Sandy Hook Elementary School Victims Relief Fund

Again, the nit-picking. There's nothing more to be gained here.

Stand Your Ground is more racist in its implementation than Castle Doctrine. But it is a question of degree.

I get Castle Doctrine in principle. But the implementation doesn't match the principle.

 

Yeah, great.

I mean, why do people complain about drunk driving? Or terrorism? Why don't these people just not like these things and carry on, instead of suggesting everyone has to do what they like?

I DON'T KNOW. MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE THESE THINGS KILL PEOPLE. ONE DOES NOT DO TERRORISM, OR DRIVE DRUNK, OR HAVE GUNS, IN A VACUUM. Other people who were not involved in your decision to be a terrorist or drive drunk or have guns will be killed because of your decision.

Sometimes it is not about what you like. It is about society. But this goes back to an earlier discussion with tochatihu and fuzzy1 about the rest of the world being committed to the greater good, and the US being committed to individual freedoms to do things no matter how injurious those things might be to everyone else.

No. I don't think it's fair that people who don't like 'em get killed by people who do like 'em.

No, really. When I stop - see below - you and fuzzy carry on posting about how guns are good. And fun. And safe. And how it's not fair that people like me think they might be dangerous.

I can't think of a better place to do this than on a thread called "Sandy Hook Elementary School Victims Relief Fund". Nothing says "guns are good" like that title.

Less, thanks. As I said, nothing is being gained from anything being posted here. No-one is learning.

Want proof?

You've said repeatedly that owning a gun allows you to protect your family, and you've said I cannot protect mine.

I have told you multiple times that statistics show that owning a gun puts you and your family at greater risk of being killed.

Then @Rmay635703 posts about someone protecting his daughter to death - as so often happens - and you say this:

Yes, just like you THINK you're protecting your family.

I mean..... You've learned nothing. You've understood nothing. There is no point in my posting anything more. It is a waste of time.

Really, you and fuzzy go on posting on the Sandy Hook thread about how great guns are, and I won't bother to question you any more.

 

Please do explain, without incorporating the Stand Your Ground abuses.

 

1 both are obvious misuse if otherwise good tools.

2 well, they pretty much do. when a deranged/drunk person attempts to hurt others, we usually try to stop them from doing so. until then, they're free to enjoy alcohol, or cars, or firearms, or fertilizer.

3 so you're against the objects, not the people that misuse them ? this is going to be difficult.

4 correct

5 that's fine. when the rest of the world calls for help, we try.

6 thank you for your opinion.

7 agreed, it's definitely not fair

8 agreed, they are fun and safe

9 thank you for your opinion

10 if you would like to start a new discussion, please link to it in this thread, so we can find it easily.

11 thank you for your opinion

12 yes
13 ok
14 you may be surprised what has been learned, and what is still in question.

15 well, ok. it was nice talking with you, and gaining some understanding from your opinions and perspectives.

16 see 15.


*****
before you go though, I'm still wondering what regulations you would propose to prevent the scenario above... the father killing his own child ?

while you may be afraid of guns, and unfamiliar with their usage, everyone is not. in training, owners are taught to only shoot at what they can see, never what they cannot. this is general firearm safety, general beginning of education stuff.

I would imagine that if the gun owner had more training, more awareness (glasses on, not sleepy etc) the outcome would have been much better and thankfully not made it to the news.

now, I read your comments and see that your are very unfamiliar with firearms, or at least do not have daily interaction with them. there are courses that ready the weapons with their due respect, teach safe handling, safe firing, safe cleaning, etc for people that want to have a better understanding. if the father had more training (I'm assuming he had very little) this could have been prevented.

the people I know that are expert level marksman that compete in tournaments are very well trained (much better than I) and stress safety, thinking, common sense at every opportunity. I have a decent amount of respect for them and their methods.

much like driving, I believe that MORE TRAINING is the answer to poorly skilled drivers. more training the answer to poorly skilled firearms owners, more training for poorly skilled excavator operators.

the difference between poorly skilled and intentional harm is a wider gap though. when it comes to intentional harm, via any of these tools, the PERSON intending harm is what needs to be dealt with, instead of (opinion incoming!) banning all cars, all trains all fertilizers.

