that cannot be challenged, then the answer is, well, such assumption wallowing doesn't allow one to challenge the evidence provided.)

Ah, but could it very well be that we simply don't understand the link? (Which seems to be the case.) That would be a more reasonable response.

For someone who declares himself atheistic, you also display quite a bit of faith in unfounded assumptions. ;-)

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The evidence is in the declining crime rates, specifically. The use of crime and poverty is there to show the way common wisdom and seemingly logical conclusions are not always so.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

The evidence is in the declining crime rates, specifically.

Yes, I'm aware. That's why I mentioned the methylethyl lead upthread, the one you pointed out to me you had posted about a year ago.

The use of crime and poverty is there to show the way common wisdom and seemingly logical conclusions are not always so.

I'm also aware of the common "wisdom." The GINI numbers on income inequality, though, are not a part of that common canon. As far as I know, there is neither "common wisdom" nor hard and tested psychological theory to explain the GINI/societal phenomenon correlations. Which is why I chided you for dismissing the income inequality correlations in the first place; if they haven't yet been explained, stating that there is "no reason" to support an explanation is like smelling a fart, knowing you didn't pass gas, seeing no one else in the room, and concluding the smell therefore doesn't exist.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

This illustrates the difficulty of isolating the causes of trends in society. The best explanation for the steady decline in violent crime since its peak in the early 1990s has nothing to do with guns, and nothing to do with income inequality. It's the two-decades-delayed result of Roe v. Wade.