Subject:
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Re: Swift was Right! (He just named the wrong people...)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 19 Jun 2003 15:23:46 GMT
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Viewed:
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2340 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Koudys wrote:
> > Maybe I just haven't seen the right studies or something, but you have no
> > real proof or data to support that statement, do you? It's just fuzzy
> > anti-gun speak that doesn't deal with actual issues but with imagined public
> > safety protections. I mean, it has no more support than would the
> > statement: "less hammers equals less death by hammers." Right?
> Well, besides being logical and such, there would be less deaths by hammers
> if there were less hammers.
That reasoning isn't entirely sound, and it omits relevant factors. If there
are fifty deaths-by-hammer, then we need to ascertain how many hammers were
involved. If one guy went on a hammering spree with one ball-peen, then the
elimination of 49 hammers isn't going to reduce the overall deathrate. In fact,
if the mad hammerer was stopped only by the judicious application of someone
else's hammer, then the elimination of the 49 hammers could have helped expand
his kill rate.
Now, you might argue that the total elimination of hammers would eliminate
death by hammers, and you'd be correct. However, as John Neal has pointed out,
that's not a realistic goal in the large scale. The building in which I work
has a very strict "no firearms" policy, and to date there have been no firearms
deaths in the building. But that's in a privately-owned and very tightly
controlled environment, rather than the open arena of a nation.
> Just as, as John points out, there would be less deaths by cars if there
> were less cars. Do I need a study to show me the infallible logic of the
> point?
It's entirely fallacious, unfortunately, because it equates "rate of
occurrence" with "number of actors," and you just can't make that assumption.
Only if each hammer or car or gun causes exactly one death can you say that the
elimination of any portion of those guns will correlate to a reduction in
deathrate.
The fact is that each gun can cause zero deaths or fifty deaths or anywhere in
between, and there can therefore be no neat correlation between number of guns
and number of deaths.
Dave!
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