 

The regulations we have in pretty much every developed country: extreme limits on household gun ownership. It's not about banning "ugly guns" or anything. It's about stopping people from having guns in their houses in almost all cases.

That's why we hardly ever get stories like this in the rest of the world. Our regulations work to prevent exactly that scenario.

 

Just as a quick point before I go....

I was watching Frankie Boyle's New World Order last night. (It's a BBC show, but it's on YouTube. I'd highly recommend it.) It showed a clip of this story from the UK on Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein.

https://metro.co.uk/2021/06/16/lady-c-corrects-gb-news-host-who-calls-jeffrey-epstein-a-paedophile-14779493/

Correcting Wootton calling him a paedophile, Lady [Campbell] said that it is a ‘medical term’ and that actually that Epstein was an ephebophile – an adult who is sexually attracted to adolescents, usually between the ages of 15 to 19.​

The host went on to point out that this was semantics and that Epstein was still "a bad man".

It reminded me of this thread. Whether it's "ugly guns" or "but you need to compare America to Honduras, not Britain", it is a semantic defence of something that is terrible.

As I said,

Honestly, like that Lady Campbell thing, this thread increasingly just disgusts me - as it would most people outside of the US. It's not a good thing to be part of. Nothing is being gained, and I'm losing a lot of respect for people.

 

oh, I didn't realize you could have firearms over there ? what are the "almost" cases, where firearms are still allowed ?

 

shrug, ok, we did try.

any way, if you get a chance to get out and have some firearms training, I hope you do. there's a lot to be gained from the education, you're guaranteed to meet some decent folks and learn a thing or two in the process.

happy motoring !

 

sooooo anyway, why does it have to be so hard to see pellets ? I can pick em up and feel which end is which, but dang it I can't see em worth a flip anymore. everything down range is crisp, but these dang pellets the kids like to use are almost invisible !

 

The below poster has exited this conversation, but I have plenty more follow-up.

I hope no one is offended that the outside material they linked has been insufficient to change (m)any minds, that their references haven’t been taken as The Final Definitive Word, The End Of Debate. That really should be no surprise, as all references linked in all these threads are but just a couple tiny drops in a very large pond of topical literature. And very carefully curated drops at that, not revealing the major problems of the whole field.

What some deride as nit-picking, others see as strong indicators that this field is as badly afflicted by the Replication Crisis as any other. I quickly saw this when digging into this field’s technical literature three decades ago, but without the framework and language since developed by others looking at numerous other fields:

“The replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially of substantial parts of scientific knowledge.

The replication crisis most severely affects the social and medical sciences, where considerable efforts have been undertaken to re-investigate classic results, to determine both their reliability and, if found unreliable, the reasons for the failure. Survey data strongly indicates that all natural sciences are affected as well.

The phrase "replication crisis" was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem. Considerations around causes and remedies have given rise to a new scientific discipline called metascience, which uses methods of empirical research to examine empirical research practice. “



A very major problem in this field has been a lack of statistical robustness, explained better here than my own words can:

https://www.mpsanet.org/more-guns-less-replication-the-case-for-robust-research-findings/

“One way out of this mess is to invoke another statistical concept: robustness. Just as replication can have a narrow or broad meaning, robustness can as well. … robustness in the statistical sense refers to a relationship between two variables that is not driven by just a few cases or assumptions. At the risk of oversimplifying: if a few seemingly minor alterations in a data analysis result in a change in the results, then those results were not robust in the first place. For a better, more technical explanation, visit http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~dtyler/ShortCourse.pdf.

Like replication, robustness can also be defined more broadly. Much as the results with a single dataset are robust if they hold across all (or least many) of the cases and not just a few, so research results can be said to be robust if the same finding keeps popping up in multiple studies, using different data and different ways of modeling it. Findings such as the relationship between education and political participation (those with more education are more likely to vote and to participate in other ways) hold up, no matter how you slice the data. Old data, new data, crude models, highly sophisticated analyses—again and again, the relationship appears. There is just no way around the fact that more education often pairs with more political involvement. Of course, a few individuals exist who do not fit this pattern, but these exceptions do not debunk the claim. It is solid. Within a single dataset, robustness refers to the relationship holding across a broad swath of cases. Considered more broadly, a finding can be said to be robust if it holds up across a broad swath of studies.

