Rusty, you're an idiot. The Clackamas Town Center shooter shot himself, but only when he was confronted by an armed civilian who was drawing his weapon on him. Look that up too, fool.
And SneakyPete, no, correlation does not imply causation, at least not in a rigorous sense of logical implication. Did you have to look that up on Wikipedia, or did you hear it in middle school first?
But it does imply correlation. That means they're connected to each other, positively or negatively.
For instance, if you run a correlation analysis on the Brady Scorecard ranking of cities in various states against the homicide rates in those cities, you find that the correlation coefficient is 0.01. In other words, gun laws have no measurable connection to murder rates in US cities.
There are plenty of other things that are highly correlated to murder rates, though. And that means those things are connected to higher rates of people killing each other. e.g. you find them together much more often than not.
"There are plenty of other things that are highly correlated to murder rates, though. And that means those things are connected to higher rates of people killing each other. e.g. you find them together much more often than not."
"Racist jackass."
The race cards are like dollar bills, when printed a million times they lose their value.
You resorting to this infantile name calling just shows you ran out of arguments Rusty.
paradox, gwharton has multiple times hinted at the "real" problem in American cities. This is part of his pro-gun argument. If I continue calling out someone for bigotry, my opinion becomes worth less? Interesting
The Jackass part I threw in because last commenter did as well. It looked like a fun thing to do.
SneakyPete, I suppose if you call that "nerve" annoyance with people who glibly repeat phrases they heard somewhere without seeming to understand what they mean, then I suppose yes, you touched that one. You got hit by some overspray from my response to Rusty being an ignorant, loudmouthed tool, and i apologize for that.
Rusty, on the other hand, seems to have gained his entire worldview from a high school sophomore social justice class and can't seem to fathom that his perspective on things might be a little ... immature and deluded. Out here in the real world, violent crime is a problem. Violent crime tends to correlate with certain things, which means those things are connected and go together most of the time. Poverty is one of them, but not nearly to the level Rusty seems to think is the case. Poverty is weakly to moderately, not strongly, correlated to violent crime. Gun laws don't correlate to violent crime or homicide at all. Neither does population density (which is sort of surprising, actually). Ethnicity demographics are very highly correlated to violent crime, and consistently so even when controlling for poverty, education, and income. Again, that doesn't mean they cause one another, but it sure does mean they go together a whole lot. That's just fact.
Rusty seems to think facts are "racist." I suppose that means that in Rusty's mind the FBI, Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, and US Census Bureau are all cross-burning Nazis or something, since that's where those numbers all come from.
See, now things are getting somewhere. I am not taking a side, and my glib repeating of a phrase (how you've gained insight into whether I understand the phrase or not is a mystery to me) is simply because find it useless when numbers get sprayed without further consideration.
"Ethnicity demographics are very highly correlated to violent crime, and consistently so even when controlling for poverty, education, and income. "
Show me this last part. I want to learn your ways. Please don't link to an article that says "Football player shoots girlfriend". I want you to open my innocent liberal eyes.
Violent crime tends to correlate with certain things, which means those things are connected and go together most of the time.
compared to an example from the wikipedia article sneaky linked: Example 3
As ice cream sales increase, the rate of drowning deaths increases sharply.
Therefore, ice cream consumption causes drowning.
The aforementioned example fails to recognize the importance of time and temperature in relationship to ice cream sales. Ice cream is sold during the hot summer months at a much greater rate than during colder times, and it is during these hot summer months that people are more likely to engage in activities involving water, such as swimming. The increased drowning deaths are simply caused by more exposure to water-based activities, not ice cream. The stated conclusion is false.
g, i'm not really getting the feeling that you do understand what this means, or perhaps you understand the concept but you just don't care for it. to be fair, you did say "doesn't mean they cause one another," but it sure seems like you're trying to imply there is a causal relationship. do you have a link to the source of your statistics? i would be interested in perusing them when i have time.
related to the above example, your are suggesting people wear snorkels while eating ice cream because of a statistically relevant correlation. i've eaten enough ice cream, as have many on this board, to know from personal experience that wearing a snorkel while eating ice cream is not a necessary safety precaution. if someone in your neighborhood is shooting at people and you need a gun to defend yourself, then by all means defend yourself. if that's not the case, i don't understand why you want to make-up an imaginary phantom so you have something to defend yourself from.
i don't think it counts as inflationary when the million race cards are always thrown in the same direction. it's only inflationary when the race cards are spread out among many recipients.
The ice cream thing reminded me of Kinder eggs, you know the chocolate eggs with toys inside them. It is illegal to bring them into the US because kids may accidentally swallow the toys. Only in the US of A.
Bradley Manning is neither a journalist nor a regular citizen. He was an enlisted soldier who took an oath and made his own contract as part of the conditions of serving in the military. Stealing classified information and calling it whistleblowing is breaking the law and the oath he took as a soldier. That is why he is being court marshalled and not waiting for trial in a civil court. Bad example to reference.
The ad hominem arguments also does not make for a good reasoned argument. Your statement that because you use your speech to troll, you would use a gun, if you had one, to shoot randomly is a logical fallacy and shows your own bias and ignorance about those who own guns responsibly.
Its ok to hate guns. You are entitled to hate gun owners. But the law is written and was on the books for 200 years before someone used a gun for a mass shooting. When the state tries to sidestep the will of the people (wait until tomorrow/s executive orders are anounced) or the law on the books, that is where the consent of the governed is violated.
The state can easily control guns through the markets, like they do many other things: Why not pass a 10,000% tax on ammo? The legislators would rather let the executive overstep his power because the real objective, the abolition of the second amendment, is a legislative impossibility.
"The legislators would rather let the executive overstep his power because the real objective, the abolition of the second amendment, is a legislative impossibility. "
maestro "But the law is written and was on the books for 200 years before someone used a gun for a mass shooting."
