When will we learn?

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

Comments

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

I'll take an acknowledgement over no acknowledgement at all.


Ok... I'll take an honest acknowledgement over no acknowledgement...

The information on that is more mixed than last time I looked into it.

Drawing conclusions that madsciense has then seems to be quite unfounded doesn't it?

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

My own position is that I don't think there is strong evidence that gun regulation has much of an effect on homicide rates (in either direction).

I don't think people are stupid for thinking otherwise, but both sides of the argument seem to do a lot of clutching at straws for statistical backing. Using the UK's low homicide rate to argue for gun regulation strikes me as an obvious example of dodgy statistics, but (as made clear in my opening) I'm not convinced by the opposing argument either.

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

I'm not using UK's homicide rate for an argument for gun control I'm using it to deconstruct madscience's poor argument. I'm happy to have a discussion about policy but only after we acknowledge and respect certain facts. Facts that people like madscience or squidboi or whomever always look to explain away.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

My point is that the UK's lower homicide rate isn't a relevant fact unless you can make a case that it's due to gun regulation laws (which I find dubious).

The UK's change in homicide rate before and since handguns were criminalised is at least a relevant statistic, even though it does still require careful interpretation (and needs to be combined with similar legal changes in other nations if we want to establish a trend),

Also; when it comes to statistics, I think we should be careful about criticising people for 'explaining away' inconvenient statistics. It is what you essentially did in response to the statistic that madscience. It's unfortunate that people's interpretation tends to be biased towards their pre-existing political beliefs and attitudes, but we're all engage in interpretation whenever we interact with statistics (or at least we should be... we shouldn't be taking them at face value)

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

No I explained with properly cited material why madscience's claims were dubious, and even if they were true they run counter to his narrative. This is a common and effective argument tactic called modus tollens. I did not explain away the deaths of 2500 people because I found them to be ideologically inconvenient. I don't particularly care one way or the other about guns, I care about accurately reflecting reality.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

I've seen the dialogue, although nothing quite so clear-cut that I would label as denying the consequent.

You have presented a different interpretation of the available data.

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

I dunno I pretty much solely took issue with his dubious claim that gun control made violent crime worse to the degrees he mentioned.

You have presented a different interpretation of the available data.

Are we entering the realm of solipsism now? Or can you give me any feedback as to which data we are talking about? I have no interpretation of madscience's sources, because those sources are garbage.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, she didn't even "explain away" my statistics. If you give even a cursory read to the documents she "properly cited", you'll see that one of them is from 1991, and the other clearly states that the crime counting rules changed after the 2006 survey, so the change cannot explain the surge in crime from 1997-2005.

I kind of want to see how many more times she'll hang herself with her own rope, but I'm getting sleepy.

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

No it doesn't state that. And I'm a dude for the record.