Conversely, the research on concealed-carry, gun ownership, and crime is not robust, in the broad sense that I am using it. Lott’s research finds that concealed-carry laws mean more crime deterrence. The research from Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang, referenced in the piece from The Washington Post above, shows that such laws increase crime—specifically aggravated assault—while having no impact on other crime rates. For his part, Levitt believes that there is little relationship at all between gun ownership and crime rates. In short, the research on this topic is highly sensitive to model specification, time periods covered, and data used. No clear, robust relationships have emerged that carry across different research by different researchers using different data and different modeling techniques, to establish clear conclusions. The most likely explanation for this, is that the relationship between gun ownership and crime is ambiguous. Whether positive or negative, the effects are small compared to the big drivers such as the percentage of poor, unemployed, young males—who commit the vast majority of street crimes, regardless of race—that exist in the population at any given time…”

(FWIW, my own personal views here fall closest to Levitt.)

Way back then, one of my “hobbies” was reading and digging in to ‘anti-gun science’ papers and looking for cherry-picking, special selections of time frames and locations, measures left out, and other problems betraying that their claimed conclusions to not be statistically robust. I found a very rich assortment of problems, and almost universally present.

I also found that the ‘pro-gun science’ equally displayed the very same afflictions. That is why you haven’t seen me presenting or defending any of it as superior to the opposition, because it isn’t. When I do present some, it is only as a counterbalance to highlight the lack of robustness of the opposition.

Back then, the best any neutral reviewer could say was that the literature of the whole field, taken together, was “inconclusive”. That is what the Task Force on Community Preventive Services’s report in the CDC’s MMWR (linked several times in these fora), after reviewing 51 studies that evaluated the effects of selected firearms laws on violence, concluded:

“The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes.”

“The Task Force's review of firearms laws found insufficient evidence to determine whether the laws reviewed reduce (or increase) specific violent outcomes (Table). Much existing research suffers from problems with data, analytic methods, or both. Further high-quality research is required to establish the relationship between firearms laws and violent outcomes.

Several recurring problems were associated with the studies that evaluated the effects of firearms laws on violent outcomes: … [see article]

In conclusion, the application of imperfect methods to imperfect data has commonly resulted in inconsistent and otherwise insufficient evidence with which to determine the effectiveness of firearms laws in modifying violent outcomes.”


Much more recently, RAND produced a much larger science review of newer literature for a wider variety of outcomes. While some are pictorially summarized like this:






… most summaries came out as this:




Counting up the pictorial summaries, I found 3 Supportives, 6 Moderates, 10 Limiteds, and 50 Inconclusives. And plenty more questions that haven’t been studied, or at least not solidly enough to be reviewed.

Two distinctive features of this review are that (1) they always look at both firearms-only cases, and total (non-gun included) cases, to watch out for shifts, and (2) homicide and suicide are always separated, not combined, to watch out for their very different patterns and demographics.

Both of these have long been on my own requirements lists. Studies that don’t do these are almost always hiding something unfavorable to their proclaimed conclusion.

 

Probably the most glaringly bogus “science" I looked at was “Effects of Restrictive Licensing of Handguns on Homicide and Suicide in the District of Columbia”, (N Engl J Med 1991; 325:1615-1620), by Loftin, McDowall, et. al. Yes, the very same David McDowall who was uncritically referred to in the Scientific American article "Journey to Gunland" very recently linked in this thread, and also in another thread several years ago by @tochatihu. This studied DC’s 1976 handgun ‘restriction’, a.k.a. a handgun ban, though with a grandfather clause for prior registrations. Their conclusion was “Our data suggest that restrictions on access to guns in the District of Columbia prevented an average of 47 deaths each year after the law was implemented.”

A thing that immediately jumped out was that McDowall’s study expressed death rates as counts per months, rather than the usual per-capita rates normally used elsewhere. Looking up populations, it quickly became apparent why: the subject population (District of Columbia) was in major decline in that era, shrinkng 20% during the study period, while the control population ( the rest of the Washington, D.C.–Maryland–Virginia MSA, or Metropolitan Statistical Area) grew 51%. These diverging population changes, undisclosed by the authors, created opportunity for statistical hijinx.

