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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On February 23 2018 00:00 NewSunshine wrote:Show nested quote +On February 22 2018 22:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun). I actually want to expound on this one a little bit, because it's absolutely true and touches on something a lot of the pro-gun arguments base themselves on, the idea that regardless of whether regulations are introduced, and even regardless of whether they're effective, everyone who ever got a gun for the purpose of shooting someone would have still gotten a gun, or would have used something else in its place. It assumes, right from the start, that all gunmen, and all would-be gunmen, are perfectly rational actors, 100% determined to obtain a gun and use it for violent ends, or do whatever it takes in the event they can't get one. Now, for some people that's true, and maybe for our mass-shooters that's pretty close, but that's giving a lot of credit to every single person who got a gun from someone they knew, or just walked into a shop and bought one, sight-unseen, to do who-knows-what with it. Not enough credence is lent to the very real phenomenon that for every regulation you introduce, every inconvenience you place on doing something, no matter how small, it will dissuade a non-zero number of people from doing it who were doing it before. It's a game of margins, for most people there is a point at which they'll say "fuck it, this shit ain't worth it", and there is always a group of people that are on either side of that margin. A simple regulation or ban might not stop someone who is myopically focused on the task of committing a mass murder, but it will stop a considerable number of people who would've been smaller offenders*, and those are the ones that make up most of the gun-related deaths. *I use this term loosely, this can also include anyone who shot someone for less insidious reasons, who nonetheless died when they wouldn't have before.
It also leaves out the substantial number of accidental shootings by young children and adults alike. It's not as if people are going to start accidentally stabbing or running people over to make up for it.
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On February 22 2018 22:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 22 2018 20:48 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 19:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 15:49 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 13:28 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 13:10 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 12:56 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 12:48 Leporello wrote:On February 22 2018 12:38 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 12:35 Leporello wrote:
[quote]
No one here has compared a 50 cal to an AR-15. Psht. Even I know that! LOL. Oh gee.
Here's a question, for your database: do you think the Vegas shooting would've resulted in so many deaths if the man didn't have access to an AR-15 (which is an assault-rifle)? Would so many have died if the only guns he could buy were pistols, shotguns, and bolt-action rifles? Would the Vegas shooting happened if the person in question went through a rigorous mental health screening check every 6 months? Anyone can use that logic. Yes, the Vegas shooting happened. Yes, he utilized semi-automatic long rifle weapons converted with a bumpfire stock. Do you truly believe though that removing access to the AR-15 would have prevented him from committing that same kind of crime with another type of weapon/tool?That's the honest question we should be asking ourselves here. This guy meticulously planned his attack on those people, and made many efforts in order to conceal his effort to harm others. Just like the Florida shooter knew how to defeat standard school lockdown protocol by pulling the fire alarm to force students and staff out into the open, and he chose the perfect time to do it (towards the end of school) to cause mass confusion. These people planned these things out, and it's not like they just decided one day I'm going to pick up an AR-15 and just go kill some people. Not to mention, you conveniently leave out the fact that the Virgina Tech shooter utilized pistols to inflict 33 fatalities (including himself), and not an AR-15. Not only do I think that, the vast majority of law-enforcement thinks it to. Of course, it would have been different. He didn't choose the AR-15 because he likes the way it smells. He picked it because it was the best tool for the job. And the job was long-distance murder. Now, other things can murder. But at that range? That effectively? No. just: No. See: I answer questions. What if he chose to drive a car through the crowd? What if he got a bomb into that crowd? You're assuming that he stays at the same range if he has a different tool. There are other tools that can be used to kill more people quickly. We saw that happened when someone ran through a crowd with a vehicle. All evidence that I have seen points to the idea that an assault weapons ban/firearm ban in general does nothing to curtail the homicide rate within a country. Why people keep insisting on one makes no sense to me. Are you familiar with the existence of a continent called Europe? Ever since the firearm bans in UK homicide rates (total homicide not firearm homicide rates) have been essentially the same. But I guess arguing with facts is not a thing anymore. Firearm bans SHOULD have a dramatic effect on homicide rates if we are to believe the 'liberal' side of the argument, especially after a decade. However, the truth is that they have almost no effect on the overall homicide rate within a country. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ A glance at the left side bar (actually, the right one too) suggests that it's not the most neutral of sources. Here's a huge meta analysis/ review of the then-existing research on firearm legislation and correlation with firearm-related injuries. Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically reviewed studies exploring the associations between firearm-related laws and firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries/deaths. We restricted our search to studies published from 1950 to 2014. Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g., background checks) and access to (e.g., safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively. Limitations of studies include challenges inherent to their ecological design, their execution, and the lack of robustness of findings to model specifications. High quality research on the association between the implementation or repeal of firearm legislation (rather than the evaluation of existing laws) and firearm injuries would lead to a better understanding of what interventions are likely to work given local contexts. This information is key to move this field forward and for the development of effective policies that may counteract the burden that firearm injuries pose on populations. Also, a quick look at the Wiki article on UK firearms laws shows a decline in firearms used in crimes as well as firearm-caused fatalities, even without adjustment per capita for population growth. superstartran thinks Wiki info is pretty much the worst ever- his strong reaction to it previously was one of the reasons he was banned in the first place- so that might not be a strong selling point to him. (Of course, that entry has over 100 citations and looks to be reasonable overall. Thanks for sharing it.) I like how you were so up all on that one study that uses the wrong data for a negative binomial regression, which is a pretty amateurish mistake to do (or you do it on purpose to push an agenda). So, like I said, are you going to respond why that study used rate data instead of count data? Are you referring to MLL's post? This one? + Show Spoiler +On February 20 2018 07:49 MyLovelyLurker wrote:I guess I'm a bit late on the whole 'let's dl wikipedia into a Jupyter notebook and correlate away' thing I was planning to do this morning, and happy that American stats exceptionalism is alive and well. I want to share this study www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov that rigorously establishes correlation between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates within the 50 States. It's based on 2012 data. I didn't see anything fundamentally wrong with its scientific methodology. Interestingly enough, looking at the bibliography shows a grand total of eighty references, many of them pointing in a similar direction. Sharing the discussion / conclusion as : 'To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates within the 50 states. Our study encompassed a 30-year period, with data through 2010, and accounted for 18 possible confounders of the relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide. We found a robust relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates that was not explained by any of these potential confounders and was not sensitive to model specification. Our work expanded on previous studies not only by analyzing more recent data, but also by adjusting for clustering by year and state and controlling for factors, such as the rate of nonfirearm homicides, that likely capture unspecified variables that may be associated with both gun ownership levels and firearm homicide rates. The correlation of gun ownership with firearm homicide rates was substantial. Results from our model showed that a 1-SD difference in the gun ownership proxy measure, FS/S, was associated with a 12.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. All other factors being equal, our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower. Because of our use of a proxy measure for gun ownership, we could not conclude that the magnitude of the association between actual household gun ownership rates and homicide rates was the same. However, in a model that incorporated only survey-derived measures of household gun ownership (for 2001, 2002, and 2004), we found that each 1-SD difference in gun ownership was associated with a 24.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. 'Our study substantially advances previous work by analyzing recent data, examining the longest and most comprehensive panel of state-specific data to date, and accounting for year and state clustering and for a wide range of potential confounders. We found a robust relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates, a finding that held whether firearm ownership was assessed through a proxy or a survey measure, whether state clustering was accounted for by GEEs or by fixed effects, and whether or not gun ownership was lagged, by up to 2 years. The observed relationship was specific to firearm-related homicide. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher levels of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.' What evidence do you have that they used the wrong data? Why do you think that rate data can't be used and that count data must be used? And I don't know what you mean by "all up on that one study". I merely said it looked solid and I was interested in hearing your response to it (although you were temp banned at the time). You just laughed it off though, which I had seen you do before. That was what prompted me to reply to your comment in the first place. Here was our conversation: Show nested quote +On February 19 2018 10:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 07:05 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 06:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 05:30 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 05:19 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 04:00 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 02:58 ragnasaur wrote:
Those graphs are dumb. USA is a first world country & the comparative countries like Jamacia and Honduras are third world.
Apples & Oranges That is my exact point. You and I can throw any graph out there, without actually controlling for several variables you don't get an accurate picture But your response to a graph that *did* control for that variable (OECD countries) was a graph that was purposely less accurate and *didn't* control for it. Those two graphs are not both equally inaccurate, and just because you can find a bad graph doesn't mean the good graph should be ignored. The fact that you really think that OECD graph is actually an accurate representative and can be used as evidence for correlation between number of firearms and firearm related violence is laughable at best. The author himself said that you cannot use his graphs as evidence for anything because the dude got his fucking statistics from wikipedia.There's a MUCH stronger correlation of income disparity and poverty with firearm related violence more than anything, but no one wants to talk about that. It's all about guns bro. So now, well sourced encyclopedias aren't good enough references? You realize that "lol Wikipedia" wasn't even a valid rebuttal a decade ago, right? I mean, it's fine to discuss additional variables one should control for when having this discussion, but you're acting really smug for a person invoking strawman graphs and dismissing sources that are likely to be legitimate. Are you seriously trying to use outdated data that doesn't control for various different variables as a reliable source to claim that the data shown shows a strong correlation? "Well Sourced" lmao.Wikipedia 'likely to be legitimate' Sometimes I wonder if you guys actually graduated from a university and were taught basic scientific method or you are just talking out of your own ass. User was temp banned for this post. This is the last post I'll make about sourcing, as I see you're temp banned and I'm not sure if it borders on off-topic, but encyclopedias are generally good starting points for when people want to start researching topics, since they often times have an extensive bibliography for more information. And Wikipedia is no different, in that most long entries have dozens- if not hundreds- of works that are cited, and you'll immediately know if any pages aren't well-sourced. Keep in mind that it was established back in 2005 that Wikipedia's accuracy was comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica's ( https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ ) and Wikipedia has only become more reliable over the past 13 years (despite the taboo that comes with public editors). When doing real research, of course you're going to double-check your sources against other sources, but starting at a Wiki entry for basic overviews and looking through the bibliography is actually a pretty good informational springboard. In other words, it's completely inappropriate to automatically dismiss statements just because they exist on Wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm well aware of the mathematics and statistics references you're making (e.g., correlation), considering I teach high school and college math and statistics. You're not the only one who understands confounding variables. And I'm trying to have a dialogue with you- not get into a dick-swinging contest. The reason I had responded in the first place to your rebuttal of someone else's post was that you had tried refuting a study that attempted to control for certain variables with your own graph that specifically didn't, and you tried saying that since you found a meaningless graph, that someone else's graph was automatically equally meaningless. I found that to be disingenuous, along with your "lol Wiki is auto-wrong and anyone who uses Wiki is stupid" philosophy, and then other people ended up citing even more studies. I don't feel like your one-liner dismissive responses to some of these studies are really all that convincing, and calling people "amateurish" or saying that you are "talking out of your own ass" isn't really strengthening your arguments. This statement that you made to ticklishmusic is controversial, as there is plenty of research that disagrees with your claim: Show nested quote +We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49: 985-88.