They had muskets in mind. You can't buy explosive devices, land mines, artillery pieces at your gun store. Even silencers are illegal. It is totally fair game to redefine what a modern musket actually is. Automatic weapons are a fair game in this discussion. So are a whole bunch of other weapons designed solely for mass slaughter.
curtkram, the example in the wikipedia article (LOL by the way) is extremely misleading, because they've chosen a correlation with a low Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient (e.g. two things with weak monotone association by linear rank relationship, and thus likely to yield misleading correlation analysis due to poor linear association: ice cream and drowning may have a moderate correlation coefficient in this example - which is suspect anyway - but their Spearman value is low). Makes for a cool story in a wikipedia article, though.
The Spearman's Rho for demographic ethnies vs. homicide rates is very high (0.90 or higher). That means the level of monotone association for those data categories when ranked linearly suggests a very strong connection regardless of how strongly they are correlated, as opposed to the weak connection between ice cream sales and drowning whether those two data categories actually correlate or not. A high Spearman coefficient means a strong connection and suggestion of high association relevance.
As for the sources of the data used for this kind of analysis, you can get the crime report data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting system here: http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/
The US Census local population and demographic data can be found in several places, but US Census Quickfacts is probably the most accessible format: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html
The US Census also collects other statistics about people and households, including income, educational attainment, and many other things: http://www.census.gov/people/
Rusty, all the data used to control for income and education with respect to crime correlations came from these sources. One method used for the control analysis was to take data for two different but colocated ethnies with similar income or educational attainment distributions and compare them. So, for example, poor black populations have a correlation coefficient of 0.80 (highly positive) to local murder rates, while poor non-white hispanic populations have a correlation coefficient of -0.26 (weakly negative) to local murder rates. The income and education profiles are similar between those two populations as analyzed, but the murder rates associated with their share of the population in various major cities is radically different.
" So, for example, poor black populations have a correlation coefficient of 0.80 (highly positive) to local murder rates, while poor non-white hispanic populations have a correlation coefficient of -0.26 (weakly negative) to local murder rates. The income and education profiles are similar between those two populations as analyzed, but the murder rates associated with their share of the population in various major cities is radically different."
This is not what I asked for, and you know it. Too many variables for the results to mean a thing. I asked you to show me where a poor ethnic group remains as violent as they get more affluent and educated. This is what you originally implied.
Don't bother. You hate the blacks. Your paw hated blacks and Italians. your grandpa hated blacks, Italians and the Irish. Baby steps. Your offspring will hopefully be less bigoted.
Rusty, you're being obtuse. You asked me for how I controlled for income and education in the data, and I told you. The results are clear, and they get clearer when you throw in the same calculation for other ethnies (poor asians, for instance, have a -0.42 demographic correlation with homicide - moderately negative). I know math is hard, but that's how you control for multi-variate data in statistical analysis: compare data sets with similar values for the component you're controlling for and different values for the component you want to test.
More generally, the percentage of a population in poverty correlates to violent crime positively by a factor of 0.36 (weakly positive). Unemployment correlates at 0.35 (again, weakly positive). Failure to graduate from high school correlates at 0.37 (still weakly positive, but getting close to moderately positive). You can use those values and the Census income and education data to control for those components as well. As proxies for class status, you can even combine them.
So, in uncontrolled analysis the percentage of the population that is black correlates to the homicide rate at 0.80. That's a strong and statistically-significant connection with a high Spearman Rho (0.90). When controlling for income, education, and unemployment, the correlation drops to 0.78. Still very high. And the Spearman value doesn't change at all.
I know you think math is racist, but the single most accurate predictor of a local area's violent crime rate is its ethnic demographic composition, not income, not education levels, not unemployment, not gun laws. This is a highly-robust mathematical result: it shows up consistently across the whole country, and in fact the whole world. Since those results contradict a lot of cherished beliefs among the bien pensants, they predictably elicit all sorts of outrage any time somebody mentions them.
Funny how much supposedly "rational" people behave like religious fundamentalists when they are confronted with facts they don't like, isn't it? Go ahead and keep frothing at the mouth and calling me "racist" though. I wouldn't want to deny you the pleasure of denouncing the unbelievers and heretics to your buddies in the faith.
gwharton. these numbers look made up, but let's assume they are 100% correct.
you are singling out a single race and then comparing it to various immigrant groups (who have a much better support network, and chance to move on up).
But it doesn't matter. WHITE PEOPLE have historically been in charge of the most murderous, most violent, most brutal cultures in the last 2000 years. Post-colonialism era hasn't been around for that long (name a single black region in the world that hasn't been invaded by a white colony). You are taking a tiny snippet of current conditions and making these wild conclusions about nature of human beings in comparison to their skin color. Dumb.
You are clearly not a dumdum, but my god, your logic is blinded by hatred.
As an aside, Rusty is correct about one thing: the extremely high correlation in the USA between black ethnies and violent crime is relatively new. In fact, prior to the 1960s it was present but much less strong. Since that time, it has risen precipitously, along with US violent crime rates in general. However, as violent crime rates have declined since the 1990s, the ethnographic correlation has remained very high. It's still four times more predictive than any other factor we have data for.
Contrary to what Rusty seems to think, I do not think black people are inherently more violent than anybody else. They're certainly a lot more likely to be so now (statistically speaking), but it hasn't always been that way. Something in our society changed in the 1960s which brought into being a strong correlation between violent crime and black people which was not previously there (and did so over a very short period of time). Within that same time period, many other social pathologies became dramatically more prevalent in that community as well (a subject Senator Moynihan was deeply concerned about). Unfortunately, whatever it was we don't have any idea of how to measure it in a data set we can analyze along with the other information we have. Figuring that problem out would be an excellent subject for a PhD thesis in sociology, assuming you could find a university anywhere which would allow you to study it objectively and keep people like Rusty from putting you on trial for scientific heresy like a modern-day Galileo.
gwharton - the correlation is leaded gasoline. higher rates in the atmosphere in older urbanized areas, coupled with white flight and increased car usage after WWII and you get 30 years of high crime among people who grew up being exposed to high lead levels - which were largely african americans. we've known this for at least a decade.
gwharton, it sounds like you're trying to delicately tiptoe around removing the civil rights act passed in the 60's. wouldn't it make more sense to say it all hit the fan in 1954 instead of the 60s? maybe there would be less violent crime if racial minorities had different toilets and drinking fountains. obviously not, but it does seem like you're trying to statistically justify racism.
or is this a debate tactic the nra is emailing out now? when someone talks about firearm legislation, try to change the topic by making it about race? as has been pointed out, the several shootings that prompted this current push for new restrictions weren't committed by racial minorities, and they didn't target racial minorities.
and fluoride. i heard fluoride is a plot by the communists. i'm pretty sure there is a correlation between putting fluoride in our water and the rise in violence you are alleging. countries that don't have fluoride in their water probably have lower rates of gun violence.