After reframing the data I collected (slightly different than McDowall’s, due mostly to having access only to annual reports instead of the more detailed monthly figures he used, but not different enough to change outcomes), I found that his claimed benefit outcome vanished! Not mostly, but completely so. On a per-capita view, the claimed result was completely explained as the result of population shifts plus a broader trend of falling death rates experienced by the control group. Total (not just gun-only) homicide and suicide rates each fell slightly in both groups. But the population decline of the subject group greatly enhanced the reduction in its monthly counts, while the control group’s population growth exceeded its per-capita deaths decline, so its monthly counts continued to grow. The intervention's claimed benefit was an illusion, created by nonstandard and inappropriate model selection that hid other important changes. He used smoke and mirrors.

My letter to the editor of NEJM was rejected, the form reply from Jerome Kassirer indirectly saying ‘Thanks, but we use only correspondence from credentialed authors’. Several known scientists later pointed out that McDowall’s claimed conclusion was entirely dependent on model selection, vanishing with other models. But at least I did feel vindicated when, a decade later, that CDC-MMWR review cast aside that particular ‘science’ study – and 50 others! – as inconclusive, for similar reasons.

If I were to correspond on this today, I would describe it from a different angle, showing the results of applying his measure of “lives saved” to two simple artificial ‘null’ datasets:

Null #1, replace the annual homicide and suicide figures (total, not gun-only) with constant per-capita figures computed to match the average that each group experienced over the whole study period. Everyone should agree that this artificial dataset is essentially what we’d expect if the studied intervention had “no affect”, i.e. a null case.

Yet feeding this set into McDowall’s measure, produces a “benefit” of 43 lives saved per year, entirely because the subject population decreased, and almost matching the 47 he claimed as a result of the intervention. Potential victims had moved out.

Null #2, do the same as above, except separately for Before- and After-intervention periods. Then, to adjust for any possible external factors that caused a region-wide decline shared by both subject and control groups, replace just the subject group’s After data with a constant per-capita rate computed so that its Before/After ratio is the same as the control group. Reasonable people ought to agree that this is also a valid null case.

Feeding this null set into McDowall’s measure, produces a “benefit” of 66 lives saved per year. This “null” outcome, from simple population changes and a larger outside trend, is even better than the 47 he claims as a result of the intervention. I.e. his claimed measure of the benefit falls short of a null case. His claimed benefit collapses. The intervention actually under-performed a null case.

This garbage is what was passing as “peer reviewed science” in the gun control field back then, probably due to the extremely widespread confirmation bias all around the field. This study quickly became part of the holy revered gospel of the gun control orthodoxy. Its position should have been knocked down by that MMWR report, but as its NEJM page shows, it continues to be regularly cited.

Soon thereafter, the medical field figured out that is it was experiencing replication problems with many drug and treatment studies. E.g. drug companies were funding many small studies, knowing full well that random noise would produce a certain fraction of positive outcomes, and then publishing only the favorable ones. The medical science industry then began imposing new rules to reduce publication biases, significance thresholds, and other known problems.

Since then, this Replication Crisis has been found in very many other fields.

As previously stated, this is why I don’t bring up the many pro-gun studies for support in these gun debates. They are no less guilty.

There is plenty more to reply to, when I have time.

 

stuff I really liked, that can be seen happening daily: statistical hijinks ... I laughed in my car when I read that just now.

very well written. I'm guessing you've caught more than a few Professors of S.H. off guard already, but they're hiding from the facts for now, until "authorized" folks bring it down on then.

I'm frustrated daily by the stretching of truths and outright ies that propagate through the streams of information... they're so thinly disguised ave poorly worded that anyone paying attention can catch them.... but then I realized the folks listening to the drivel don't really care, aren't paying attention, and just let it bounce around inside for a while until the next firehose of knowledge is pointed at them... and they drink and they drink and they believe what they've drunk.

over hearing conversations about current events, how and why those events happened, sometimes I just have to tilt my head a little and wonder