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ The correlations here seem to indicate: 1. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of gun deaths; 2. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of overall deaths; 3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun).
You claim to teach statistics and understand statistics but don't know that Negative Binomial Regression Models are utilized for modeling count variables? Bro, I didn't even major in statistics and I know that.
You would pretty much never utilize Negative Binomial Regression Models for rates, which is exactly what that study does. You would utilize a poisson regression model if you were using rate data, but the study doesn't do that on purpose because it would blow up their claims.
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Is this the math equivalent of “Bro, do you even lift?” Ask for the three other non-math nerd TL users.
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nah, using correct model is step 1 of any statistical research. using the wrong one could all but invalidate the study. though i’ve been out of the game far too long to back up the accuracy of the chosen model.
in laymen’s terms, choosing the model IS the definition of how accurate your findings/predictions would be.
if i wanted to predict next months temperature using a linear(it’s exacty what you think. the rate of increase remains constant.) model over the last three days i’d come to a prediction of 180°F (pulled out of my ass but the point remains.) next year? forget it. 1800° and we all died months ago.
of course controlling for outliers (the oddly high temperature of the last few days) is also a concern, i wouldn’t be able to blow the results out of the proportion if i used a more appropriate model.
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On February 22 2018 13:28 superstartran wrote:Show nested quote +On February 22 2018 13:10 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 12:56 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 12:48 Leporello wrote:On February 22 2018 12:38 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 12:35 Leporello wrote:On February 22 2018 12:31 Danglars wrote:
I want to thank the people in the last three pages of posts for posting tons of gun facts to counter some assertions. Even with Leporello in the mix (and like three posts calling things assault rifles that aren’t), that kind of knowledgeable discussion should be ground zero before adding special wait times or licenses for AR-15s. More of an “despite their great performance in the home defense role alongside pistols, I suggest ...” rather than “my straw man says there’s no good reason to use it in the role” or “the usefulness/threat ratio is too damn high”
I’ve got too many vocal gun control advocates in my local SoCal area (even one official in a gun control group that protests) that don’t know the difference between a .50-cal and AR-15 ... and think only Rambo-wannabes would ever want an AR-15. But this is California, so naturally I get the crazier fringe of these groups. No one here has compared a 50 cal to an AR-15. Psht. Even I know that! LOL. Oh gee. Here's a question, for your database: do you think the Vegas shooting would've resulted in so many deaths if the man didn't have access to an AR-15 (which is an assault-rifle)? Would so many have died if the only guns he could buy were pistols, shotguns, and bolt-action rifles? Would the Vegas shooting happened if the person in question went through a rigorous mental health screening check every 6 months? Anyone can use that logic. Yes, the Vegas shooting happened. Yes, he utilized semi-automatic long rifle weapons converted with a bumpfire stock. Do you truly believe though that removing access to the AR-15 would have prevented him from committing that same kind of crime with another type of weapon/tool?That's the honest question we should be asking ourselves here. This guy meticulously planned his attack on those people, and made many efforts in order to conceal his effort to harm others. Just like the Florida shooter knew how to defeat standard school lockdown protocol by pulling the fire alarm to force students and staff out into the open, and he chose the perfect time to do it (towards the end of school) to cause mass confusion. These people planned these things out, and it's not like they just decided one day I'm going to pick up an AR-15 and just go kill some people. Not to mention, you conveniently leave out the fact that the Virgina Tech shooter utilized pistols to inflict 33 fatalities (including himself), and not an AR-15. Not only do I think that, the vast majority of law-enforcement thinks it to. Of course, it would have been different. He didn't choose the AR-15 because he likes the way it smells. He picked it because it was the best tool for the job. And the job was long-distance murder. Now, other things can murder. But at that range? That effectively? No. just: No. See: I answer questions. What if he chose to drive a car through the crowd? What if he got a bomb into that crowd? You're assuming that he stays at the same range if he has a different tool. There are other tools that can be used to kill more people quickly. We saw that happened when someone ran through a crowd with a vehicle. All evidence that I have seen points to the idea that an assault weapons ban/firearm ban in general does nothing to curtail the homicide rate within a country. Why people keep insisting on one makes no sense to me. Are you familiar with the existence of a continent called Europe? Ever since the firearm bans in UK homicide rates (total homicide not firearm homicide rates) have been essentially the same. But I guess arguing with facts is not a thing anymore. Firearm bans SHOULD have a dramatic effect on homicide rates if we are to believe the 'liberal' side of the argument, especially after a decade. However, the truth is that they have almost no effect on the overall homicide rate within a country. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/
I don't think the effect of a firearm ban on a country that had stronger gun control for 80 years prior to it is particularly relevant to thow things would pan out in the US.
It's also disingenuous to suggest that such policies not having a dramatic effect on homicide rates in a country with an already 'normal' homicide rate means the same result is to be expected in a country with a disproportionately high homicide rate relative to its level of development.
Personally I don't find that a firearm ban à la 1997 UK is a feasible or necessary measure for the US. Start with restricting gun ownership for people with a history of violence and mental institutions and by throwing the book at those that sell them weapons illegally. With having to provide reasons for why you need several weapons, or large amounts of ammunition or weapons that can do large amounts of damage and are uncommonly used for hunting or personal defence. Some decades after doing these things, if a ban is still a hot topic of discussion, then it would be an appropriate time to pull the UK charts.
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On February 23 2018 00:15 superstartran wrote:Show nested quote +On February 22 2018 22:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 20:48 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 19:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 15:49 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 13:28 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 13:10 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 12:56 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 12:48 Leporello wrote:On February 22 2018 12:38 superstartran wrote:
[quote]
Would the Vegas shooting happened if the person in question went through a rigorous mental health screening check every 6 months? Anyone can use that logic. Yes, the Vegas shooting happened. Yes, he utilized semi-automatic long rifle weapons converted with a bumpfire stock. Do you truly believe though that removing access to the AR-15 would have prevented him from committing that same kind of crime with another type of weapon/tool?
That's the honest question we should be asking ourselves here. This guy meticulously planned his attack on those people, and made many efforts in order to conceal his effort to harm others. Just like the Florida shooter knew how to defeat standard school lockdown protocol by pulling the fire alarm to force students and staff out into the open, and he chose the perfect time to do it (towards the end of school) to cause mass confusion. These people planned these things out, and it's not like they just decided one day I'm going to pick up an AR-15 and just go kill some people.
Not to mention, you conveniently leave out the fact that the Virgina Tech shooter utilized pistols to inflict 33 fatalities (including himself), and not an AR-15. Not only do I think that, the vast majority of law-enforcement thinks it to. Of course, it would have been different. He didn't choose the AR-15 because he likes the way it smells. He picked it because it was the best tool for the job. And the job was long-distance murder. Now, other things can murder. But at that range? That effectively? No. just: No. See: I answer questions. What if he chose to drive a car through the crowd? What if he got a bomb into that crowd? You're assuming that he stays at the same range if he has a different tool. There are other tools that can be used to kill more people quickly. We saw that happened when someone ran through a crowd with a vehicle. All evidence that I have seen points to the idea that an assault weapons ban/firearm ban in general does nothing to curtail the homicide rate within a country. Why people keep insisting on one makes no sense to me. Are you familiar with the existence of a continent called Europe? Ever since the firearm bans in UK homicide rates (total homicide not firearm homicide rates) have been essentially the same. But I guess arguing with facts is not a thing anymore. Firearm bans SHOULD have a dramatic effect on homicide rates if we are to believe the 'liberal' side of the argument, especially after a decade. However, the truth is that they have almost no effect on the overall homicide rate within a country. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ A glance at the left side bar (actually, the right one too) suggests that it's not the most neutral of sources. Here's a huge meta analysis/ review of the then-existing research on firearm legislation and correlation with firearm-related injuries. Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically reviewed studies exploring the associations between firearm-related laws and firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries/deaths. We restricted our search to studies published from 1950 to 2014. Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g., background checks) and access to (e.g., safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively. Limitations of studies include challenges inherent to their ecological design, their execution, and the lack of robustness of findings to model specifications. High quality research on the association between the implementation or repeal of firearm legislation (rather than the evaluation of existing laws) and firearm injuries would lead to a better understanding of what interventions are likely to work given local contexts. This information is key to move this field forward and for the development of effective policies that may counteract the burden that firearm injuries pose on populations. Also, a quick look at the Wiki article on UK firearms laws shows a decline in firearms used in crimes as well as firearm-caused fatalities, even without adjustment per capita for population growth. superstartran thinks Wiki info is pretty much the worst ever- his strong reaction to it previously was one of the reasons he was banned in the first place- so that might not be a strong selling point to him. (Of course, that entry has over 100 citations and looks to be reasonable overall. Thanks for sharing it.) I like how you were so up all on that one study that uses the wrong data for a negative binomial regression, which is a pretty amateurish mistake to do (or you do it on purpose to push an agenda). So, like I said, are you going to respond why that study used rate data instead of count data? Are you referring to MLL's post? This one? + Show Spoiler +On February 20 2018 07:49 MyLovelyLurker wrote:I guess I'm a bit late on the whole 'let's dl wikipedia into a Jupyter notebook and correlate away' thing I was planning to do this morning, and happy that American stats exceptionalism is alive and well. I want to share this study www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov that rigorously establishes correlation between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates within the 50 States. It's based on 2012 data. I didn't see anything fundamentally wrong with its scientific methodology. Interestingly enough, looking at the bibliography shows a grand total of eighty references, many of them pointing in a similar direction. Sharing the discussion / conclusion as : 'To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates within the 50 states. Our study encompassed a 30-year period, with data through 2010, and accounted for 18 possible confounders of the relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide. We found a robust relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates that was not explained by any of these potential confounders and was not sensitive to model specification. Our work expanded on previous studies not only by analyzing more recent data, but also by adjusting for clustering by year and state and controlling for factors, such as the rate of nonfirearm homicides, that likely capture unspecified variables that may be associated with both gun ownership levels and firearm homicide rates. The correlation of gun ownership with firearm homicide rates was substantial. Results from our model showed that a 1-SD difference in the gun ownership proxy measure, FS/S, was associated with a 12.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. All other factors being equal, our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower. Because of our use of a proxy measure for gun ownership, we could not conclude that the magnitude of the association between actual household gun ownership rates and homicide rates was the same. However, in a model that incorporated only survey-derived measures of household gun ownership (for 2001, 2002, and 2004), we found that each 1-SD difference in gun ownership was associated with a 24.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. 'Our study substantially advances previous work by analyzing recent data, examining the longest and most comprehensive panel of state-specific data to date, and accounting for year and state clustering and for a wide range of potential confounders. We found a robust relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates, a finding that held whether firearm ownership was assessed through a proxy or a survey measure, whether state clustering was accounted for by GEEs or by fixed effects, and whether or not gun ownership was lagged, by up to 2 years. The observed relationship was specific to firearm-related homicide. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher levels of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.' What evidence do you have that they used the wrong data? Why do you think that rate data can't be used and that count data must be used? And I don't know what you mean by "all up on that one study". I merely said it looked solid and I was interested in hearing your response to it (although you were temp banned at the time). You just laughed it off though, which I had seen you do before. That was what prompted me to reply to your comment in the first place. Here was our conversation: On February 19 2018 10:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 07:05 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 06:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 05:30 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 05:19 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 04:00 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 02:58 ragnasaur wrote:
Those graphs are dumb. USA is a first world country & the comparative countries like Jamacia and Honduras are third world.
