|
here's an interesting possibility. by coincidence in the broader sense (which means this thread is old enough now that it can encompass a range of possibilities) i've been working on a criminology project and in the course of that have been looking at alot of studies concerning guns, crime rates and what if any relations there are between them...turns out that none of the claims which are repeated as certainties by the 2nd amendment fundies here seem to be supported by actual studies. for example, until quite recently, there was no single, agreed upon statistical dataset, no agreed upon conventions for defining various types of crime simply because police information is highly decentralized. studies that have tried to investigate correlations then would run into problems of data first of all. there are problems of method that follow from this, and then there are the usual but annoying problems of analysis-for-hire that have proliferated over the past decade or so as various interest groups have tried to paralyze coherent discussion by buying analytic outcomes through the mechanism of earmarking funding in such a way that the outcomes are built into acceptance of the funding--and even this is not systematic, so you can't really tell whether instance a funded by institution 1 is necessarily worthless.
what this all means is i am coming to the conclusion that most appeals to "studies" or "facts" made in this and in most similar threads are bullshit, nothing more and nothing less---but that the way around this is to do the actual work and get access to real data, read the real data and put yourself through the trouble of trying to sort out what is and is not good information.
i don't think most of the folk who have posted here have done a bit of that.
instead i think that positions are based on third or fourth hand summaries of data that people haven't looked at, often cherry-picked, that is accepted because it conforms to positions held in advance.
i'm not sure if this is the thread to do this or if it should be another--i suppose i'll find out--but that's the problem.
i don't believe that anyone has done the basic research they pretend to have done---what i've been seeing indicates that the positions staked out here have no relation at all to the positions you see outlined in actual studies of guns, violence, crime and the effects of regulation on them.
and i don't think there is a single position within the literature that i've happened to look at--so it's not a matter of simply standing received wisdom (this is an ironic term) on it's head--rather i don't think anyone's done the work.
rather than start barraging you with citations---what information--specific information--do you rely on to formulate your views about guns, gun control, violence/crime?
anything?
if you do, show the information--put up citations or bite articles.
there debates never get anywhere in part because they're not based on anything more advanced than the competing statements "i like guns" and "i don't like guns"....
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|