Do the enemies of firearms freedom ever get tired of manipulating data to further their civilian disarmament agenda? No. No they don’t. Because the facts are not on the side of gun control. So…the facts must die. A slow, lingering death, I might add. For example . . .
Vox’s very first stat — on America mass shootings in “public, populated paces” (?) vs. a carefully-picked selection of foreign countries — doesn’t reveal the criteria for a mass shooting and excludes gang violence and terrorism from the totals. So they’re just comparing psycho killer mass shootings.
And no wonder. The November Paris terrorist attacks left 130 people dead, just three shy of the total attributed to the U.S. and 129 more than the number “1” written next to France. Oh wait, the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in January of the same year left 11 dead. Mort la difference!
Oh, and what about Norway? Not on the chart. Maybe that’s because the Norway mass shooter killed 77 people. And we’re just :36 seconds into this piece of anti-gun agitprop. Hang on. I thought terrorist attacks were excluded from the totals. So why does Vox include a sound bite from President Obama on the San Bernardino terrorist attack? Was that just workplace violence, too?
And then we get the news that the U.S. has the highest suicide rate of “the ten countries ranked on human development by the U.N.” Hello? What about Japan? Or all the other “developed” countries that outrank the U.S. on suicide rates, including India, Russia, Japan, Hungary, Poland, Finland, Iceland and . . . wait for it . . . France.
Look! There’s Norway in the suicide chart! So Norway’s in when it suits Vox and out when it doesn’t. Cherry pick much? Another chart: the rate of firearms-related homicides in the U.S. is increasing! Only the rate hasn’t fluctuated much: between 6 and 8 per 100k. Context people. Context.
And on and on the Vox video goes, through no less than 18 charts. Including the revelation that “young black men” account for the lion’s share of firearms-related homicides. But let’s not talk about gang violence, right?
This kind of cherry picked data can prove just about anything. In this case it proves that the anti-gunners ain’t got game. So they play games with the numbers. Interspersed with emotionally charged videos designed to draw attention away from Vox’s intentional distortions.
Not to belabor the point (much), correlation does not equal causation — especially when the facts used to establish the relationship are molded, massaged, manipulated and stretched to breaking point.
“America doesn’t have a gun problem,” Vox concludes, suddenly returning gang-related homicides to the equation. “It has several of them.” That much is true. But don’t be fooled.
“Gun violence” is not America’s biggest problem, nor are we alone in the world — “developed” or not — in experiencing firearms-related homicides. But American citizens enjoy more legally-guaranteed individual liberty than any other country in the world. And our gun rights protect those freedoms. And that’s the truth.
If I had presented an engineering professor with a statistical analysis like this I’d have been a victim of violence….
It’s called a *facepalm*, and I prefer to think of it as an educational performance improvement plan.
He would have given your face a high five.
Science and math based disciplines tend to frown on wildly jumping to conclusions.
Well, psychology, notwithstanding.
Sorry, psych-folks – too much feelings for my liking. I prefer the behavior sciences; with their data and hard-facts based methods, lawful and orderly principles of behavior, and general use of, well, science.
Except for those that sold themselves out in support of the global climate warming change agenda.
Everyone has a price.
$50 million and I’ll club a baby seal or stroke the long dong of climate change – buyer’s choice.
I’m not an idiot, but 20 bucks is 20 bucks.
I studied psychology for long enough to realize it is not an actual science. You know, with facts and stuff. Just a bunch of unproven theories. And chemicals. So basically, fun with drugs. Just like hippies. And as worthy of respect.
Yup psychology is complete crap. When I took it at the college level (like preuniversity here where I live), it was all very interesting and made sense. The conditioning and behavior stuff.
Then I got to university and the courses were all like “well this kind of behaviour could be this or could be that, we don’t know and there’s no way to find out”.
You’re Jedi mind tricks work on me too often. I got about 90 seconds into that before I regained control of myself and shut it off.
Same here in Australia. Murder rates at historic low about 240 a year out of 24 million people. About 10 to 12 percent by firearm, 40 percent by knives and 30 percent blunt force. By legal owners most years 0
Media / government wants to impose more rules in the name of domestic violence and common sense.
Don’t mention the imported crime between gangs over drug dealing
Never let government impose more rules
The enemies of personal/individual liberties never tire, but like some states of people resisting gun control, some states are resisting the push to remove personal freedom with an individual’s health care decisions. Oklahoma and Hawaii just defeated mandatory vaccine bills, maybe there’s still
Some sense out there?
“They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem.”
— Jeff Cooper
It’s not a tumor!
– Det. John Kimble
I felt dumber for watching the video, but my favorite part is when magic marker girl misspelled Obama. Yup.
Oh man VOX…it pops up on Yahoo. Ultra left claptrap. Ya’ can’t comment without giving up all your info. Don’t give ’em publicity TTAG…
To the Pajama Boy weenies at Vox. Listen to Beccaria:
“The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.”
I glimpsed at their Youtube channel. Anti-gun video – Check – Bernie puff piece – check, Global Warming – Check, Trump is Hitler – check. They’re a lock-step ultra left wing propagandist. I don’t need to waste time watching that crap.
Yep, they have a whole category of over the top misinformation vids on vaccines and disease. All the same package.
So why does Vox include a sound bite from President Obama on the San Bernardino terrorist attack? Was that just workplace violence, too?
Workplace dispute.
Ain’t no such thing as Islamic Terrorism.
If you torture the data enough they will tell you anything.
Interestingly enough you can still vote on comment on that bit of whatever they want to call it.
I actually watched the whole thing and I realized something…. VOX and its writers are a bunch of children. They may have adult-sized bodies, but their minds are stuck somewhere around age eight.
For those that didn’t get far into the video they keep presenting their information in the form of bar charts with a darker band of the bar to represent gun violence/death. Yes, they included suicides in their numbers but then they tried to sound smart by addressing suicides specifically with its own bar chart. Then they tried to make the case that suicide by gun is fatal and you don’t get a ‘second chance.’
That was the point when I realized they are children. They somehow got this idea in their head that if they could wave a magic wand and make all the guns disappear they could at the same time disappear all the gun deaths from their charts. If all the guns suddenly disappeared, all the suicides by guns would also disappear. If all the guns went away, all the deaths would go away too. The bar on the graph next to the words USA would magically and suddenly be smaller than all the bars on the graphs next to all those other countries.
To think that so many people will not commit suicide because there are no more guns, no more muggings or other gang violence, no more mass shootings all because the guns are gone……
It is almost cute in its naivety.
Almost.
Did I mention they didn’t close the comments over on that video?
Oh death! Where is thy sting?
Amen to that whole last paragraph. I have grown to absolutely despise “it only happens here” nonsense.
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