XPost: talk.politics.guns, uk.politics.guns, aus.politics.guns   
   From: murff@warlock.org   
      
   On Sat, 10 May 2014 09:34:56 +1000, Dechucka wrote:   
      
   >   
   > The facts are there, shit eh if you don't like them   
      
   No, they're not. All we have is your statement based on a particular set   
   of data.   
      
   Now, I proposed a mechanism whereby a level of gun ownership can be   
   *correlated* with a higher suicide rate, but where that mechanism   
   explicitly reverses the causality implicit in your claim. Try putting   
   some actual figures on it for illustration:   
      
   Suicide attempt rate in "no-gun" jurisdiction: 100   
   Suicide attempt rate in "gun owning" jurisdiction: 50   
      
   Probability of successful attempt with pills, car exhaust etc: 30%   
   Probability of successful attempt with a gun: 80%   
      
   Simplistically, and for illustration, you get 30 suicides in the "no gun"   
   jurisdiction, and 40 in the "gun owning" one. So guns are automatically   
   bad and cause a higher suicide rate, don't they...   
      
   ... well, no. In that example "gun owning" is correlated with and may   
   even cause a lower attempt rate.   
      
   Now, those numbers were entirely made up to illustrate the arithmetic   
   behind my question, because the answer you gave to news:lkjm6j$fhn$1@dont-   
   email.me:   
      
   "Yes it does, got a gun in the house then the  higher the suicide and   
   murder rate"   
      
   merely looked at the headline figures and not what was actually going on.   
      
   So, for your claims to be credible, can you provide a numerically sound   
   demonstration that they don't rely on disregarding factors of the sort I   
   illustrated above ?   
      
   --   
   Murff...   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)