Then you kick, and kick, and kick...and, maybe it starts, or maybe it backfires, or maybe you've flooded it....
You had to get your timing right or you'd still get your knee in your guts.
I got a good deal on the trade-in.
Well you DO know yer scoots.
Oh I bet you did!
On 8/13/2017 4:21 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:> > Scout, once again you have drowned out common sense with tedium.>
No he hasn't. He's right and you're wrong. You wrote, "To discuss this with any common sense you have to minimize the variables, and look at the countries most similar to the US in ways that relate to economics, education, culture, and to violence itself: Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and a few others. That is, if you're interested in exploring the truth of it rather than defending an ideological case." Then you jump straight to arguing correlation between guns and violence, and totally ignore the very argument you began, which would require you to look for correlations between education and violence, education and violence, culture and violence, etc. Worse, you then imply not just correlation but actual causation between gun ownership and violence, all the while completely ignoring any idea that if you want to examine violence, one thing you should actually examine is the causes of violence. But it's simpler to try to count objects (guns) than explore actual causes and recommend actual solutions, so that's what you limit your sorry-ass argument to.
Nope. Here's what "the gun culture" gets you:
Report: Concealed Carry Permit Holders Are The Most Law-Abiding People In The Country August 10, 2016
The report, written by Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott, notes that it is "very rare for permit holders to violate the law" and compares the crimes committed by permit holders to police officers and the general population. The police committed 103 crimes per 100,000 officers, while the general population committed 3,813 per 100,000 people, 37 times as much as the police crime rate.
And yet, the same metric shows an even lower crime rate for permit holders.
"Combining the data for Florida and Texas data, we find that permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at less than a sixth the rate for police officers," Lott writes. "Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 16.5 per 100,000 officers. Among permit holders in Florida and Texas, the rate is only 2.4 per 100,000.10 That is just 1/7th of the rate for police officers. But there's no need to focus on Texas and Florida ? the data are similar in other states."
The report found that while concealed carry-permits have surged since
1999, the murder rates have declined: < chart omitted > According to the report, the permit holder total surged by 190 percent from 2007-2015, and in that same time period violent crime declined by 18 percent, as well as murder rates by 16 percent. Additionally, "25 states with the highest rates of permit-holding experienced markedly lower rates of murder and violent crime," according to Lott.States that allowed for concealed carry without permits had a 31 percent lower murder rate and 28 percent lower violent crime rate than "the seven jurisdictions with the lowest percentage of permit holders."
The main takeaway from the report: concealed carry permit holders are the most law-abiding group in the country and are a deterrent to crime.
If you look at what I concluded (that correlation sometimes does infer causation), and how I framed it, you'll see what was silly about Scout's absurd correlation examples. I left the answer to the final question open because it was so obvious that it was kind of funny.
And it was this: There is a cross-countries correlation, among similar countries, between having FEW guns in a society and LOW rates of firearms-related murder.
SeaSnake acknowledged it, possibly without realizing what he was doing so, when he replied "Because they use OTHER tools..."
Of course. You can only use a gun if you can get one. So there is a negative-to-negative correletion, or a positive correlation regarding low rates of each, for the simple and obvious reason that you can't kill someone with a gun you don't have. And, as an aside, in the countries we were discussing, low rates of gun ownership largely correspond to low murder rates. The "substitution effect" is a lot lower than 1:1.
In other words, the old "correlation does not infer causation" chestnut is not necessarily true. You have to apply some common sense to the issue to get at the truth of it. When Scout started listing absurd and generally unrelated correlations, I could see that we were going off on one of the byzantine and tedious arguments for which he is famous. I don't have time for it.
So, believe what you want. The negative correlation and causation I described is not arguable if you have the sense that God gave a grape, to borrow an old expression. You can't shoot someone with a gun you don't have.
Boxer smooth - solid choice in every way!
I APPROVE this post!
How would you know?
Well, you certainly have the experience with that.