Donna, mass shootings seem to be committed by white people in roughly the same proportion as the percentage of the white population of the US (less, actually, but within the standard error, particularly since the sample size of mass shooting incidents is very, very small). Same with most other ethnicities, who also seem to commit mass shootings at rates roughly equal to their proportion of the population. Mass killings actually seem to be the one type of violent crime where the incident statistics seem to match the overall demographics of the country within standard error bounds.
And yes, men perpetrate violent crime vastly more often than women. Not only is that statistically true, but it should suprise nobody. I mean, DUH.
thanks gwharton. i enjoy my creativity and find that fiction is often preferable to fact (you seem to enjoy this on occasion as well, thought i find trying to use logical fallacies and statistics to encourage these fantasies to be a bore). professional help is unnecessary; both the sort of help that may encourage such whims and the sort that might oppress them.
I kind of hate to even do this, but: in over 70% of mass shootings in the last 30 years the shooter has been a white male.
(PS only 1% have been female.)
Correlate that.
I would have thought that it is more than 70% a white crime? This all has nothing to do with race and more to do with the places people are being raised. black crime is usually urban crime, gangs, drug dealing, ect. This is probably because of poverty, lack of opportunities, and the need to find acceptance from a "family" due to the disfunctional home life caused by poverty. During the early 1900's when italian and irish people made up the majority of the poor urban ghettos, they were the gangsters and dealers. Italian crime in 1920 was mostly urban crime. Environment is everything.
the white mass shooters are usually from suburban areas. Does suburbia spawn a specific type of sociopath? Is it a breeding ground for specific types of crimes? I would guess that it does. I think it has to do with the isolation that a suburban environment allows for. A disturbed person growing up in a suburban environment may face more social isolation than if they were to grow up in a place with a stronger more diverse community. On top of that, suburban kids are typically more materialistic, clicky, and socially isolated to their own "tribes" of like minded peers. I would guess that the feeling of being left out, of not fitting the mold, creates animosity and hatred toward the community, and in turn breed a specific type of sociopath. If you look at cereal killer profiles most of them were emotionally abandoned by their parents...molesters were usually victims of molestation....ect... I think that the feeling of abandonment by the community creates the mass shooter profile. Of course the individual must be derranged to begin with, but if that same person grew up in the south bronx, they may have developed into a different kind of criminal.
The media and the politicians are looking for a simple solution to very deep sociological and psychological problem...complex problems require complex solutions.
toasteroven, I don't know what the causal factors of these major differences in criminal behavior are. All I know is that something significant changed regarding both the amount of violent crime and who was committing it, starting at a period somewhere in the 1960s, getting progressively worse through the 1970s, and remaining high since then. That's what the data say, and they say it loudly.
Now, you could propose all sorts of different causal factors for that. Curtkram obviously has some ideas about what those might be, but most of his suggestions would be very difficult to analyse in any meaningful way.
Your own suggestion of environmental lead exposure is certainly something that can be measured (though historical data are unavailable or inconsistently collected). Lead is a known toxin with the specific somatic effect of reducing intelligence and self-control for those who've had high exposure during childhood development. We have reason to suspect that lead exposure had been increasing from the 19th century
The problem with that theory is: environmental lead exposure should have affected everyone who was exposed uniformly (unless you're going to suggest that some ethnic groups are genetically resistant to lead poisoning, which seems highly unlikely). Crime statistics clearly show this was not the case. Some groups became much more violence- and crime-prone while others in the same locations and sharing the same environmental exposures did not. I haven't run an association significant analysis on lead levels vs. crime statistics, but it would not suprise me at all if the association relevance of the two was very low: a bit like how doctors once thought ice cream caused polio because the two were seasonally correlated.
One aspect of the whole issue that deserves a closer look is the historical cyclicality of crime in the US. Strauss & Howe have proposed that there is a connection between crime and the failure of civil order in American society that has been repeating in a roughly 80-year period since before the Revolutionary War. There have previously been eras of high crime and low social order in our history, and they have all coincided with certain generational and historical patterns in our broader society. As a result of that, they proposed in their 1989 book, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, that we would see a peak in crime rates in the 1990s, followed by a prolonged decline. Note that they predicted this based on historical correlations and pattern recognition, and not any kind of "just so" story such as Levitt's abortion theory or this Mother Jones (LOL) lead theory. In fact, it happened more or less exactly as they predicted. That, to me, suggests their work would be a good place to start when looking for deeper causes in all this.
The good news, following from Strauss & Howe, is that crime rates are declining and will continue to decline for the next thirty-plus years (until the 2040s to 2050s, when they'll probably start going up again). They propose that this will happen because of a new generation reaching adulthood with a particular kind of shared experience of events (the Millennials), who are going to rebel against the culture through social order (the opposite of what the Boomers did when they rebelled agains the social order through the culture).
The bad news, again from Strauss & Howe, is that the next twenty years are likely to be a period of chaos, upheaval, and violence in larger-scale, more prosaic ways.
much ado about nothing, though perhaps other news organizations are reporting a different list. no guns have been taken away from architects, but i suppose many of you gun-rights activists can assume you were justified in your paranoia.
