Re: violent crime up
On Jun 13, 2006, at 9:09 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
Switzerland is another frequent counter-example.
I’m always troubled by ‘counter examples’ to flawed points.
There’s no counter-example to the claim that the combination of
American “culture” and millions of guns and gun owners results in
10,000 murders/year.It’s just bad statistics.
How’s that? You have some examples that show both similiarities and
differences. Similarity: lots of guns. Differences: on the dependent
side, murders; on the independent side, imperial history, frontier
culture, inequality, racial heterogeneity… You control for the
similarities and try to see if the dissimilarities are significant.
That sounds like standard stats to me.
Again, Archer says Australia, New Zealand, and Canada had similar
frontier stories, but currently have comparatively low homicide
rates.Do you realize how dumb this sounds? Looking at historical
artifacts from over a hundred years ago, about countries that were
tiny fractions of the size they are today with very little
resemblance to the modern version, and trying to suss out reasons
for differing homicide rates!?
So history’s bunk?
Doug