Had a 72 Norton 750 that I rode from omaha to phoenix in 78 Bought it wrecked in a salvage yard allong with a Triumph front end to put on it It had a Dunstall motor in it When ya twisted the wick the front end came up Basicly a giant dirt bike but no problems on the road Rode it for a couple years in Az and traded it off for a truck
Sadly your conclusion is utterly wrong. Correlations do not imply, infer, suggest, indicate, denote, or otherwise even hint that there is any causality.
As such, you attempt to take a correlation, which you produce by manipulating the data in such a manner as to produce such a correlation, and then using that made up indicator you try to go all out blaming an inanimate object for the actions of people.
Absurd? They are just as valid as yours. Further if you're going to say, and you have, that correlations sometimes infer causation, then you can't claim they are absurd without looking into them further. Oh, but that's right, you dismissed them out of hand because the causality wasn't something you decided existed.
Or more likely you couldn't come up with any answer that wouldn't expose you as a hypocrite or sink your own argument outright.
So us they are similar, particularly among those aspects that cause and drive people to engage in violent crime.
Saying that 3 cars are similar in all aspects because they all have 4 wheels, seats, power steering and are painted red doesn't tell us why one goes 200mph and the other 2 can only go 120mph
You need to look at the factors that impact the issue you're looking at. You aren't doing that.
Then explain Mexico.
Explain Brazil
That's right, you're going to tell us they aren't similar for factors you ignore within your cherry picked comparisons.
Sure, and if the murder rate goes up while the use of guns goes down....is that an improvement?
More people are dead.
Are you going to tell us they are better off?
Sorry, but unless your objective is only to reduce the use of this means, rather than the rate of violent crimes being committed, then substitution effects have to be considered.
And there isn't a country on the fact of the planet where a criminal can't get guns.
After all, look at Mexico. Look at Brazil. All the gun control you would ever want.
< So there is aAh, so their death only matters if they were killed by a gun.
On the flip side of that I might note you can't defend your life with a gun you don't have either.
A lot more people defend themselves with guns than are attacked with guns.
Would you turn them into victims?
Let's keep this simple: Assume a community of people. Remove all of their guns. Now show the correlation between removing guns and the absence of any homicides committed with guns. It is +1.0. That's a perfect correlation.
They may never have killed each other even when they had guns. Each of them may have had a different reason for not committing homicide.
But now you have an absolute, physical reason why they aren't shooting each other. You have *the* absolute cause, regardless of any other causes that may come or go over time. Even if you assumed that no one in that community would intentionally shoot someone else, there is always the possibility that some clown would be showing off his new toy and accidentally kill someone. "Never had an intention" isn't a cause that produces "no homicides." In other words, it's not a sufficient cause. (BTW, don't give me a hard time about an ad absurdum examples; you used several in your own argument.)
And here's the key: A complete lack of guns is absolutely causative AND absolutely predictive. It is first cause, proximate cause and sufficient cause. As long as there are no guns in the community, the lack of firearms-related homicides will hold, absolutely, even if they change their minds and decide they really do want to shoot each other, after all. It is the strong and irreducible cause for them not shooting each other.
This is the reductio adsurdum case that proves "correlation does not imply causation" is not absolute, that it has limits beyond which it is not true. There are many others, and I'm sure we could come up with one that is less absurd, but this one proves the point. Remove guns, and shootings stop.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Only in this case, it's not a fallacy. It describes a physical case with only one possible outcome; it is both accurate and logically valid. Aristotelian logic is limited there, too, as it is in many places.
The reason I find your arguments tedious is, in this case, we're talking about "high correlations" and you introduce anecdotes (like Mexico) without any attempt to show that including it would produce a weak correlation. It probably wouldn't, if you started with a list of countries that are rich, educated, and not at war, weighted for population, and then threw in one outlier that has an outsize problem with warring drug cartels. Brazil is similar.