All I know is that something significant changed regarding both the amount of violent crime and who was committing it, starting at a period somewhere in the 1960s, getting progressively worse through the 1970s, and remaining high since then. That's what the data say, and they say it loudly.
wrong - violent crime started dropping off in the early 90s and is now at pre 60s rates. it was higher in big cities because there was a higher concentration of lead levels in the atmosphere compared to other places. crime rates have now pretty much equalized everywhere - except is still high in places where there is high lead content in soil and housing. Did you even bother to read the article I posted and the research they linked to?
I'm sorry if this doesn't match your sociological world view - but we know that lead exposure in early childhood has severe effects on behavior and cognitive ability - and dramatically increases one's likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior. This is why we got rid of leaded gasoline and lead paint in the first place.
"While there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil," Obama said at a mid-day announcement at the White House, "if there's even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try it."
in other news, president obama has proposed a maximum 5 hour speed limit on all roads and mandatory helmets for everyone. "because if there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try it." he said.
In other news, Wayne Pepe LaPierre, states that speed limits and traffic lights are not constitutional, so he's going to start running red lights and driving 60 in school zones. He also notes, that his new whites only compound, The Citadel, in Idaho is now open for slave trading.
So about that new legislative proposal to curb "gun violence": 4.5 Billion dollars going directly to who? Teachers (not for education but for "training" and "mental first aid training"), 4 Billion directly to Municipalities to keep 15,000 police officers on the payroll (Hey Chicago! Hey Detroit!), 50 million dollars to schools to create "safer and more nurturing school climates" (another teacher's union slush fund that will show zero results), etc, etc, etc. 4.5 Billion-that's more that the stimulus gave for Public Housing. And 4 Billion going to police. Everyone here see where the benevolent State thinks it should be spending your money? On more guns!
The belief is also that the broadly termed "mental health" (now administered by the federal govt) according to the President, is the reason for gun violence. How about the moral question? Where is the 50 million dollars to support the teaching of morality, right vs wrong, citizenship and encouraging people to seek answers and learning about these questions through their churches or faith communities? For all you secularists, where is the 50 million to teach ethics and philosophy and civics? All these mass killers (and a majority of all killers) come from broken or fatherless homes. Where is the 50 million to educate men and women about their roles as fathers and mothers? Not all human failures are the result of poor "mental health".
But that would just be too controversial, instead lets abuse the Affordable care act to deputize doctors to notify authorities that someone has a gun at home or ask children to rat out their parents if they have a gun at home. And, let's make doctors responsible to teach "gun safety". Please. Oh, but don't dare protect a doctor from refusing to perform against his or her conscience or notifying a parent of a child's condition because he/she thinks its the right thing to do.
There are 2 million Traumatic Brain Injuries each year (One every 15 seconds).
500,000 of these injuries require hospital admission.
Every 5 minutes someone dies from a head injury.
- 140,000 people each year.
- 75,000 - 100,000 in the U.S.
- Over half of the deaths occur at the time of the incident or within two hours of hospitalization.
Every 5 minutes someone becomes permanently disabled due a head injury. 70,000 - 90,000 of those who survive will have lifelong disabilities.2,000 more will live in a persistent vegetative state.
Over 50% of those who sustain a Brain Injury have been intoxicated at the time or injury. The cost of Traumatic Brain Injuries in the U.S. is over $48 Billion each year!
thank GOD president obama is putting everything he's got into this. as he said today "helmets designed for games on the field have to have a place in the field of all life's activities."
AGAIN, Maestro, your baton swings wildly. Physicians, studies have shown this to be the case, when they ask if there are guns in the home, it's an effort to discuss gun safety. Why? Because it appears, so-called responsible gun owners put their handguns under pillows, in shoe-boxes, in dresser drawers, on shelves in closets; anywhere and everywhere, but a gun safe. More children die from "responsible" gun owners, than irresponsible doctors. Fucking retard.
toaster, you didn't even bother to read what I wrote, did you. If you had, you would have noticed the whole section where I mentioned that overall crime rates had dropped significantly since the early 90s, but the correlations had not.
Where is the 50 million dollars to support the teaching of morality, right vs wrong, citizenship and encouraging people to seek answers and learning about these questions through their churches or faith communities?
your church and faith community failed. maybe someone, or some sort of entity, should step in and clean up after your failure. you were so busy talking about abortion and building golden altars that you didn't notice your flock has become corrupt. seems to me evil comes from the faithful more often than the secular.
if you think religion and faith communities still have some shred of respectable legitimacy, why don't you get them to start preaching about gun lockers, trigger locks, separating weapons from ammunition, and providing some sort of mental health treatment to those who need it. you've been so busy preaching about how moral you are that you forgot how to be moral.
Most fuckheads (including those on this forum) who do not support gun control have never had any "Event" happen to them or their loved ones. AND THAT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. You can discuss the second amendment and what freedom means in the postmodern context, but if you ever were at the point of losing a loved one due to an act of gun violence, you would know.
Architects and Guns-Who has one-who wants one
Rusty, you're an idiot. The Clackamas Town Center shooter shot himself, but only when he was confronted by an armed civilian who was drawing his weapon on him. Look that up too, fool.
And SneakyPete, no, correlation does not imply causation, at least not in a rigorous sense of logical implication. Did you have to look that up on Wikipedia, or did you hear it in middle school first?
But it does imply correlation. That means they're connected to each other, positively or negatively.
For instance, if you run a correlation analysis on the Brady Scorecard ranking of cities in various states against the homicide rates in those cities, you find that the correlation coefficient is 0.01. In other words, gun laws have no measurable connection to murder rates in US cities.
There are plenty of other things that are highly correlated to murder rates, though. And that means those things are connected to higher rates of people killing each other. e.g. you find them together much more often than not.
Hit a nerve, did I?
Jackass.
"There are plenty of other things that are highly correlated to murder rates, though. And that means those things are connected to higher rates of people killing each other. e.g. you find them together much more often than not."
Why can't you just say poverty?