Apples & Oranges That is my exact point. You and I can throw any graph out there, without actually controlling for several variables you don't get an accurate picture But your response to a graph that *did* control for that variable (OECD countries) was a graph that was purposely less accurate and *didn't* control for it. Those two graphs are not both equally inaccurate, and just because you can find a bad graph doesn't mean the good graph should be ignored. The fact that you really think that OECD graph is actually an accurate representative and can be used as evidence for correlation between number of firearms and firearm related violence is laughable at best. The author himself said that you cannot use his graphs as evidence for anything because the dude got his fucking statistics from wikipedia.There's a MUCH stronger correlation of income disparity and poverty with firearm related violence more than anything, but no one wants to talk about that. It's all about guns bro. So now, well sourced encyclopedias aren't good enough references? You realize that "lol Wikipedia" wasn't even a valid rebuttal a decade ago, right? I mean, it's fine to discuss additional variables one should control for when having this discussion, but you're acting really smug for a person invoking strawman graphs and dismissing sources that are likely to be legitimate. Are you seriously trying to use outdated data that doesn't control for various different variables as a reliable source to claim that the data shown shows a strong correlation? "Well Sourced" lmao.Wikipedia 'likely to be legitimate' Sometimes I wonder if you guys actually graduated from a university and were taught basic scientific method or you are just talking out of your own ass. User was temp banned for this post. This is the last post I'll make about sourcing, as I see you're temp banned and I'm not sure if it borders on off-topic, but encyclopedias are generally good starting points for when people want to start researching topics, since they often times have an extensive bibliography for more information. And Wikipedia is no different, in that most long entries have dozens- if not hundreds- of works that are cited, and you'll immediately know if any pages aren't well-sourced. Keep in mind that it was established back in 2005 that Wikipedia's accuracy was comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica's ( https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ ) and Wikipedia has only become more reliable over the past 13 years (despite the taboo that comes with public editors). When doing real research, of course you're going to double-check your sources against other sources, but starting at a Wiki entry for basic overviews and looking through the bibliography is actually a pretty good informational springboard. In other words, it's completely inappropriate to automatically dismiss statements just because they exist on Wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm well aware of the mathematics and statistics references you're making (e.g., correlation), considering I teach high school and college math and statistics. You're not the only one who understands confounding variables. And I'm trying to have a dialogue with you- not get into a dick-swinging contest. The reason I had responded in the first place to your rebuttal of someone else's post was that you had tried refuting a study that attempted to control for certain variables with your own graph that specifically didn't, and you tried saying that since you found a meaningless graph, that someone else's graph was automatically equally meaningless. I found that to be disingenuous, along with your "lol Wiki is auto-wrong and anyone who uses Wiki is stupid" philosophy, and then other people ended up citing even more studies. I don't feel like your one-liner dismissive responses to some of these studies are really all that convincing, and calling people "amateurish" or saying that you are "talking out of your own ass" isn't really strengthening your arguments. firearm bans had no discernible effect on total homicide rates. This statement that you made to ticklishmusic is controversial, as there is plenty of research that disagrees with your claim: We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49: 985-88.
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ The correlations here seem to indicate: 1. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of gun deaths; 2. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of overall deaths; 3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun). You claim to teach statistics and understand statistics but don't know that Negative Binomial Regression Models are utilized for modeling count variables? Bro, I didn't even major in statistics and I know that. You would pretty much never utilize Negative Binomial Regression Models for rates, which is exactly what that study does. You would utilize a poisson regression model if you were using rate data, but the study doesn't do that on purpose because it would blow up their claims.
There are two things in here that I'd like to contest, "bro".
1. Conversions exist between counts and rates, so just because one starts with a negative binomial regression model doesn't mean the data can't be interpreted either in terms of counts or in terms of rates. Conventionally, yes, NBR is used when you start with counts, although Poissons certainly aren't only used for rates. Furthermore, there are special cases of negative binomial regression models (e.g., Pascal and Polya distributions) that tend to be preferable over Poisson counterparts, as they can be made more accurate by accounting for different means and standard deviations. NBR and Poisson are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, here's another example of the same kind of comparative modeling happening, and you'll notice that this source considers both NBR and Poisson to be comparable as count models (i.e., your claim that Poisson = rates is not necessarily true), yet also allows the data to be interpreted as rates:
Also, the negative binomial model, as compared to other count models (i.e., Poisson or zero-inflated models), is assumed the appropriate model. In other words, we assume that the dependent variable is over-dispersed and does not have an excessive number of zeros. The first half of this page interprets the coefficients in terms of negative binomial regression coefficients, and the second half interprets the coefficients in terms of incidence rate ratios. https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/output/negative-binomial-regression/
In other words, the study isn't automatically refuted simply because they're using a different model, because you can totally interpret the data in both ways.
2. I'm curious as to what evidence you have that the other model would "blow up their claims". Please elaborate.
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On February 23 2018 00:19 brian wrote:
nah, using correct model is step 1 of any statistical research. using the wrong one could all but invalidate the study. though i’ve been out of the game far too long to back up the accuracy of the chosen model.
in laymen’s terms, choosing the model IS the definition of how accurate your findings/predictions would be.
if i wanted to predict next months temperature using a linear(it’s exacty what you think. the rate of increase remains constant.) model over the last three days i’d come to a prediction of 180°F (pulled out of my ass but the point remains.) next year? forget it. 1800° and we all died months ago.
of course controlling for outliers (the oddly high temperature of the last few days) is also a concern, i wouldn’t be able to blow the results out of the proportion if i used a more appropriate model.
Completely agree with you that using the correct model is incredibly important, and I'd like to elaborate a bit on SST's issue (as it's not quite the same as the scenario you're pointing out).
SST's issue, if I understand it correctly, is that the kind of variable being assessed (rate variable*) is different than the kind of variable typically assessed by the negative binomial regression model being used (count variable*). And therefore, SST states, the results are invalid because the model is not appropriate to use with the given data. (He then suggests using a Poisson model instead, but that model prefers count variables just as much as NBR does, so that's irrelevant.)
The problem with his problem, however, is that there are ways to convert between rate and count variables: "Count models can be used for rate data in many instances by using exposure" https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/seminars/regression-models-with-count-data/
In fact, the above website literally lists Poisson and NBR as back-to-back as models that typically prefer counts, so it would be inconsistent to suggest that Poisson can handle the conversion to rates but NBR can't.
"A count is understood as the number of times an event occurs; a rate as how many events occur within a specific area or time interval." https://www.statistics.com/modeling-count-data/
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On February 23 2018 00:43 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 00:15 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 22:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 20:48 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 19:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 15:49 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 13:28 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 13:10 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 12:56 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 12:48 Leporello wrote:
[quote]
Not only do I think that, the vast majority of law-enforcement thinks it to.
Of course, it would have been different. He didn't choose the AR-15 because he likes the way it smells. He picked it because it was the best tool for the job.
And the job was long-distance murder. Now, other things can murder. But at that range? That effectively? No.
just: No.
See: I answer questions.
What if he chose to drive a car through the crowd? What if he got a bomb into that crowd? You're assuming that he stays at the same range if he has a different tool. There are other tools that can be used to kill more people quickly. We saw that happened when someone ran through a crowd with a vehicle. All evidence that I have seen points to the idea that an assault weapons ban/firearm ban in general does nothing to curtail the homicide rate within a country. Why people keep insisting on one makes no sense to me. Are you familiar with the existence of a continent called Europe? Ever since the firearm bans in UK homicide rates (total homicide not firearm homicide rates) have been essentially the same. But I guess arguing with facts is not a thing anymore. Firearm bans SHOULD have a dramatic effect on homicide rates if we are to believe the 'liberal' side of the argument, especially after a decade. However, the truth is that they have almost no effect on the overall homicide rate within a country. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ A glance at the left side bar (actually, the right one too) suggests that it's not the most neutral of sources. Here's a huge meta analysis/ review of the then-existing research on firearm legislation and correlation with firearm-related injuries. Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically reviewed studies exploring the associations between firearm-related laws and firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries/deaths. We restricted our search to studies published from 1950 to 2014. Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g., background checks) and access to (e.g., safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively. Limitations of studies include challenges inherent to their ecological design, their execution, and the lack of robustness of findings to model specifications. High quality research on the association between the implementation or repeal of firearm legislation (rather than the evaluation of existing laws) and firearm injuries would lead to a better understanding of what interventions are likely to work given local contexts. This information is key to move this field forward and for the development of effective policies that may counteract the burden that firearm injuries pose on populations. Also, a quick look at the Wiki article on UK firearms laws shows a decline in firearms used in crimes as well as firearm-caused fatalities, even without adjustment per capita for population growth. superstartran thinks Wiki info is pretty much the worst ever- his strong reaction to it previously was one of the reasons he was banned in the first place- so that might not be a strong selling point to him. (Of course, that entry has over 100 citations and looks to be reasonable overall. Thanks for sharing it.) I like how you were so up all on that one study that uses the wrong data for a negative binomial regression, which is a pretty amateurish mistake to do (or you do it on purpose to push an agenda). So, like I said, are you going to respond why that study used rate data instead of count data? Are you referring to MLL's post? This one? + Show Spoiler +On February 20 2018 07:49 MyLovelyLurker wrote:I guess I'm a bit late on the whole 'let's dl wikipedia into a Jupyter notebook and correlate away' thing I was planning to do this morning, and happy that American stats exceptionalism is alive and well. I want to share this study www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov that rigorously establishes correlation between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates within the 50 States. It's based on 2012 data. I didn't see anything fundamentally wrong with its scientific methodology. Interestingly enough, looking at the bibliography shows a grand total of eighty references, many of them pointing in a similar direction. Sharing the discussion / conclusion as : 'To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates within the 50 states. Our study encompassed a 30-year period, with data through 2010, and accounted for 18 possible confounders of the relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide. We found a robust relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates that was not explained by any of these potential confounders and was not sensitive to model specification. Our work expanded on previous studies not only by analyzing more recent data, but also by adjusting for clustering by year and state and controlling for factors, such as the rate of nonfirearm homicides, that likely capture unspecified variables that may be associated with both gun ownership levels and firearm homicide rates. The correlation of gun ownership with firearm homicide rates was substantial. Results from our model showed that a 1-SD difference in the gun ownership proxy measure, FS/S, was associated with a 12.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. All other factors being equal, our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower. Because of our use of a proxy measure for gun ownership, we could not conclude that the magnitude of the association between actual household gun ownership rates and homicide rates was the same. However, in a model that incorporated only survey-derived measures of household gun ownership (for 2001, 2002, and 2004), we found that each 1-SD difference in gun ownership was associated with a 24.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. 'Our study substantially advances previous work by analyzing recent data, examining the longest and most comprehensive panel of state-specific data to date, and accounting for year and state clustering and for a wide range of potential confounders. We found a robust relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates, a finding that held whether firearm ownership was assessed through a proxy or a survey measure, whether state clustering was accounted for by GEEs or by fixed effects, and whether or not gun ownership was lagged, by up to 2 years. The observed relationship was specific to firearm-related homicide. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher levels of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.' What evidence do you have that they used the wrong data? Why do you think that rate data can't be used and that count data must be used? And I don't know what you mean by "all up on that one study". I merely said it looked solid and I was interested in hearing your response to it (although you were temp banned at the time). You just laughed it off though, which I had seen you do before. That was what prompted me to reply to your comment in the first place. Here was our conversation: On February 19 2018 10:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 07:05 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 06:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 05:30 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 05:19 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 04:00 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 02:58 ragnasaur wrote:
Those graphs are dumb. USA is a first world country & the comparative countries like Jamacia and Honduras are third world.
