XPost: talk.politics.guns, uk.politics.guns, aus.politics.guns   
   From: murff@warlock.org   
      
   On Sat, 10 May 2014 08:05:09 +1000, Dechucka wrote:   
   >   
   > One of the reasons/the reason a gun in the house is associated with more   
   > suicides and murders?   
      
   I think you have to distinguish between an attempt to use numbers to   
   prove something, and an analysis of numbers to find something out.   
      
   The first probably does stop with "more guns => more suicides". The   
   second is more interesting because it asks "does more guns => more   
   suicide attempts" ?  I don't know. But it may be that "more guns" is   
   actually correlated with "fewer suicide attempts" - but that since those   
   attempts are made with more lethal and less reversible means, more of   
   them are successful. Simply counting body bags doesn't provide any   
   information on that.   
      
   The antis jump on the "more suicides" outcome. Evidence and analysis   
   would be better - and less prone to being refuted out of hand, as there   
   are statistical techniques for measuring the strength of a given set of   
   numbers.   
      
   --   
   Murff...   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)