Oh, you had something else in mind.
Racist jackass.
"Racist jackass."
The race cards are like dollar bills, when printed a million times they lose their value.
You resorting to this infantile name calling just shows you ran out of arguments Rusty.
spoken like a true racist.
paradox, gwharton has multiple times hinted at the "real" problem in American cities. This is part of his pro-gun argument. If I continue calling out someone for bigotry, my opinion becomes worth less? Interesting
The Jackass part I threw in because last commenter did as well. It looked like a fun thing to do.
SneakyPete, I suppose if you call that "nerve" annoyance with people who glibly repeat phrases they heard somewhere without seeming to understand what they mean, then I suppose yes, you touched that one. You got hit by some overspray from my response to Rusty being an ignorant, loudmouthed tool, and i apologize for that.
Rusty, on the other hand, seems to have gained his entire worldview from a high school sophomore social justice class and can't seem to fathom that his perspective on things might be a little ... immature and deluded. Out here in the real world, violent crime is a problem. Violent crime tends to correlate with certain things, which means those things are connected and go together most of the time. Poverty is one of them, but not nearly to the level Rusty seems to think is the case. Poverty is weakly to moderately, not strongly, correlated to violent crime. Gun laws don't correlate to violent crime or homicide at all. Neither does population density (which is sort of surprising, actually). Ethnicity demographics are very highly correlated to violent crime, and consistently so even when controlling for poverty, education, and income. Again, that doesn't mean they cause one another, but it sure does mean they go together a whole lot. That's just fact.
Rusty seems to think facts are "racist." I suppose that means that in Rusty's mind the FBI, Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, and US Census Bureau are all cross-burning Nazis or something, since that's where those numbers all come from.
See, now things are getting somewhere. I am not taking a side, and my glib repeating of a phrase (how you've gained insight into whether I understand the phrase or not is a mystery to me) is simply because find it useless when numbers get sprayed without further consideration.
"Ethnicity demographics are very highly correlated to violent crime, and consistently so even when controlling for poverty, education, and income. "
Show me this last part. I want to learn your ways. Please don't link to an article that says "Football player shoots girlfriend". I want you to open my innocent liberal eyes.
b3tadine, leave the room to the adults please. Your passive aggressive emotion filled reactions are not being taken seriously here.
Violent crime tends to correlate with certain things, which means those things are connected and go together most of the time.
compared to an example from the wikipedia article sneaky linked:
Example 3
As ice cream sales increase, the rate of drowning deaths increases sharply.
Therefore, ice cream consumption causes drowning.
The aforementioned example fails to recognize the importance of time and temperature in relationship to ice cream sales. Ice cream is sold during the hot summer months at a much greater rate than during colder times, and it is during these hot summer months that people are more likely to engage in activities involving water, such as swimming. The increased drowning deaths are simply caused by more exposure to water-based activities, not ice cream. The stated conclusion is false.
g, i'm not really getting the feeling that you do understand what this means, or perhaps you understand the concept but you just don't care for it. to be fair, you did say "doesn't mean they cause one another," but it sure seems like you're trying to imply there is a causal relationship. do you have a link to the source of your statistics? i would be interested in perusing them when i have time.
related to the above example, your are suggesting people wear snorkels while eating ice cream because of a statistically relevant correlation. i've eaten enough ice cream, as have many on this board, to know from personal experience that wearing a snorkel while eating ice cream is not a necessary safety precaution. if someone in your neighborhood is shooting at people and you need a gun to defend yourself, then by all means defend yourself. if that's not the case, i don't understand why you want to make-up an imaginary phantom so you have something to defend yourself from.
i don't think it counts as inflationary when the million race cards are always thrown in the same direction. it's only inflationary when the race cards are spread out among many recipients.
The ice cream thing reminded me of Kinder eggs, you know the chocolate eggs with toys inside them. It is illegal to bring them into the US because kids may accidentally swallow the toys. Only in the US of A.
curtkram:
Bradley Manning is neither a journalist nor a regular citizen. He was an enlisted soldier who took an oath and made his own contract as part of the conditions of serving in the military. Stealing classified information and calling it whistleblowing is breaking the law and the oath he took as a soldier. That is why he is being court marshalled and not waiting for trial in a civil court. Bad example to reference.
The ad hominem arguments also does not make for a good reasoned argument. Your statement that because you use your speech to troll, you would use a gun, if you had one, to shoot randomly is a logical fallacy and shows your own bias and ignorance about those who own guns responsibly.
Its ok to hate guns. You are entitled to hate gun owners. But the law is written and was on the books for 200 years before someone used a gun for a mass shooting. When the state tries to sidestep the will of the people (wait until tomorrow/s executive orders are anounced) or the law on the books, that is where the consent of the governed is violated.
The state can easily control guns through the markets, like they do many other things: Why not pass a 10,000% tax on ammo? The legislators would rather let the executive overstep his power because the real objective, the abolition of the second amendment, is a legislative impossibility.
"The legislators would rather let the executive overstep his power because the real objective, the abolition of the second amendment, is a legislative impossibility. "
Could you please explain this in more detail?
maestro "But the law is written and was on the books for 200 years before someone used a gun for a mass shooting."
They had muskets in mind. You can't buy explosive devices, land mines, artillery pieces at your gun store. Even silencers are illegal. It is totally fair game to redefine what a modern musket actually is. Automatic weapons are a fair game in this discussion. So are a whole bunch of other weapons designed solely for mass slaughter.
curtkram, the example in the wikipedia article (LOL by the way) is extremely misleading, because they've chosen a correlation with a low Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient (e.g. two things with weak monotone association by linear rank relationship, and thus likely to yield misleading correlation analysis due to poor linear association: ice cream and drowning may have a moderate correlation coefficient in this example - which is suspect anyway - but their Spearman value is low). Makes for a cool story in a wikipedia article, though.