Apples & Oranges That is my exact point. You and I can throw any graph out there, without actually controlling for several variables you don't get an accurate picture But your response to a graph that *did* control for that variable (OECD countries) was a graph that was purposely less accurate and *didn't* control for it. Those two graphs are not both equally inaccurate, and just because you can find a bad graph doesn't mean the good graph should be ignored. The fact that you really think that OECD graph is actually an accurate representative and can be used as evidence for correlation between number of firearms and firearm related violence is laughable at best. The author himself said that you cannot use his graphs as evidence for anything because the dude got his fucking statistics from wikipedia.There's a MUCH stronger correlation of income disparity and poverty with firearm related violence more than anything, but no one wants to talk about that. It's all about guns bro. So now, well sourced encyclopedias aren't good enough references? You realize that "lol Wikipedia" wasn't even a valid rebuttal a decade ago, right? I mean, it's fine to discuss additional variables one should control for when having this discussion, but you're acting really smug for a person invoking strawman graphs and dismissing sources that are likely to be legitimate. Are you seriously trying to use outdated data that doesn't control for various different variables as a reliable source to claim that the data shown shows a strong correlation? "Well Sourced" lmao.Wikipedia 'likely to be legitimate' Sometimes I wonder if you guys actually graduated from a university and were taught basic scientific method or you are just talking out of your own ass. User was temp banned for this post. This is the last post I'll make about sourcing, as I see you're temp banned and I'm not sure if it borders on off-topic, but encyclopedias are generally good starting points for when people want to start researching topics, since they often times have an extensive bibliography for more information. And Wikipedia is no different, in that most long entries have dozens- if not hundreds- of works that are cited, and you'll immediately know if any pages aren't well-sourced. Keep in mind that it was established back in 2005 that Wikipedia's accuracy was comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica's ( https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ ) and Wikipedia has only become more reliable over the past 13 years (despite the taboo that comes with public editors). When doing real research, of course you're going to double-check your sources against other sources, but starting at a Wiki entry for basic overviews and looking through the bibliography is actually a pretty good informational springboard. In other words, it's completely inappropriate to automatically dismiss statements just because they exist on Wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm well aware of the mathematics and statistics references you're making (e.g., correlation), considering I teach high school and college math and statistics. You're not the only one who understands confounding variables. And I'm trying to have a dialogue with you- not get into a dick-swinging contest. The reason I had responded in the first place to your rebuttal of someone else's post was that you had tried refuting a study that attempted to control for certain variables with your own graph that specifically didn't, and you tried saying that since you found a meaningless graph, that someone else's graph was automatically equally meaningless. I found that to be disingenuous, along with your "lol Wiki is auto-wrong and anyone who uses Wiki is stupid" philosophy, and then other people ended up citing even more studies. I don't feel like your one-liner dismissive responses to some of these studies are really all that convincing, and calling people "amateurish" or saying that you are "talking out of your own ass" isn't really strengthening your arguments. firearm bans had no discernible effect on total homicide rates. This statement that you made to ticklishmusic is controversial, as there is plenty of research that disagrees with your claim: We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49: 985-88.
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ The correlations here seem to indicate: 1. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of gun deaths; 2. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of overall deaths; 3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun). You claim to teach statistics and understand statistics but don't know that Negative Binomial Regression Models are utilized for modeling count variables? Bro, I didn't even major in statistics and I know that. You would pretty much never utilize Negative Binomial Regression Models for rates, which is exactly what that study does. You would utilize a poisson regression model if you were using rate data, but the study doesn't do that on purpose because it would blow up their claims. There are two things in here that I'd like to contest, "bro". 1. Conversions exist between counts and rates, so just because one starts with a negative binomial regression model doesn't mean the data can't be interpreted either in terms of counts or in terms of rates. Conventionally, yes, NBR is used when you start with counts, although Poissons certainly aren't only used for rates. Furthermore, there are special cases of negative binomial regression models (e.g., Pascal and Polya distributions) that tend to be preferable over Poisson counterparts, as they can be made more accurate by accounting for different means and standard deviations. NBR and Poisson are not mutually exclusive. In fact, here's another example of the same kind of comparative modeling happening, and you'll notice that this source considers both NBR and Poisson to be comparable as count models (i.e., your claim that Poisson = rates is not necessarily true), yet also allows the data to be interpreted as rates: Show nested quote +Also, the negative binomial model, as compared to other count models (i.e., Poisson or zero-inflated models), is assumed the appropriate model. In other words, we assume that the dependent variable is over-dispersed and does not have an excessive number of zeros. The first half of this page interprets the coefficients in terms of negative binomial regression coefficients, and the second half interprets the coefficients in terms of incidence rate ratios. https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/output/negative-binomial-regression/In other words, the study isn't automatically refuted simply because they're using a different model, because you can totally interpret the data in both ways. 2. I'm curious as to what evidence you have that the other model would "blow up their claims". Please elaborate.
1) Conversions weren't used here; they clearly had an agenda and utilized the wrong model. This was not a special case.
2) When you rerun the numbers and actually convert and ensure that you're using count data and not rate data, the graph will look more like this
![[image loading]](https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Screen-Shot-2013-12-08-at-Sunday-December-8-1.22-PM.png)
Which basically shows a pretty normal distribution. Aka their study is a bunch of bullshit.
This is exactly why so many people on the 'other side' of the argument feel like 'your' side wants to take away firearms. You have people go as far as basically fudge the numbers of a study in order to 'prove' their agenda.
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thx DPB, as always i do appreciate the lesson. exactly the thing i wanted to know but didn’t want to research o.o
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On February 23 2018 01:12 brian wrote:
thx DPB, as always i do appreciate the lesson. exactly the thing i wanted to know but didn’t want to research o.o
All good 
On February 23 2018 01:06 superstartran wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 00:43 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 23 2018 00:15 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 22:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 20:48 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 19:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 15:49 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 13:28 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 13:10 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 12:56 superstartran wrote:
[quote]
What if he chose to drive a car through the crowd? What if he got a bomb into that crowd? You're assuming that he stays at the same range if he has a different tool. There are other tools that can be used to kill more people quickly. We saw that happened when someone ran through a crowd with a vehicle.
