re gun control in article c l bgo magpie linknet com manes magpie linknet com steve manes writes i would be surprised if there weren t contrary studies i might add that sloan and kellerman was endorsed by the police departments of both seattle and vancouver and is considered by most of the references i have at hand the most exhaustive study of its kind even by those who take issue with some of the essay s conclusions s k s statistics speak largely for themselves without postulate and i might add vitamin c has been endorsed by a nobel laureate as a panacea for almost everything from the common cold to cancer in order to compare violent crime trends s k compared all violent crime categories from simple assault through various mechanisms of homicide wait a minute s k did not compare trends if they did they would have seen that the advent of canada s gun law had no effect on homicides total or handgun without a pre vs post comparison one cannot speculate as to the utility of anything all they have is a correlation and correlation does not prove causality if your point is that non whites commit more handgun crimes than whites then yours is the dubious assumption conventional social theory is that economic status not color is the primary motivating factor for crime especially violent crime what s your point anyway that white people are more responsible gun owners should we assume that it s a coincidence that there are comparitively fewer white people earning below the poverty line and living in tenement neighborhoods where most violent crime occurs hold it again you dismiss a point about demographics then you ask about socio economic demographics very slick differences between the two cities in the permit regulations render these two numbers strictly noncomparable on the contrary it s these differences that are the very basis of the study the easy availability of legal handguns in seattle and the much more difficult restricted weapons permit required in vancouver once again correlation does not prove causality looking at pre vs post data the canadian gun law had no effect not so cook measures suicides and assaultive homicides with firearms against a survey based estimate of the number of legal and illegal guns in circulation within a city sir if you were a canadian and owned a gun before the restrictive gun laws were passed and decided to hide it rather than turn it in would you answer truthfully a question about gun ownership from someone who calls writes or asks you on the street that is one problem with surveys nobody will answer an incriminating question another is that people will often tell you what they think you want to here again your author misses the core issue that vancouver citizens are prohibited from purchasing handguns on the basis of self defense they don t have a choice in the matter does that mean no vancouver citizens have handguns i think not you are discounting guns purchased beforehand and guns purchased for purposes other than self defense which can also be used for defense hmmm sounds like your author might like a bumper sticker that reads guns don t kill people black people kill people honestly his conjectures backed up by zero evidence zero studies and even less common sense aren t worth the considerable time it must have taken you to type in his assumptions look frighteningly close to those pseudo scientific studies that the white supremist assholes love the crap that takes published statistics twisted around in an attempt to prove the inherent criminal nature of black people he makes valid points about demographic differences you then resort to the kind of argument that the politically correct movement often uses to stifle any debate nice real nice this author s essay contains independent study upon which to base his conclusions just some strained disjointed statistical discourse attempting to blame seattle s murder rate on blacks one doesn t have to produce his own data in order to point out the flaws in the methodology and conclusions of another s study again you resort to pc tactics al standard disclaimer