The Spearman's Rho for demographic ethnies vs. homicide rates is very high (0.90 or higher). That means the level of monotone association for those data categories when ranked linearly suggests a very strong connection regardless of how strongly they are correlated, as opposed to the weak connection between ice cream sales and drowning whether those two data categories actually correlate or not. A high Spearman coefficient means a strong connection and suggestion of high association relevance.
As for the sources of the data used for this kind of analysis, you can get the crime report data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting system here: http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/
If that's too complex, a summary of the UCR data for US cities with populations over 250K for 2011 can be found on le Wik: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
The Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey data can be found here: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245
The US Census local population and demographic data can be found in several places, but US Census Quickfacts is probably the most accessible format: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html
The US Census also collects other statistics about people and households, including income, educational attainment, and many other things: http://www.census.gov/people/
You can find the Brady Campaign Scorecard information here: http://www.bradycampaign.org/stategunlaws/
Rusty, all the data used to control for income and education with respect to crime correlations came from these sources. One method used for the control analysis was to take data for two different but colocated ethnies with similar income or educational attainment distributions and compare them. So, for example, poor black populations have a correlation coefficient of 0.80 (highly positive) to local murder rates, while poor non-white hispanic populations have a correlation coefficient of -0.26 (weakly negative) to local murder rates. The income and education profiles are similar between those two populations as analyzed, but the murder rates associated with their share of the population in various major cities is radically different.
Aren't statistics fun?
" So, for example, poor black populations have a correlation coefficient of 0.80 (highly positive) to local murder rates, while poor non-white hispanic populations have a correlation coefficient of -0.26 (weakly negative) to local murder rates. The income and education profiles are similar between those two populations as analyzed, but the murder rates associated with their share of the population in various major cities is radically different."
This is not what I asked for, and you know it. Too many variables for the results to mean a thing. I asked you to show me where a poor ethnic group remains as violent as they get more affluent and educated. This is what you originally implied.
Don't bother. You hate the blacks. Your paw hated blacks and Italians. your grandpa hated blacks, Italians and the Irish. Baby steps. Your offspring will hopefully be less bigoted.
The state can easily control guns through the markets, like they do many other things: Why not pass a 10,000% tax on ammo?
hey the chris rock solution! make each bullet cost $5,000 then you'd really think about shooting that thang
Rusty, you're being obtuse. You asked me for how I controlled for income and education in the data, and I told you. The results are clear, and they get clearer when you throw in the same calculation for other ethnies (poor asians, for instance, have a -0.42 demographic correlation with homicide - moderately negative). I know math is hard, but that's how you control for multi-variate data in statistical analysis: compare data sets with similar values for the component you're controlling for and different values for the component you want to test.
More generally, the percentage of a population in poverty correlates to violent crime positively by a factor of 0.36 (weakly positive). Unemployment correlates at 0.35 (again, weakly positive). Failure to graduate from high school correlates at 0.37 (still weakly positive, but getting close to moderately positive). You can use those values and the Census income and education data to control for those components as well. As proxies for class status, you can even combine them.
So, in uncontrolled analysis the percentage of the population that is black correlates to the homicide rate at 0.80. That's a strong and statistically-significant connection with a high Spearman Rho (0.90). When controlling for income, education, and unemployment, the correlation drops to 0.78. Still very high. And the Spearman value doesn't change at all.
I know you think math is racist, but the single most accurate predictor of a local area's violent crime rate is its ethnic demographic composition, not income, not education levels, not unemployment, not gun laws. This is a highly-robust mathematical result: it shows up consistently across the whole country, and in fact the whole world. Since those results contradict a lot of cherished beliefs among the bien pensants, they predictably elicit all sorts of outrage any time somebody mentions them.
Funny how much supposedly "rational" people behave like religious fundamentalists when they are confronted with facts they don't like, isn't it? Go ahead and keep frothing at the mouth and calling me "racist" though. I wouldn't want to deny you the pleasure of denouncing the unbelievers and heretics to your buddies in the faith.
gwharton. these numbers look made up, but let's assume they are 100% correct.
you are singling out a single race and then comparing it to various immigrant groups (who have a much better support network, and chance to move on up).
But it doesn't matter. WHITE PEOPLE have historically been in charge of the most murderous, most violent, most brutal cultures in the last 2000 years. Post-colonialism era hasn't been around for that long (name a single black region in the world that hasn't been invaded by a white colony). You are taking a tiny snippet of current conditions and making these wild conclusions about nature of human beings in comparison to their skin color. Dumb.
You are clearly not a dumdum, but my god, your logic is blinded by hatred.
Keep digging, dude. You're way past the parody horizon now.
DUDE you are claiming racial superiority while clinging on to a gun. On an architecture website. You are the zenith of rational thought.
As an aside, Rusty is correct about one thing: the extremely high correlation in the USA between black ethnies and violent crime is relatively new. In fact, prior to the 1960s it was present but much less strong. Since that time, it has risen precipitously, along with US violent crime rates in general. However, as violent crime rates have declined since the 1990s, the ethnographic correlation has remained very high. It's still four times more predictive than any other factor we have data for.
Contrary to what Rusty seems to think, I do not think black people are inherently more violent than anybody else. They're certainly a lot more likely to be so now (statistically speaking), but it hasn't always been that way. Something in our society changed in the 1960s which brought into being a strong correlation between violent crime and black people which was not previously there (and did so over a very short period of time). Within that same time period, many other social pathologies became dramatically more prevalent in that community as well (a subject Senator Moynihan was deeply concerned about). Unfortunately, whatever it was we don't have any idea of how to measure it in a data set we can analyze along with the other information we have. Figuring that problem out would be an excellent subject for a PhD thesis in sociology, assuming you could find a university anywhere which would allow you to study it objectively and keep people like Rusty from putting you on trial for scientific heresy like a modern-day Galileo.
I kind of hate to even do this, but: in over 70% of mass shootings in the last 30 years the shooter has been a white male.
(PS only 1% have been female.)