All evidence that I have seen points to the idea that an assault weapons ban/firearm ban in general does nothing to curtail the homicide rate within a country. Why people keep insisting on one makes no sense to me. Are you familiar with the existence of a continent called Europe? Ever since the firearm bans in UK homicide rates (total homicide not firearm homicide rates) have been essentially the same. But I guess arguing with facts is not a thing anymore. Firearm bans SHOULD have a dramatic effect on homicide rates if we are to believe the 'liberal' side of the argument, especially after a decade. However, the truth is that they have almost no effect on the overall homicide rate within a country. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ A glance at the left side bar (actually, the right one too) suggests that it's not the most neutral of sources. Here's a huge meta analysis/ review of the then-existing research on firearm legislation and correlation with firearm-related injuries. Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically reviewed studies exploring the associations between firearm-related laws and firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries/deaths. We restricted our search to studies published from 1950 to 2014. Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g., background checks) and access to (e.g., safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively. Limitations of studies include challenges inherent to their ecological design, their execution, and the lack of robustness of findings to model specifications. High quality research on the association between the implementation or repeal of firearm legislation (rather than the evaluation of existing laws) and firearm injuries would lead to a better understanding of what interventions are likely to work given local contexts. This information is key to move this field forward and for the development of effective policies that may counteract the burden that firearm injuries pose on populations. Also, a quick look at the Wiki article on UK firearms laws shows a decline in firearms used in crimes as well as firearm-caused fatalities, even without adjustment per capita for population growth. superstartran thinks Wiki info is pretty much the worst ever- his strong reaction to it previously was one of the reasons he was banned in the first place- so that might not be a strong selling point to him. (Of course, that entry has over 100 citations and looks to be reasonable overall. Thanks for sharing it.) I like how you were so up all on that one study that uses the wrong data for a negative binomial regression, which is a pretty amateurish mistake to do (or you do it on purpose to push an agenda). So, like I said, are you going to respond why that study used rate data instead of count data? Are you referring to MLL's post? This one? + Show Spoiler +On February 20 2018 07:49 MyLovelyLurker wrote:I guess I'm a bit late on the whole 'let's dl wikipedia into a Jupyter notebook and correlate away' thing I was planning to do this morning, and happy that American stats exceptionalism is alive and well. I want to share this study www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov that rigorously establishes correlation between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates within the 50 States. It's based on 2012 data. I didn't see anything fundamentally wrong with its scientific methodology. Interestingly enough, looking at the bibliography shows a grand total of eighty references, many of them pointing in a similar direction. Sharing the discussion / conclusion as : 'To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates within the 50 states. Our study encompassed a 30-year period, with data through 2010, and accounted for 18 possible confounders of the relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide. We found a robust relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates that was not explained by any of these potential confounders and was not sensitive to model specification. Our work expanded on previous studies not only by analyzing more recent data, but also by adjusting for clustering by year and state and controlling for factors, such as the rate of nonfirearm homicides, that likely capture unspecified variables that may be associated with both gun ownership levels and firearm homicide rates. The correlation of gun ownership with firearm homicide rates was substantial. Results from our model showed that a 1-SD difference in the gun ownership proxy measure, FS/S, was associated with a 12.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. All other factors being equal, our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower. Because of our use of a proxy measure for gun ownership, we could not conclude that the magnitude of the association between actual household gun ownership rates and homicide rates was the same. However, in a model that incorporated only survey-derived measures of household gun ownership (for 2001, 2002, and 2004), we found that each 1-SD difference in gun ownership was associated with a 24.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. 'Our study substantially advances previous work by analyzing recent data, examining the longest and most comprehensive panel of state-specific data to date, and accounting for year and state clustering and for a wide range of potential confounders. We found a robust relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates, a finding that held whether firearm ownership was assessed through a proxy or a survey measure, whether state clustering was accounted for by GEEs or by fixed effects, and whether or not gun ownership was lagged, by up to 2 years. The observed relationship was specific to firearm-related homicide. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher levels of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.' What evidence do you have that they used the wrong data? Why do you think that rate data can't be used and that count data must be used? And I don't know what you mean by "all up on that one study". I merely said it looked solid and I was interested in hearing your response to it (although you were temp banned at the time). You just laughed it off though, which I had seen you do before. That was what prompted me to reply to your comment in the first place. Here was our conversation: On February 19 2018 10:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 07:05 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 06:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 05:30 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 05:19 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 04:00 superstartran wrote:
[quote]
That is my exact point. You and I can throw any graph out there, without actually controlling for several variables you don't get an accurate picture But your response to a graph that *did* control for that variable (OECD countries) was a graph that was purposely less accurate and *didn't* control for it. Those two graphs are not both equally inaccurate, and just because you can find a bad graph doesn't mean the good graph should be ignored. The fact that you really think that OECD graph is actually an accurate representative and can be used as evidence for correlation between number of firearms and firearm related violence is laughable at best. The author himself said that you cannot use his graphs as evidence for anything because the dude got his fucking statistics from wikipedia.There's a MUCH stronger correlation of income disparity and poverty with firearm related violence more than anything, but no one wants to talk about that. It's all about guns bro. So now, well sourced encyclopedias aren't good enough references? You realize that "lol Wikipedia" wasn't even a valid rebuttal a decade ago, right? I mean, it's fine to discuss additional variables one should control for when having this discussion, but you're acting really smug for a person invoking strawman graphs and dismissing sources that are likely to be legitimate. Are you seriously trying to use outdated data that doesn't control for various different variables as a reliable source to claim that the data shown shows a strong correlation? "Well Sourced" lmao.Wikipedia 'likely to be legitimate' Sometimes I wonder if you guys actually graduated from a university and were taught basic scientific method or you are just talking out of your own ass. User was temp banned for this post. This is the last post I'll make about sourcing, as I see you're temp banned and I'm not sure if it borders on off-topic, but encyclopedias are generally good starting points for when people want to start researching topics, since they often times have an extensive bibliography for more information. And Wikipedia is no different, in that most long entries have dozens- if not hundreds- of works that are cited, and you'll immediately know if any pages aren't well-sourced. Keep in mind that it was established back in 2005 that Wikipedia's accuracy was comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica's ( https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ ) and Wikipedia has only become more reliable over the past 13 years (despite the taboo that comes with public editors). When doing real research, of course you're going to double-check your sources against other sources, but starting at a Wiki entry for basic overviews and looking through the bibliography is actually a pretty good informational springboard. In other words, it's completely inappropriate to automatically dismiss statements just because they exist on Wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm well aware of the mathematics and statistics references you're making (e.g., correlation), considering I teach high school and college math and statistics. You're not the only one who understands confounding variables. And I'm trying to have a dialogue with you- not get into a dick-swinging contest. The reason I had responded in the first place to your rebuttal of someone else's post was that you had tried refuting a study that attempted to control for certain variables with your own graph that specifically didn't, and you tried saying that since you found a meaningless graph, that someone else's graph was automatically equally meaningless. I found that to be disingenuous, along with your "lol Wiki is auto-wrong and anyone who uses Wiki is stupid" philosophy, and then other people ended up citing even more studies. I don't feel like your one-liner dismissive responses to some of these studies are really all that convincing, and calling people "amateurish" or saying that you are "talking out of your own ass" isn't really strengthening your arguments. firearm bans had no discernible effect on total homicide rates. This statement that you made to ticklishmusic is controversial, as there is plenty of research that disagrees with your claim: We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49: 985-88.
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ The correlations here seem to indicate: 1. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of gun deaths; 2. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of overall deaths; 3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun). You claim to teach statistics and understand statistics but don't know that Negative Binomial Regression Models are utilized for modeling count variables? Bro, I didn't even major in statistics and I know that. You would pretty much never utilize Negative Binomial Regression Models for rates, which is exactly what that study does. You would utilize a poisson regression model if you were using rate data, but the study doesn't do that on purpose because it would blow up their claims. There are two things in here that I'd like to contest, "bro". 1. Conversions exist between counts and rates, so just because one starts with a negative binomial regression model doesn't mean the data can't be interpreted either in terms of counts or in terms of rates. Conventionally, yes, NBR is used when you start with counts, although Poissons certainly aren't only used for rates. Furthermore, there are special cases of negative binomial regression models (e.g., Pascal and Polya distributions) that tend to be preferable over Poisson counterparts, as they can be made more accurate by accounting for different means and standard deviations. NBR and Poisson are not mutually exclusive. In fact, here's another example of the same kind of comparative modeling happening, and you'll notice that this source considers both NBR and Poisson to be comparable as count models (i.e., your claim that Poisson = rates is not necessarily true), yet also allows the data to be interpreted as rates: Also, the negative binomial model, as compared to other count models (i.e., Poisson or zero-inflated models), is assumed the appropriate model. In other words, we assume that the dependent variable is over-dispersed and does not have an excessive number of zeros. The first half of this page interprets the coefficients in terms of negative binomial regression coefficients, and the second half interprets the coefficients in terms of incidence rate ratios. https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/output/negative-binomial-regression/In other words, the study isn't automatically refuted simply because they're using a different model, because you can totally interpret the data in both ways. 2. I'm curious as to what evidence you have that the other model would "blow up their claims". Please elaborate. 1) Conversions weren't used here; they clearly had an agenda and utilized the wrong model. This was not a special case. 2) When you rerun the numbers and actually convert and ensure that you're using count data and not rate data, the graph will look more like this Which basically shows a pretty normal distribution. Aka their study is a bunch of bullshit.
1. I don't think we can necessarily assume that they didn't use conversions, or that they were biased in their research/ had an agenda, or that they utilized the wrong model. Also, if you wanted to try to run a Poisson on the data instead of NBR, you'd still need to do the conversions. Do you still prefer Poisson or a different model, or do you think that NBR could still work?
2. How are the numbers being rerun, exactly? What does that even mean? What model? NBR? Poisson? Another model? For me to trust that graph of yours (not "yours" per se, but this graph from crimeresearch.org that you're showing), I would need more context than just a diagonal trend line to know that this graph is not just "a bunch of bullshit".
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On February 23 2018 01:16 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 01:12 brian wrote:
thx DPB, as always i do appreciate the lesson. exactly the thing i wanted to know but didn’t want to research o.o All good Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 01:06 superstartran wrote:On February 23 2018 00:43 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 23 2018 00:15 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 22:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 20:48 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 19:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 15:49 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 13:28 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 13:10 ticklishmusic wrote:
[quote]