In real life, comparing relative correlation coefficients is the best tool you have for examining the point. I ran a bunch of them in Excel around ten years ago, when we had this same argument. It's your turn this time. d8-)
And then you may want to get into regression analysis or the Granger causality test, to see why successful hedge funds make billions by ignoring the ordinary (and sophomoric) assumptions about correlation and causality, and use predictability to produce effective identities of causation. To a high degree of statistical predictability, of course -- which is the way the real world works, anyway.
You have an ideological story to tell, and I shouldn't keep screwing it up by pointing out it's flaws?
Well, no shit. The world is a simple place when you can reduce it down to a meaningless cartoon.
However, are you telling me that the issue, for you isn't how many people were killed, but only the means being used?
That seems to be what you're suggesting with your little mythical fantasy land.
However, let's move on and see how this fantasy land of your works....
Which would mean right off that, that by your own admission guns aren't the cause of people killing other people....even with guns.
Rather something else is making them decide to engage in violent crime.
Already your little fantasy is falling apart, but moving on....
Which would figure indicate that the cause isn't whether there are guns, but rather the reasoning of the people, and what would have them decide they have a reason to kill....with whatever means they eventually use.
Wow, it's your fantasy land, and it's already doing more to support my position than your claims about reality.
Sure....it's a total fantasy.
That people decide they have reasons to kill other people?/
That is the only cause you've yet identified.
No, the cause to commit violence is a human decision as it ways has been. Now the reasons that people chose to engage in violence may change, but the cause remains the same, the willingness of one person to harm another.
Sure, and someone could push another over the cliff as well. Maybe we should remove cliffs....or someone got pushed into the water and drowned.....let's remove any sort of streams or bodies of water. And when you get done.....you wont have anything left, because you will have eliminated everything that exists....even the people. Since people don't need weapons to kill.
So your fantasy world is now empty....just like your brain.
Meanwhile, the gun still isn't the cause...the gun didn't make him clown around in a manner that could harm others, and you could substitute a lot of things for that gun, and the harm would still occur. The only constant would be the fool holding the object.
Accidents always can and will occur, but that isn't going to stop just because you remove one means.
After all that "new toy" could be Ugh's wonderful new rock on a stick, of those rocks tied to the ends of a piece of rope, or that pointy piece of rock Ugh found....
So again, I'm not seeing where guns are the cause of anything.
No, because you've not shown that the guns were the cause people killed. Indeed you seemed to indicate the exact opposite "some clown showing off".... seems to me the problem was the clown showing off....not whatever happened to be used to kill someone.
So, it's not causative, but yes, it's predictable that some people will kill will guns. Just as we can predict that people will kill with sticks, rocks, rope, knives, and pretty much anything you can point to. Because the means used to inflect harm isn't the cause of why the harm occurred.
Wrong. Means not cause. Unless you're going to tell me that all those people turned from innocent well meaning people that NEVER killed anyone by accident or other reason, and only the presence of the guns turned them into homicidal blood thirsty maniacs.
At which point, you're going to need to explain the means by which an inanimate object can cause such a change in people.
You continue to confuse means with cause.
True, but they will immediately substitute other means and people will still end up dead.
The cause of the homicidal outbreak isn't whether guns are there but because "they change their minds". IOW, the people DECIDED they wanted to kill. Given that, the means to kill is all around them. It didn't arrive with the guns, it's not something the guns caused people to do.
Indeed, let's imagine the world at a time without guns. There wouldn't even be knowledge of guns. Now, was the world a peaceful place without killing, murder, violence and even war? LOL, you wish.
Now clearly guns didn't cause the violence then because there were no guns, but yet violence was a regular occurrence.
Again you confuse means with cause. They are not the same thing.
You dying from a knife in your heart wasn't caused by the knife, but the SOB who shoved it into your chest.
After all, I bet you have knives in the kitchen and none of them have leaped out of the drawer to plunge themselves into your heart.
No, it would take some PERSON to cause that to happen. That person would be the CAUSE of your death, not the means they used.
So as long as they murder each other by other means then everything is good?
No, it shows that even in your fantasy world you still don't know what you're talking about.
