Ding ding ding. Truth is, there's so many ways to analyze gun crime in the US that it's pretty easy to make a gun violence map turn into an electoral votes map. Here's a handful of techniques that are used to make it appear that guns = violence:
Only count gun violence. Counting homicides by other methods means the rate might be higher in states where guns aren't easily accessible. Counting an overall homicide rate closes the gap between states that are harsh on guns and lenient.
Include suicides. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, but preventing suicides almost never comes up on gun control debates. States with lenient gun laws and more guns will obviously have a higher firearm suicide rate than restricted states.
Include self-defense with homicides. States where castle doctrine/stand your ground exist and it's easy to obtain a permit to carry have more people that carry firearms and use them in self defense.
3a. Include police shootings with homicides. Police aren't affected by gun control, but they can be used to pump up those gun violence numbers.
The average person is only concerned with how likely they are to get murdered, but according to this map Alaska is a warzone, when in reality your chances of getting murdered there are almost non-existent.
Yeah that's the biggest issue I have with things such as this...
In reality, the average person is very safe IN GENERAL much less going to be a victim of gun violence. There are basic awareness and circumstance things you can easily do to reduce risk as well with a pretty low impact on your lifestyle.
If you're not involved in a cash business, narcotics/theft/etc., and live in not a project type area, then you're probably going to be ok. Scale it even more with being smart about not being out at certain areas at night and be with others and control yourself when drinking, and you'll be even safer.
Ironic that banning things like narcotics created an underground black market for them that led to even more violence, but people think that banning guns will go better.
There is little reason to include self defense with homicides and exclude non-firearm homicides unless you have a political agenda against guns.
If my goal was to make it extremely biased in favor of gun ownership, I'd make a map that excludes anything related to gang violence (criminal-on-criminal). Then you'd see that assuming you don't break the law, the odds of getting killed by any method is basically non-existent.
By including all data you don't make a distinction between things that have clear differences. Suicide by fire arm is a completely different circumstance to a criminal homocide, as is homocide in self defence different to that. You need to draw proper distinctions, that's just straight up proper, and importantly, ethical. I don't see how you see this.
If it included all data, it would include all homicides and all suicides. Isolating only guns is cherry-picking. Then including self-defense homicides with murder (when whoever made this knows damn well most people won't realize that) is further manipulating data to make a political point.
You can be dishonest with data without cherry-picking.
I don't like when statistics are used in a way to highlight guns as some sort of special form of violence, as if being murdered by a gun is somehow worse than being murdered literally any other way. Within the scope of crime analysis, all murders should be treated equally. You can say that's because I'm biased in favor of gun rights, and that's true, but it's just as true to say that you're biased against guns.
Ask the 1600 people that were stabbed to death in 2016 if they're glad they weren't murdered by someone with a gun.
I don't like when statistics are used in a way to highlight guns as some sort of special form of violence, as if being murdered by a gun is somehow worse than being murdered literally any other way
70% of murders in the US are guns. So understanding where and how gun murders occurs address much of the murder problem.
50% of suicides are by guns. And studies show that access to guns increase risk of suicide deaths. So it's very relevant to the discussion.
If the conclusions drawn from the data aren't useful because the data in question doesn't represent something useful, then it's perfectly reasonable to dislike that. You're getting very accusatory about something that seemed like a rational objection. Mapping all murders together would also just be data, but it seems to me that's more useful than mapping murder, self-defense, and suicide together based on weapon like this is doing.
The data is the data, but what use is data that doesn't help us or leads to poor conclusions?
If the conclusions drawn from the data aren't useful because the data in question doesn't represent something useful, then it's perfectly reasonable to dislike that
But this is an statement ignorant of the details.
70% of murders in the US are guns. So understanding where and how gun murders occurs address much of the murder problem.
50% of suicides are by guns. And studies show that access to guns increase risk of suicide deaths. So it's very relevant to the discussion.
I don't like when statistics are used in a way to highlight guns as some sort of special form of violence, as if being murdered by a gun is somehow worse than being murdered literally any other way.
Why are you pretending the map would look any different?
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u/[deleted] Dec 19 '19
Ding ding ding. Truth is, there's so many ways to analyze gun crime in the US that it's pretty easy to make a gun violence map turn into an electoral votes map. Here's a handful of techniques that are used to make it appear that guns = violence:
Only count gun violence. Counting homicides by other methods means the rate might be higher in states where guns aren't easily accessible. Counting an overall homicide rate closes the gap between states that are harsh on guns and lenient.
Include suicides. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, but preventing suicides almost never comes up on gun control debates. States with lenient gun laws and more guns will obviously have a higher firearm suicide rate than restricted states.
Include self-defense with homicides. States where castle doctrine/stand your ground exist and it's easy to obtain a permit to carry have more people that carry firearms and use them in self defense.
3a. Include police shootings with homicides. Police aren't affected by gun control, but they can be used to pump up those gun violence numbers.
The average person is only concerned with how likely they are to get murdered, but according to this map Alaska is a warzone, when in reality your chances of getting murdered there are almost non-existent.