Are you familiar with the existence of a continent called Europe? Ever since the firearm bans in UK homicide rates (total homicide not firearm homicide rates) have been essentially the same. But I guess arguing with facts is not a thing anymore. Firearm bans SHOULD have a dramatic effect on homicide rates if we are to believe the 'liberal' side of the argument, especially after a decade. However, the truth is that they have almost no effect on the overall homicide rate within a country. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ A glance at the left side bar (actually, the right one too) suggests that it's not the most neutral of sources. Here's a huge meta analysis/ review of the then-existing research on firearm legislation and correlation with firearm-related injuries. Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically reviewed studies exploring the associations between firearm-related laws and firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries/deaths. We restricted our search to studies published from 1950 to 2014. Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g., background checks) and access to (e.g., safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively. Limitations of studies include challenges inherent to their ecological design, their execution, and the lack of robustness of findings to model specifications. High quality research on the association between the implementation or repeal of firearm legislation (rather than the evaluation of existing laws) and firearm injuries would lead to a better understanding of what interventions are likely to work given local contexts. This information is key to move this field forward and for the development of effective policies that may counteract the burden that firearm injuries pose on populations. Also, a quick look at the Wiki article on UK firearms laws shows a decline in firearms used in crimes as well as firearm-caused fatalities, even without adjustment per capita for population growth. superstartran thinks Wiki info is pretty much the worst ever- his strong reaction to it previously was one of the reasons he was banned in the first place- so that might not be a strong selling point to him. (Of course, that entry has over 100 citations and looks to be reasonable overall. Thanks for sharing it.) I like how you were so up all on that one study that uses the wrong data for a negative binomial regression, which is a pretty amateurish mistake to do (or you do it on purpose to push an agenda). So, like I said, are you going to respond why that study used rate data instead of count data? Are you referring to MLL's post? This one? + Show Spoiler +On February 20 2018 07:49 MyLovelyLurker wrote:I guess I'm a bit late on the whole 'let's dl wikipedia into a Jupyter notebook and correlate away' thing I was planning to do this morning, and happy that American stats exceptionalism is alive and well. I want to share this study www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov that rigorously establishes correlation between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates within the 50 States. It's based on 2012 data. I didn't see anything fundamentally wrong with its scientific methodology. Interestingly enough, looking at the bibliography shows a grand total of eighty references, many of them pointing in a similar direction. Sharing the discussion / conclusion as : 'To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates within the 50 states. Our study encompassed a 30-year period, with data through 2010, and accounted for 18 possible confounders of the relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide. We found a robust relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates that was not explained by any of these potential confounders and was not sensitive to model specification. Our work expanded on previous studies not only by analyzing more recent data, but also by adjusting for clustering by year and state and controlling for factors, such as the rate of nonfirearm homicides, that likely capture unspecified variables that may be associated with both gun ownership levels and firearm homicide rates. The correlation of gun ownership with firearm homicide rates was substantial. Results from our model showed that a 1-SD difference in the gun ownership proxy measure, FS/S, was associated with a 12.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. All other factors being equal, our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower. Because of our use of a proxy measure for gun ownership, we could not conclude that the magnitude of the association between actual household gun ownership rates and homicide rates was the same. However, in a model that incorporated only survey-derived measures of household gun ownership (for 2001, 2002, and 2004), we found that each 1-SD difference in gun ownership was associated with a 24.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. 'Our study substantially advances previous work by analyzing recent data, examining the longest and most comprehensive panel of state-specific data to date, and accounting for year and state clustering and for a wide range of potential confounders. We found a robust relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates, a finding that held whether firearm ownership was assessed through a proxy or a survey measure, whether state clustering was accounted for by GEEs or by fixed effects, and whether or not gun ownership was lagged, by up to 2 years. The observed relationship was specific to firearm-related homicide. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher levels of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.' What evidence do you have that they used the wrong data? Why do you think that rate data can't be used and that count data must be used? And I don't know what you mean by "all up on that one study". I merely said it looked solid and I was interested in hearing your response to it (although you were temp banned at the time). You just laughed it off though, which I had seen you do before. That was what prompted me to reply to your comment in the first place. Here was our conversation: On February 19 2018 10:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 07:05 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 06:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 05:30 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 05:19 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
[quote]
But your response to a graph that *did* control for that variable (OECD countries) was a graph that was purposely less accurate and *didn't* control for it. Those two graphs are not both equally inaccurate, and just because you can find a bad graph doesn't mean the good graph should be ignored. The fact that you really think that OECD graph is actually an accurate representative and can be used as evidence for correlation between number of firearms and firearm related violence is laughable at best. The author himself said that you cannot use his graphs as evidence for anything because the dude got his fucking statistics from wikipedia.There's a MUCH stronger correlation of income disparity and poverty with firearm related violence more than anything, but no one wants to talk about that. It's all about guns bro. So now, well sourced encyclopedias aren't good enough references? You realize that "lol Wikipedia" wasn't even a valid rebuttal a decade ago, right? I mean, it's fine to discuss additional variables one should control for when having this discussion, but you're acting really smug for a person invoking strawman graphs and dismissing sources that are likely to be legitimate. Are you seriously trying to use outdated data that doesn't control for various different variables as a reliable source to claim that the data shown shows a strong correlation? "Well Sourced" lmao.Wikipedia 'likely to be legitimate' Sometimes I wonder if you guys actually graduated from a university and were taught basic scientific method or you are just talking out of your own ass. User was temp banned for this post. This is the last post I'll make about sourcing, as I see you're temp banned and I'm not sure if it borders on off-topic, but encyclopedias are generally good starting points for when people want to start researching topics, since they often times have an extensive bibliography for more information. And Wikipedia is no different, in that most long entries have dozens- if not hundreds- of works that are cited, and you'll immediately know if any pages aren't well-sourced. Keep in mind that it was established back in 2005 that Wikipedia's accuracy was comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica's ( https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ ) and Wikipedia has only become more reliable over the past 13 years (despite the taboo that comes with public editors). When doing real research, of course you're going to double-check your sources against other sources, but starting at a Wiki entry for basic overviews and looking through the bibliography is actually a pretty good informational springboard. In other words, it's completely inappropriate to automatically dismiss statements just because they exist on Wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm well aware of the mathematics and statistics references you're making (e.g., correlation), considering I teach high school and college math and statistics. You're not the only one who understands confounding variables. And I'm trying to have a dialogue with you- not get into a dick-swinging contest. The reason I had responded in the first place to your rebuttal of someone else's post was that you had tried refuting a study that attempted to control for certain variables with your own graph that specifically didn't, and you tried saying that since you found a meaningless graph, that someone else's graph was automatically equally meaningless. I found that to be disingenuous, along with your "lol Wiki is auto-wrong and anyone who uses Wiki is stupid" philosophy, and then other people ended up citing even more studies. I don't feel like your one-liner dismissive responses to some of these studies are really all that convincing, and calling people "amateurish" or saying that you are "talking out of your own ass" isn't really strengthening your arguments. firearm bans had no discernible effect on total homicide rates. This statement that you made to ticklishmusic is controversial, as there is plenty of research that disagrees with your claim: We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49: 985-88.
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ The correlations here seem to indicate: 1. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of gun deaths; 2. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of overall deaths; 3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun). You claim to teach statistics and understand statistics but don't know that Negative Binomial Regression Models are utilized for modeling count variables? Bro, I didn't even major in statistics and I know that. You would pretty much never utilize Negative Binomial Regression Models for rates, which is exactly what that study does. You would utilize a poisson regression model if you were using rate data, but the study doesn't do that on purpose because it would blow up their claims. There are two things in here that I'd like to contest, "bro". 1. Conversions exist between counts and rates, so just because one starts with a negative binomial regression model doesn't mean the data can't be interpreted either in terms of counts or in terms of rates. Conventionally, yes, NBR is used when you start with counts, although Poissons certainly aren't only used for rates. Furthermore, there are special cases of negative binomial regression models (e.g., Pascal and Polya distributions) that tend to be preferable over Poisson counterparts, as they can be made more accurate by accounting for different means and standard deviations. NBR and Poisson are not mutually exclusive. In fact, here's another example of the same kind of comparative modeling happening, and you'll notice that this source considers both NBR and Poisson to be comparable as count models (i.e., your claim that Poisson = rates is not necessarily true), yet also allows the data to be interpreted as rates: Also, the negative binomial model, as compared to other count models (i.e., Poisson or zero-inflated models), is assumed the appropriate model. In other words, we assume that the dependent variable is over-dispersed and does not have an excessive number of zeros. The first half of this page interprets the coefficients in terms of negative binomial regression coefficients, and the second half interprets the coefficients in terms of incidence rate ratios. https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/output/negative-binomial-regression/In other words, the study isn't automatically refuted simply because they're using a different model, because you can totally interpret the data in both ways. 2. I'm curious as to what evidence you have that the other model would "blow up their claims". Please elaborate. 1) Conversions weren't used here; they clearly had an agenda and utilized the wrong model. This was not a special case. 2) When you rerun the numbers and actually convert and ensure that you're using count data and not rate data, the graph will look more like this Which basically shows a pretty normal distribution. Aka their study is a bunch of bullshit. 1. I don't think we can necessarily assume that they didn't use conversions, or that they were biased in their research/ had an agenda, or that they utilized the wrong model. Also, if you wanted to try to run a Poisson on the data instead of NBR, you'd still need to do the conversions. Do you still prefer Poisson or a different model, or do you think that NBR could still work? 2. How are the numbers being rerun, exactly? What does that even mean? What model? NBR? Poisson? Another model? For me to trust that graph of yours (not "yours" per se, but this graph from crimeresearch.org that you're showing), I would need more context than just a diagonal trend line to know that this graph is not just "a bunch of bullshit".
The math is done here since I'm too lazy to redo it myself; regardless of whether you trust the source or not, if you actually know the math it's done properly and makes sense. Which is exactly why I don't trust that study at all; there's no reason for them to NOT convert, but they don't and use rate data. It's not like this was any kind of special case.
https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/problems-with-public-health-research-michael-siegel-craig-ross-and-charles-king-the-relationship-between-gun-ownership-and-firearm-homicide-rates-in-the-united-states-1981-2010-ajph/
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The idea of having (armed!) security in a school is absurd to me..
yes yes I know I'm not from the US, so I cannot understand, but isn't there a point where you step back and you realize that something is broken in the system?
I'm not claiming anything about gun control or gun laws, I know nothing about guns and I'm very happy that I don't - and that I have never even seen a gun in ~30 years of life - but you clearly have a problem!
It does not matter what's the best weapon to defend yourself against home intruder, or what is the exact definition of 'assault rifle' ... I understand you come from a different perspective, but the fact that your schools are frequently theater of shootings (shootings! I honestly find hard to picture how this can happen, how is it possible that a teenager has even the idea of picking up a gun and shooting his classmates) is so sick that I don't understand how are you discussing about how correct it is to use a binomial model or not ...
I guess part of the disconnect comes from the fact that you think of the US as a 'western culture' country, but the level of separation compared to european culture is way larger than one is lead to believe. Reading this thread is actually eye opening for me (I was probably naive myself, for sure ...)
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Security would be one thing (still ridiculous that people feel this is a good idea), arming teachers is another level of delusion.
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On February 23 2018 02:16 VHbb wrote:
The idea of having (armed!) security in a school is absurd to me..
yes yes I know I'm not from the US, so I cannot understand, but isn't there a point where you step back and you realize that something is broken in the system?
I'm not claiming anything about gun control or gun laws, I know nothing about guns and I'm very happy that I don't - and that I have never even seen a gun in ~30 years of life - but you clearly have a problem!
It does not matter what's the best weapon to defend yourself against home intruder, or what is the exact definition of 'assault rifle' ... I understand you come from a different perspective, but the fact that your schools are frequently theater of shootings (shootings! I honestly find hard to picture how this can happen, how is it possible that a teenager has even the idea of picking up a gun and shooting his classmates) is so sick that I don't understand how are you discussing about how correct it is to use a binomial model or not ...
I guess part of the disconnect comes from the fact that you think of the US as a 'western culture' country, but the level of separation compared to european culture is way larger than one is lead to believe. Reading this thread is actually eye opening for me (I was probably naive myself, for sure ...)
I very much agree with this post. Many people like to think that Europe and the US are parts of the came cultural circle, but once you start to follow what's happening across the great water you can see that it's like a whole different world out there. Gun culture, healthcare, private prison industry, the political system, etc., each of these aspects seem very outlandish for an European at a closer look.
I, for one, can understand why someone would like to own a gun for hunting or personal defence, and I have numerous friends who like to go to a shoting range just for the fun of it. But having literally tens of millions of guns in private hands spread over the nation, and people owning dozens of different guns, some of which could easily be considered military-grade (not to mention things like high-capacity clips or non-standard ammo types) just for the sake of it, is a very alien concept to me.