The correlation between guns and those killed with guns was 100%....but guns didn't cause those deaths...the people who pulled the trigger did.
As such you have a correlation and there is ZERO causality between what you're comparing.
This in a fantasy world where over which you are effectively God, but even there you can't show that the guns CAUSED anything.
You only showed they could be USED by people. It is those people that are the cause of why someone else was harmed or killed by the gun.
Like the notion that guns caused the people to turn into homicidal maniacs just because this inanimate object was introduced into their fantasy existence?
Sure, but the stabbing, the clubbing, the beatings, the strangulations, the crushing, the violence, the harm, and the murders will STILL CONTINUE TO EXIST AND OCCUR.
Thus we see that you don't care that violent criminals harm and kill people.....your only objections seems to be with what means they chose to use to inflect that harm or death.
Thus we see that you attempt to blame an object for the actions of the person responsible. To assert that the cause is the weapon, and no the person who uses it.
Tell me in your fantasy world is the object put on trial for any crime....or the person using it?
I ask because if you're going to assert the object was the cause, then the person using it is utterly innocent of doing anything wrong.
It is a fallacy, for the simple fact is that your argument is purely illusionary.
Further despite being illusionary, you still could NOT establish that the guns caused anyone to die. With a person to use it the gun just sets there and does NOTHING. It can't cause someone to pick it up. It can't cause the person to have homicidal tendencies. It can't cause the person to seek out a victim. It can't cause them to put the gun at the victim. It can't cause them to pull the trigger.
According to you the car drives the person. The horse rides the man. The beach causes the sunlight to be hot.
This is the basic flaw your reasoning has here and oddly enough is a nearly exact reflection of your reasoning processes in reality.
You blame the means rather than the people who used it. You blame the tool rather than the criminal.
Then you wonder why people laugh at you.
On the contrary, the people could simply leave the guns alone and absolutely no one would ever be harmed. They could also pick up the guns and always use them in a safe responsible manner and again no one would cause harm to another person.
All your logic shows is that like reality, it is the people who chose if harm will occur.
No, it's introduced to refute your assertion of a high correlation. It's data that directly contradicts what you assert. It's data that does not support your conclusions. It's data you can't refute.
Ah, so crime isn't caused by guns, but by all these other things.
Such as poor inner city minorities. Who aren't rich., aren't educated and are at war.
Indeed if we adjust for such areas within the US we find that what's left is pretty much exactly like those other counties in crime rates.
Oh, but that's right, you don't adjust for such variations within a country. Instead you used *average* national totals which you claim wasn't appropriate when I did so.
...if you're not worried about finding out the truth and the actual causes of something.
Ok, let me sum it up for you them. No causality between guns and violence crime has EVER been established.
There, now you can take your excel spreadsheets, fold them until they are all corners, and stick them where you pull your claims from.
Sure you can bet on correlations, and you can even make money without knowing why the correlation exists or even if it's a reflection of causality.
I would note that if your hedge fund played the market that more guns in the US would mean more violent crimes and murders.......you would be bankrupt right now.
The real world results did NOT track what you assert was the correlation, and such you bet against reality and thus lost your collective a$$.
So, what do we have?
That even in a fantasy world you created and control, guns couldn't be shown to be the cause of anyone committing harm against another, at most you showed they were the means.
Sort of like occurs in reality.
Further we discover that your objection isn't to violent crime and murder.....but only the criminal's use of a particular means to harm and kill others.
So your argument is crap and it's based on a utterly irrational position.
Now, have I answered your questions and shot your argument down into flaming wreckage yet again?
Translation: more like 30. We know it because you turned down multiple invitations to post the registration, which means you either don't have one, or it contradicts what you've been saying about the old POS.
Never gonna' happen.
BTW, I extended my bike trip. Probably will total about 8000 miles, and I'm at about 6300. Meanwhile, you're still sitting in your dung heap, pretending to a motorcyclist. Too funny. Oh, and this motel, while a bit spartan and battle worn, is WAY nice than your place. Did you catch up on the rent yet?
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