Correlate that.
gwharton - the correlation is leaded gasoline. higher rates in the atmosphere in older urbanized areas, coupled with white flight and increased car usage after WWII and you get 30 years of high crime among people who grew up being exposed to high lead levels - which were largely african americans. we've known this for at least a decade.
I love it when a white guy (i'm guessing here gwharton), sees a correlation between crime and ethnicity.
Let's just breed ourselves out already.
I know Seattle is segregated, but come on.
gwharton, it sounds like you're trying to delicately tiptoe around removing the civil rights act passed in the 60's. wouldn't it make more sense to say it all hit the fan in 1954 instead of the 60s? maybe there would be less violent crime if racial minorities had different toilets and drinking fountains. obviously not, but it does seem like you're trying to statistically justify racism.
or is this a debate tactic the nra is emailing out now? when someone talks about firearm legislation, try to change the topic by making it about race? as has been pointed out, the several shootings that prompted this current push for new restrictions weren't committed by racial minorities, and they didn't target racial minorities.
and fluoride. i heard fluoride is a plot by the communists. i'm pretty sure there is a correlation between putting fluoride in our water and the rise in violence you are alleging. countries that don't have fluoride in their water probably have lower rates of gun violence.
Here's some recent coverage on the lead exposure/crime relationship.
Donna, mass shootings seem to be committed by white people in roughly the same proportion as the percentage of the white population of the US (less, actually, but within the standard error, particularly since the sample size of mass shooting incidents is very, very small). Same with most other ethnicities, who also seem to commit mass shootings at rates roughly equal to their proportion of the population. Mass killings actually seem to be the one type of violent crime where the incident statistics seem to match the overall demographics of the country within standard error bounds.
And yes, men perpetrate violent crime vastly more often than women. Not only is that statistically true, but it should suprise nobody. I mean, DUH.
curtkram, you sure do seem to have a very active fantasy life. You may want to seek professional help for your paranoia issues, though.
thanks gwharton. i enjoy my creativity and find that fiction is often preferable to fact (you seem to enjoy this on occasion as well, thought i find trying to use logical fallacies and statistics to encourage these fantasies to be a bore). professional help is unnecessary; both the sort of help that may encourage such whims and the sort that might oppress them.
I kind of hate to even do this, but: in over 70% of mass shootings in the last 30 years the shooter has been a white male.
(PS only 1% have been female.)
Correlate that.
I would have thought that it is more than 70% a white crime? This all has nothing to do with race and more to do with the places people are being raised. black crime is usually urban crime, gangs, drug dealing, ect. This is probably because of poverty, lack of opportunities, and the need to find acceptance from a "family" due to the disfunctional home life caused by poverty. During the early 1900's when italian and irish people made up the majority of the poor urban ghettos, they were the gangsters and dealers. Italian crime in 1920 was mostly urban crime. Environment is everything.
the white mass shooters are usually from suburban areas. Does suburbia spawn a specific type of sociopath? Is it a breeding ground for specific types of crimes? I would guess that it does. I think it has to do with the isolation that a suburban environment allows for. A disturbed person growing up in a suburban environment may face more social isolation than if they were to grow up in a place with a stronger more diverse community. On top of that, suburban kids are typically more materialistic, clicky, and socially isolated to their own "tribes" of like minded peers. I would guess that the feeling of being left out, of not fitting the mold, creates animosity and hatred toward the community, and in turn breed a specific type of sociopath. If you look at cereal killer profiles most of them were emotionally abandoned by their parents...molesters were usually victims of molestation....ect... I think that the feeling of abandonment by the community creates the mass shooter profile. Of course the individual must be derranged to begin with, but if that same person grew up in the south bronx, they may have developed into a different kind of criminal.
The media and the politicians are looking for a simple solution to very deep sociological and psychological problem...complex problems require complex solutions.
toasteroven, I don't know what the causal factors of these major differences in criminal behavior are. All I know is that something significant changed regarding both the amount of violent crime and who was committing it, starting at a period somewhere in the 1960s, getting progressively worse through the 1970s, and remaining high since then. That's what the data say, and they say it loudly.
Now, you could propose all sorts of different causal factors for that. Curtkram obviously has some ideas about what those might be, but most of his suggestions would be very difficult to analyse in any meaningful way.
Your own suggestion of environmental lead exposure is certainly something that can be measured (though historical data are unavailable or inconsistently collected). Lead is a known toxin with the specific somatic effect of reducing intelligence and self-control for those who've had high exposure during childhood development. We have reason to suspect that lead exposure had been increasing from the 19th century
The problem with that theory is: environmental lead exposure should have affected everyone who was exposed uniformly (unless you're going to suggest that some ethnic groups are genetically resistant to lead poisoning, which seems highly unlikely). Crime statistics clearly show this was not the case. Some groups became much more violence- and crime-prone while others in the same locations and sharing the same environmental exposures did not. I haven't run an association significant analysis on lead levels vs. crime statistics, but it would not suprise me at all if the association relevance of the two was very low: a bit like how doctors once thought ice cream caused polio because the two were seasonally correlated.
One aspect of the whole issue that deserves a closer look is the historical cyclicality of crime in the US. Strauss & Howe have proposed that there is a connection between crime and the failure of civil order in American society that has been repeating in a roughly 80-year period since before the Revolutionary War. There have previously been eras of high crime and low social order in our history, and they have all coincided with certain generational and historical patterns in our broader society. As a result of that, they proposed in their 1989 book, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, that we would see a peak in crime rates in the 1990s, followed by a prolonged decline. Note that they predicted this based on historical correlations and pattern recognition, and not any kind of "just so" story such as Levitt's abortion theory or this Mother Jones (LOL) lead theory. In fact, it happened more or less exactly as they predicted. That, to me, suggests their work would be a good place to start when looking for deeper causes in all this.
The good news, following from Strauss & Howe, is that crime rates are declining and will continue to decline for the next thirty-plus years (until the 2040s to 2050s, when they'll probably start going up again). They propose that this will happen because of a new generation reaching adulthood with a particular kind of shared experience of events (the Millennials), who are going to rebel against the culture through social order (the opposite of what the Boomers did when they rebelled agains the social order through the culture).
