Killing Spree in AL

[TruckOSaurus]

mrstickball said:

vlad321 said:

Sorry work got the best of me, did people just discount the data in:

http://www.gun-control-network.org/International.gif

Because of Switzerland? I believe even in the shitty US educatoinal system they still teach statstics, and as I can remember correctly such a thing as outliers does exist. Also that one outlier (Switzerland) barely affects the correlation. Plot them on your Mathematica/TI-83s, I dare you.

It's called 'skewing the data', and it's something they must not teach where you live.

You see, that chart didn't bother to show crime rates, homicides, or anything other than intentional gun-related deaths (does this include sucides too? US suicide rates are higher than in Europe, also skewing the data). You can't use that chart to prove anything else other than more firearms = they're used more. That's like arguing that if there are more kitchen knives, there'll be more accidental cuttings. What would make a better case is if they compared TOTAL homicides, murders, or violent crimes to give the same kind of graph. Of course they couldn't, since Switzerland and Saudi Arabia (very high gun ownership %) have 2 of the lowest per-capita countries in the world for murders.

You could make the same statistical assumption about virtually every item on the world.

The only thing I get from this graph is that every country's number of intentional firearm deaths loosely follows a pattern according to percentage of household with a gun except for the US which is abnormally high. Why it is that way though, I have no idea.