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On February 23 2018 01:23 superstartran wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 01:16 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 23 2018 01:12 brian wrote:
thx DPB, as always i do appreciate the lesson. exactly the thing i wanted to know but didn’t want to research o.o All good On February 23 2018 01:06 superstartran wrote:On February 23 2018 00:43 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 23 2018 00:15 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 22:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 20:48 superstartran wrote:On February 22 2018 19:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 22 2018 15:49 ticklishmusic wrote:On February 22 2018 13:28 superstartran wrote:[quote] Ever since the firearm bans in UK homicide rates (total homicide not firearm homicide rates) have been essentially the same. But I guess arguing with facts is not a thing anymore. Firearm bans SHOULD have a dramatic effect on homicide rates if we are to believe the 'liberal' side of the argument, especially after a decade. However, the truth is that they have almost no effect on the overall homicide rate within a country. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ A glance at the left side bar (actually, the right one too) suggests that it's not the most neutral of sources. Here's a huge meta analysis/ review of the then-existing research on firearm legislation and correlation with firearm-related injuries. Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically reviewed studies exploring the associations between firearm-related laws and firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries/deaths. We restricted our search to studies published from 1950 to 2014. Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g., background checks) and access to (e.g., safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively. Limitations of studies include challenges inherent to their ecological design, their execution, and the lack of robustness of findings to model specifications. High quality research on the association between the implementation or repeal of firearm legislation (rather than the evaluation of existing laws) and firearm injuries would lead to a better understanding of what interventions are likely to work given local contexts. This information is key to move this field forward and for the development of effective policies that may counteract the burden that firearm injuries pose on populations. Also, a quick look at the Wiki article on UK firearms laws shows a decline in firearms used in crimes as well as firearm-caused fatalities, even without adjustment per capita for population growth. superstartran thinks Wiki info is pretty much the worst ever- his strong reaction to it previously was one of the reasons he was banned in the first place- so that might not be a strong selling point to him. (Of course, that entry has over 100 citations and looks to be reasonable overall. Thanks for sharing it.) I like how you were so up all on that one study that uses the wrong data for a negative binomial regression, which is a pretty amateurish mistake to do (or you do it on purpose to push an agenda). So, like I said, are you going to respond why that study used rate data instead of count data? Are you referring to MLL's post? This one? + Show Spoiler +On February 20 2018 07:49 MyLovelyLurker wrote:I guess I'm a bit late on the whole 'let's dl wikipedia into a Jupyter notebook and correlate away' thing I was planning to do this morning, and happy that American stats exceptionalism is alive and well. I want to share this study www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov that rigorously establishes correlation between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates within the 50 States. It's based on 2012 data. I didn't see anything fundamentally wrong with its scientific methodology. Interestingly enough, looking at the bibliography shows a grand total of eighty references, many of them pointing in a similar direction. Sharing the discussion / conclusion as : 'To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates within the 50 states. Our study encompassed a 30-year period, with data through 2010, and accounted for 18 possible confounders of the relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide. We found a robust relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates that was not explained by any of these potential confounders and was not sensitive to model specification. Our work expanded on previous studies not only by analyzing more recent data, but also by adjusting for clustering by year and state and controlling for factors, such as the rate of nonfirearm homicides, that likely capture unspecified variables that may be associated with both gun ownership levels and firearm homicide rates. The correlation of gun ownership with firearm homicide rates was substantial. Results from our model showed that a 1-SD difference in the gun ownership proxy measure, FS/S, was associated with a 12.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. All other factors being equal, our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower. Because of our use of a proxy measure for gun ownership, we could not conclude that the magnitude of the association between actual household gun ownership rates and homicide rates was the same. However, in a model that incorporated only survey-derived measures of household gun ownership (for 2001, 2002, and 2004), we found that each 1-SD difference in gun ownership was associated with a 24.9% difference in firearm homicide rates. 'Our study substantially advances previous work by analyzing recent data, examining the longest and most comprehensive panel of state-specific data to date, and accounting for year and state clustering and for a wide range of potential confounders. We found a robust relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates, a finding that held whether firearm ownership was assessed through a proxy or a survey measure, whether state clustering was accounted for by GEEs or by fixed effects, and whether or not gun ownership was lagged, by up to 2 years. The observed relationship was specific to firearm-related homicide. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher levels of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.' What evidence do you have that they used the wrong data? Why do you think that rate data can't be used and that count data must be used? And I don't know what you mean by "all up on that one study". I merely said it looked solid and I was interested in hearing your response to it (although you were temp banned at the time). You just laughed it off though, which I had seen you do before. That was what prompted me to reply to your comment in the first place. Here was our conversation: On February 19 2018 10:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 07:05 superstartran wrote:On February 19 2018 06:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 19 2018 05:30 superstartran wrote:
[quote]
The fact that you really think that OECD graph is actually an accurate representative and can be used as evidence for correlation between number of firearms and firearm related violence is laughable at best. The author himself said that you cannot use his graphs as evidence for anything because the dude got his fucking statistics from wikipedia.
There's a MUCH stronger correlation of income disparity and poverty with firearm related violence more than anything, but no one wants to talk about that. It's all about guns bro. So now, well sourced encyclopedias aren't good enough references? You realize that "lol Wikipedia" wasn't even a valid rebuttal a decade ago, right? I mean, it's fine to discuss additional variables one should control for when having this discussion, but you're acting really smug for a person invoking strawman graphs and dismissing sources that are likely to be legitimate. Are you seriously trying to use outdated data that doesn't control for various different variables as a reliable source to claim that the data shown shows a strong correlation? "Well Sourced" lmao.Wikipedia 'likely to be legitimate' Sometimes I wonder if you guys actually graduated from a university and were taught basic scientific method or you are just talking out of your own ass. User was temp banned for this post. This is the last post I'll make about sourcing, as I see you're temp banned and I'm not sure if it borders on off-topic, but encyclopedias are generally good starting points for when people want to start researching topics, since they often times have an extensive bibliography for more information. And Wikipedia is no different, in that most long entries have dozens- if not hundreds- of works that are cited, and you'll immediately know if any pages aren't well-sourced. Keep in mind that it was established back in 2005 that Wikipedia's accuracy was comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica's ( https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ ) and Wikipedia has only become more reliable over the past 13 years (despite the taboo that comes with public editors). When doing real research, of course you're going to double-check your sources against other sources, but starting at a Wiki entry for basic overviews and looking through the bibliography is actually a pretty good informational springboard. In other words, it's completely inappropriate to automatically dismiss statements just because they exist on Wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm well aware of the mathematics and statistics references you're making (e.g., correlation), considering I teach high school and college math and statistics. You're not the only one who understands confounding variables. And I'm trying to have a dialogue with you- not get into a dick-swinging contest. The reason I had responded in the first place to your rebuttal of someone else's post was that you had tried refuting a study that attempted to control for certain variables with your own graph that specifically didn't, and you tried saying that since you found a meaningless graph, that someone else's graph was automatically equally meaningless. I found that to be disingenuous, along with your "lol Wiki is auto-wrong and anyone who uses Wiki is stupid" philosophy, and then other people ended up citing even more studies. I don't feel like your one-liner dismissive responses to some of these studies are really all that convincing, and calling people "amateurish" or saying that you are "talking out of your own ass" isn't really strengthening your arguments. firearm bans had no discernible effect on total homicide rates. This statement that you made to ticklishmusic is controversial, as there is plenty of research that disagrees with your claim: We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49: 985-88.
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ The correlations here seem to indicate: 1. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of gun deaths; 2. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of overall deaths; 3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun). You claim to teach statistics and understand statistics but don't know that Negative Binomial Regression Models are utilized for modeling count variables? Bro, I didn't even major in statistics and I know that. You would pretty much never utilize Negative Binomial Regression Models for rates, which is exactly what that study does. You would utilize a poisson regression model if you were using rate data, but the study doesn't do that on purpose because it would blow up their claims. There are two things in here that I'd like to contest, "bro". 1. Conversions exist between counts and rates, so just because one starts with a negative binomial regression model doesn't mean the data can't be interpreted either in terms of counts or in terms of rates. Conventionally, yes, NBR is used when you start with counts, although Poissons certainly aren't only used for rates. Furthermore, there are special cases of negative binomial regression models (e.g., Pascal and Polya distributions) that tend to be preferable over Poisson counterparts, as they can be made more accurate by accounting for different means and standard deviations. NBR and Poisson are not mutually exclusive. In fact, here's another example of the same kind of comparative modeling happening, and you'll notice that this source considers both NBR and Poisson to be comparable as count models (i.e., your claim that Poisson = rates is not necessarily true), yet also allows the data to be interpreted as rates: Also, the negative binomial model, as compared to other count models (i.e., Poisson or zero-inflated models), is assumed the appropriate model. In other words, we assume that the dependent variable is over-dispersed and does not have an excessive number of zeros. The first half of this page interprets the coefficients in terms of negative binomial regression coefficients, and the second half interprets the coefficients in terms of incidence rate ratios. https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/output/negative-binomial-regression/In other words, the study isn't automatically refuted simply because they're using a different model, because you can totally interpret the data in both ways. 2. I'm curious as to what evidence you have that the other model would "blow up their claims". Please elaborate. 1) Conversions weren't used here; they clearly had an agenda and utilized the wrong model. This was not a special case. 2) When you rerun the numbers and actually convert and ensure that you're using count data and not rate data, the graph will look more like this Which basically shows a pretty normal distribution. Aka their study is a bunch of bullshit. 1. I don't think we can necessarily assume that they didn't use conversions, or that they were biased in their research/ had an agenda, or that they utilized the wrong model. Also, if you wanted to try to run a Poisson on the data instead of NBR, you'd still need to do the conversions. Do you still prefer Poisson or a different model, or do you think that NBR could still work? 2. How are the numbers being rerun, exactly? What does that even mean? What model? NBR? Poisson? Another model? For me to trust that graph of yours (not "yours" per se, but this graph from crimeresearch.org that you're showing), I would need more context than just a diagonal trend line to know that this graph is not just "a bunch of bullshit". The math is done here since I'm too lazy to redo it myself; regardless of whether you trust the source or not, if you actually know the math it's done properly and makes sense. Which is exactly why I don't trust that study at all; there's no reason for them to NOT convert, but they don't and use rate data. It's not like this was any kind of special case. https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/problems-with-public-health-research-michael-siegel-craig-ross-and-charles-king-the-relationship-between-gun-ownership-and-firearm-homicide-rates-in-the-united-states-1981-2010-ajph/
Thank you for the link. It provides more context than just the graph, which is helpful when evaluating crimesearch.org's counterpoints, such as:
"The letter I submitted to the journal was rejected, but it is pretty surprising that a count data approach was not used with actual count data and that the regressions didn’t use the most basic controls for panel data: for example, state fixed effects to pick up the average differences across states."
In the study ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/ ), the abstract's method explicitly states "We determined fixed effects for year, accounted for clustering within states with generalized estimating equations, and controlled for potential state-level confounders." Furthermore, throughout the paper, multiple accounts of controlling for confounding variables and variation between (not just within) states are cited, so I disagree with crimesearch.org's claim that "the regressions didn’t use the most basic controls for panel data: for example, state fixed effects to pick up the average differences across states."
Second, in regards to the claim about the count data approach that both you and crimesearch.org were disputing, as well as your suggestion that Poisson would work better (even though both negative binomial regression and Poisson are both conventionally count-based instead of rate-based, and are quite similar, which shows a contradiction between what you and crimesearch.org are saying), the study explicitly justifies why it chose NBR over Poisson or other models:
"Because the outcome variable—the age-adjusted firearm homicide rate—was skewed rather than normally distributed, and because overdispersion was present in the data (the variance greater than the mean), we modeled this outcome with a negative binomial model, following the approach taken in previous studies.34–36,41,55,57,72,73 Estimation of the overdispersion parameter confirmed our choice of a negative binomial model over a Poisson model,74 following Miller et al.34."
In other words, the authors of the study considered Poisson (and surely other various models as well), but realized it wouldn't be as accurate of a model as the negative binomial would be. Why do you think Poisson would be better?
