Re: another shooting
You link a PDF that compares gun ownership rates with suicide w/gun rates. How many times do you post this and I explain to you why it does not support the case you're trying to make?
If it compared gun ownership with suicide rates (and then, among similar cultures where we could deduce that gun ownership was likely the principle cause of the difference) that would be one thing. It's suicide rates that matter, not what tool was used. Of course if you remove a large number of guns from a country less suicides are going to use guns.
And then the next statistic is gun ownership vs women's homicide rate... WITH GUNS. Again, unless gun ownership affects women's homicide rate, the graph is garbage for the same reason the previous one was.
And then it goes on to gun ownership and men's homicide rate... with guns.
This is why I insult your intelligence. Your link has nothing but common sense statistics which do NOT support the conclusions you make from them.
[Bad example, but something VERY SIMPLE is obviously needed when people are repeating the most obviously fallacious statistics over and over again thinking they're showing something which they do not even suggest:]
We could outlaw cars and, I'll wager, less people would die due to murders where a person runs another over in a car and suicides where someone crashes into something at high speed in order to end their life. If we make owning a car a crime, people won't be driving them and parking them all over the place every day. Presumably, this lack of cars on the road, in driveways, in parking garages, and parking lots will result in a general decrease in the availability of cars as a tool for homicide and suicide. If we were to ban cars, we could, as your link does, boast of our triumph over car murder and car suicide rates! We could brag that our ban reduced car murder and car suicide rates! How great would that be! That's retarded--banning cars wouldn't do us any good, right? Because it's suicide and murder rates that are significant, not CAR suicide and CAR murder rates that matter. If MURDER rates went down with the banning of cars and we could substanciate that the banning of cars was the cause, that would be an interesting statistic to examine. But if CAR MURDER rates went down with the banning of cars, that would not be an interesting statistic; it would be expected and not help anyone. If sucide rates declined because of banning cars (or guns, for instance!), that would be an interesting statistic to examine. But if CAR SUICIDE rates declined because of banning cars (or GUN suicide rates declined because of banning guns), it'd just be what we expected to happen. If something affects MURDER RATE, it may be worth examining. If something affects MURDER RATE [with that object used as a tool]... Duh?
Of course if you ban something from society it will be used less in crime--it will be used less period. But unless the actual rates of crime, not just crime-with-X-object-involved, are decreased by the banning of an object, the fact that crimes involving that object decrease is absolutely irrelevant to making the case that said object be banned.