The bad news, again from Strauss & Howe, is that the next twenty years are likely to be a period of chaos, upheaval, and violence in larger-scale, more prosaic ways.
23 things from the white house;
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/16/president-obama-unveils-23-point-gun-violence-proposal/
much ado about nothing, though perhaps other news organizations are reporting a different list. no guns have been taken away from architects, but i suppose many of you gun-rights activists can assume you were justified in your paranoia.
Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in the movie theater.
good one, mr. president.
Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in the movie theater.
I wonder when Hollywood is going to get this message.
All I know is that something significant changed regarding both the amount of violent crime and who was committing it, starting at a period somewhere in the 1960s, getting progressively worse through the 1970s, and remaining high since then. That's what the data say, and they say it loudly.
wrong - violent crime started dropping off in the early 90s and is now at pre 60s rates. it was higher in big cities because there was a higher concentration of lead levels in the atmosphere compared to other places. crime rates have now pretty much equalized everywhere - except is still high in places where there is high lead content in soil and housing. Did you even bother to read the article I posted and the research they linked to?
I'm sorry if this doesn't match your sociological world view - but we know that lead exposure in early childhood has severe effects on behavior and cognitive ability - and dramatically increases one's likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior. This is why we got rid of leaded gasoline and lead paint in the first place.
if you don't want to read a mother jones article (that does have a political agenda):
Wired
Washington Post
NBER paper
Tulane research via BBC
more analysis
or it could be three strikes laws put into effect in the 90s
Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in the movie theater.
I wonder when Hollywood is going to get this message.
yeah when i first read that i thought obama wanted to ban war/violent movies
oh - and more evidence from drum
"While there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil," Obama said at a mid-day announcement at the White House, "if there's even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try it."
in other news, president obama has proposed a maximum 5 hour speed limit on all roads and mandatory helmets for everyone. "because if there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try it." he said.
and the children approve!
In other news, Wayne Pepe LaPierre, states that speed limits and traffic lights are not constitutional, so he's going to start running red lights and driving 60 in school zones. He also notes, that his new whites only compound, The Citadel, in Idaho is now open for slave trading.
So about that new legislative proposal to curb "gun violence": 4.5 Billion dollars going directly to who? Teachers (not for education but for "training" and "mental first aid training"), 4 Billion directly to Municipalities to keep 15,000 police officers on the payroll (Hey Chicago! Hey Detroit!), 50 million dollars to schools to create "safer and more nurturing school climates" (another teacher's union slush fund that will show zero results), etc, etc, etc. 4.5 Billion-that's more that the stimulus gave for Public Housing. And 4 Billion going to police. Everyone here see where the benevolent State thinks it should be spending your money? On more guns!
The belief is also that the broadly termed "mental health" (now administered by the federal govt) according to the President, is the reason for gun violence. How about the moral question? Where is the 50 million dollars to support the teaching of morality, right vs wrong, citizenship and encouraging people to seek answers and learning about these questions through their churches or faith communities? For all you secularists, where is the 50 million to teach ethics and philosophy and civics? All these mass killers (and a majority of all killers) come from broken or fatherless homes. Where is the 50 million to educate men and women about their roles as fathers and mothers? Not all human failures are the result of poor "mental health".
But that would just be too controversial, instead lets abuse the Affordable care act to deputize doctors to notify authorities that someone has a gun at home or ask children to rat out their parents if they have a gun at home. And, let's make doctors responsible to teach "gun safety". Please. Oh, but don't dare protect a doctor from refusing to perform against his or her conscience or notifying a parent of a child's condition because he/she thinks its the right thing to do.
b3ta i don't know if you are aware of the facts
There are 2 million Traumatic Brain Injuries each year (One every 15 seconds).
500,000 of these injuries require hospital admission.
Every 5 minutes someone dies from a head injury.
- 140,000 people each year.
- 75,000 - 100,000 in the U.S.
- Over half of the deaths occur at the time of the incident or within two hours of hospitalization.
Every 5 minutes someone becomes permanently disabled due a head injury. 70,000 - 90,000 of those who survive will have lifelong disabilities.2,000 more will live in a persistent vegetative state.
Over 50% of those who sustain a Brain Injury have been intoxicated at the time or injury. The cost of Traumatic Brain Injuries in the U.S. is over $48 Billion each year!
thank GOD president obama is putting everything he's got into this. as he said today "helmets designed for games on the field have to have a place in the field of all life's activities."
AGAIN, Maestro, your baton swings wildly. Physicians, studies have shown this to be the case, when they ask if there are guns in the home, it's an effort to discuss gun safety. Why? Because it appears, so-called responsible gun owners put their handguns under pillows, in shoe-boxes, in dresser drawers, on shelves in closets; anywhere and everywhere, but a gun safe. More children die from "responsible" gun owners, than irresponsible doctors. Fucking retard.
toaster, you didn't even bother to read what I wrote, did you. If you had, you would have noticed the whole section where I mentioned that overall crime rates had dropped significantly since the early 90s, but the correlations had not.
Where is the 50 million dollars to support the teaching of morality, right vs wrong, citizenship and encouraging people to seek answers and learning about these questions through their churches or faith communities?
your church and faith community failed. maybe someone, or some sort of entity, should step in and clean up after your failure. you were so busy talking about abortion and building golden altars that you didn't notice your flock has become corrupt. seems to me evil comes from the faithful more often than the secular.
if you think religion and faith communities still have some shred of respectable legitimacy, why don't you get them to start preaching about gun lockers, trigger locks, separating weapons from ammunition, and providing some sort of mental health treatment to those who need it. you've been so busy preaching about how moral you are that you forgot how to be moral.
Most fuckheads (including those on this forum) who do not support gun control have never had any "Event" happen to them or their loved ones. AND THAT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. You can discuss the second amendment and what freedom means in the postmodern context, but if you ever were at the point of losing a loved one due to an act of gun violence, you would know.
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