The crimesearch.org author responds to the decision to choose a negative binomial model with "overdispersion (the variance greater than the mean) doesn’t imply the distribution is negative binomial in form", but the study never claimed that this implication is necessary. Using the negative binomial model was the conclusion given the parameters, not the assumption.
Both NBR and Poisson are frequently used to handle overdispersion (as explained in the following two sources), although NBR (the model the study used) is generally a better test than Poisson (the one you want to use):
"Negative binomial regression – Negative binomial regression can be used for over-dispersed count data, that is when the conditional variance exceeds the conditional mean. It can be considered as a generalization of Poisson regression since it has the same mean structure as Poisson regression and it has an extra parameter to model the over-dispersion. If the conditional distribution of the outcome variable is over-dispersed, the confidence intervals for the Negative binomial regression are likely to be narrower as compared to those from a Poisson regression model." https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/dae/negative-binomial-regression/
"Handling Overdispersion with Negative Binomial and Generalized Poisson Regression Models" https://www.casact.org/pubs/forum/07wforum/07w109.pdf
Furthermore, the crimesearch.org author doesn't indicate why we should be "taking the natural log of the rate" to transform the data. Why not square root the data, or invert the data, or conduct a power transformation- those are also common data transformation options, along with taking the logarithm. What the crimesearch.org author has shown is that if you transform the data in a certain manner, associations are removed. That doesn't mean that transformation is more accurate though. The author claims that he did it because no conversions to count data were made, but- again- I see no evidence of such a claim, nor would his solution necessarily fix the problem.
If you're still dismissive of the study, here's another one that directly addresses your consideration of whether or not a count variable is used- and it's posted by the same crimesearch.org website you've been citing:
http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-Ownership-and-Violent-Crime.pdf
"The number of each specific crime type reported for each state in each year of the study was obtained. A negative binomial regression model was estimated, with the state-level count of criminal offenses as the dependent variable and the log of the population values as the offset (coefficient constrained to 1). A negative binomial model was chosen to account for the overdispersion in the outcome variable, a condition that can lead to underestimated standard errors in Poisson models. To verify the model selection, a likelihood ratio test of the overdispersion parameter, α, was performed. Evidence to reject the null hypothesis that α¼0 indicates that the negative binomial model is preferred over Poisson. For each of the four models (outcomes of assault, robbery, homicide, and homicide with a firearm), the likelihood ratio test supported the use of negative binomial models over Poisson models (all p-values o0.001)."
"Higher levels of firearm ownership were associated with higher levels of firearm assault and firearm robbery. There was also a significant association between firearm ownership and firearm homicide, as well as overall homicide."
"The findings do not support the hypothesis that higher population firearm ownership rates reduce firearm-associated criminal perpetration. On the contrary, evidence shows that states with higher levels of firearm ownership have an increased risk for violent crimes perpetrated with a firearm. Public health stakeholders should consider the outcomes associated with private firearm ownership."
And, again:
We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49: 985-88.
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/
The correlations here seem to indicate:
1. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of gun deaths;
2. As the number of guns increases, so does the number of overall deaths;
3. The number of guns doesn't seem to affect the number of non-firearm deaths (i.e., deaths due to other weapons aren't increasing as the number of guns changes, disputing the idea that people will just kill with other weapons if they can't get their hands on a gun).
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On February 23 2018 02:16 VHbb wrote:
The idea of having (armed!) security in a school is absurd to me..
yes yes I know I'm not from the US, so I cannot understand, but isn't there a point where you step back and you realize that something is broken in the system?
I'm not claiming anything about gun control or gun laws, I know nothing about guns and I'm very happy that I don't - and that I have never even seen a gun in ~30 years of life - but you clearly have a problem!
It does not matter what's the best weapon to defend yourself against home intruder, or what is the exact definition of 'assault rifle' ... I understand you come from a different perspective, but the fact that your schools are frequently theater of shootings (shootings! I honestly find hard to picture how this can happen, how is it possible that a teenager has even the idea of picking up a gun and shooting his classmates) is so sick that I don't understand how are you discussing about how correct it is to use a binomial model or not ...
I guess part of the disconnect comes from the fact that you think of the US as a 'western culture' country, but the level of separation compared to european culture is way larger than one is lead to believe. Reading this thread is actually eye opening for me (I was probably naive myself, for sure ...)
Well, since a few o fthe more dangerous US schools have metal detectors, the notion of armed guards wouldn't exactly be shocking.
I'm guessing you find the notion of schools with metal detectors extreme. but there are some bad neighborhoods out there.
discussing the correctness of a binomial model is important though; in order to fix things it helps to understand them.
oh and @poulsen it's hundreds of millions of guns in private US hands, not tens of millions. trivia: US civilians own more guns than all the world's militaries' combined.
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On February 23 2018 02:56 PoulsenB wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 02:16 VHbb wrote:
The idea of having (armed!) security in a school is absurd to me..
yes yes I know I'm not from the US, so I cannot understand, but isn't there a point where you step back and you realize that something is broken in the system?
I'm not claiming anything about gun control or gun laws, I know nothing about guns and I'm very happy that I don't - and that I have never even seen a gun in ~30 years of life - but you clearly have a problem!
It does not matter what's the best weapon to defend yourself against home intruder, or what is the exact definition of 'assault rifle' ... I understand you come from a different perspective, but the fact that your schools are frequently theater of shootings (shootings! I honestly find hard to picture how this can happen, how is it possible that a teenager has even the idea of picking up a gun and shooting his classmates) is so sick that I don't understand how are you discussing about how correct it is to use a binomial model or not ...
I guess part of the disconnect comes from the fact that you think of the US as a 'western culture' country, but the level of separation compared to european culture is way larger than one is lead to believe. Reading this thread is actually eye opening for me (I was probably naive myself, for sure ...) I very much agree with this post. Many people like to think that Europe and the US are parts of the came cultural circle, but once you start to follow what's happening across the great water you can see that it's like a whole different world out there. Gun culture, healthcare, private prison industry, the political system, etc., each of these aspects seem very outlandish for an European at a closer look. I, for one, can understand why someone would like to own a gun for hunting or personal defence, and I have numerous friends who like to go to a shoting range just for the fun of it. But having literally tens of millions of guns in private hands spread over the nation, and people owning dozens of different guns, some of which could easily be considered military-grade (not to mention things like high-capacity clips or non-standard ammo types) just for the sake of it, is a very alien concept to me.
Allow me to say that it is increasingly looking just as absurd to a lot of us too
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On February 23 2018 03:45 zlefin wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 02:16 VHbb wrote:
The idea of having (armed!) security in a school is absurd to me..
yes yes I know I'm not from the US, so I cannot understand, but isn't there a point where you step back and you realize that something is broken in the system?
I'm not claiming anything about gun control or gun laws, I know nothing about guns and I'm very happy that I don't - and that I have never even seen a gun in ~30 years of life - but you clearly have a problem!
It does not matter what's the best weapon to defend yourself against home intruder, or what is the exact definition of 'assault rifle' ... I understand you come from a different perspective, but the fact that your schools are frequently theater of shootings (shootings! I honestly find hard to picture how this can happen, how is it possible that a teenager has even the idea of picking up a gun and shooting his classmates) is so sick that I don't understand how are you discussing about how correct it is to use a binomial model or not ...
I guess part of the disconnect comes from the fact that you think of the US as a 'western culture' country, but the level of separation compared to european culture is way larger than one is lead to believe. Reading this thread is actually eye opening for me (I was probably naive myself, for sure ...) Well, since a few o fthe more dangerous US schools have metal detectors, the notion of armed guards wouldn't exactly be shocking. I'm guessing you find the notion of schools with metal detectors extreme. but there are some bad neighborhoods out there. discussing the correctness of a binomial model is important though; in order to fix things it helps to understand them. oh and @poulsen it's hundreds of millions of guns in private US hands, not tens of millions. trivia: US civilians own more guns than all the world's militaries' combined.
It's really an alien concept to me in some rare cases (I can only recall one) we had police coming in a university where I live, during some student protests, and everyone found that not acceptable: the police cannot enter the university in these cases, and in general schools / universities / campus are *not* a place where there should be security.
This is an other point: what if the students want to organize a (pacific) protest occupying the school, knowing that there are armed security guards there?
The idea of metal detector and campus security or armed guards is just so remote and distant from the way things are here, that it's really hard to grasp why you would need it. I'm not saying you don't, or that I know better, I'm just expressing surprise!
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On February 23 2018 04:08 VHbb wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2018 03:45 zlefin wrote:On February 23 2018 02:16 VHbb wrote:
The idea of having (armed!) security in a school is absurd to me..
yes yes I know I'm not from the US, so I cannot understand, but isn't there a point where you step back and you realize that something is broken in the system?
I'm not claiming anything about gun control or gun laws, I know nothing about guns and I'm very happy that I don't - and that I have never even seen a gun in ~30 years of life - but you clearly have a problem!
It does not matter what's the best weapon to defend yourself against home intruder, or what is the exact definition of 'assault rifle' ... I understand you come from a different perspective, but the fact that your schools are frequently theater of shootings (shootings! I honestly find hard to picture how this can happen, how is it possible that a teenager has even the idea of picking up a gun and shooting his classmates) is so sick that I don't understand how are you discussing about how correct it is to use a binomial model or not ...
I guess part of the disconnect comes from the fact that you think of the US as a 'western culture' country, but the level of separation compared to european culture is way larger than one is lead to believe. Reading this thread is actually eye opening for me (I was probably naive myself, for sure ...) Well, since a few o fthe more dangerous US schools have metal detectors, the notion of armed guards wouldn't exactly be shocking. I'm guessing you find the notion of schools with metal detectors extreme. but there are some bad neighborhoods out there. discussing the correctness of a binomial model is important though; in order to fix things it helps to understand them. oh and @poulsen it's hundreds of millions of guns in private US hands, not tens of millions. trivia: US civilians own more guns than all the world's militaries' combined. It's really an alien concept to me in some rare cases (I can only recall one) we had police coming in a university where I live, during some student protests, and everyone found that not acceptable: the police cannot enter the university in these cases, and in general schools / universities / campus are *not* a place where there should be security. This is an other point: what if the students want to organize a (pacific) protest occupying the school, knowing that there are armed security guards there? The idea of metal detector and campus security or armed guards is just so remote and distant from the way things are here, that it's really hard to grasp why you would need it. I'm not saying you don't, or that I know better, I'm just expressing surprise!
I'd assume armed security guards won't disrupt a peaceful protest. at least no more so than such a protest would be disrupted in general. they have plenty of less lethal weapons/tools for that in general if they choose to use them.
i'd assume the places that have metal detectors are mostly because they're in very dangerous areas. I don't have the exact statistics; but i'd say areas wherein you'd expect several students a year at least to be the victim of an aggravated assault on campus (plus a bunch more off the school property). I can round up some numbers if you want some detail.
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