When Something Stinks

30,000 people die every year from “Gun Violence” Its a nice round number, also it doesn’t expire it seems for as long as I’ve been looking at the numbers. Of course don’t look at the numbers that ARE changing, concealed weapons permits, and gun ownership….but we’ve been down that road before.

Still since the gun control ideology is a documented failure they have to cook the numbers a lot. One big one is “Gun Death” and noting that the United States has the “Highest Gun Death”…well no, we don’t. Oh “Highest Gun Death from Civilized Nations!” You really want to point fingers at all those nations and call them not “civilized”? OH! “Highest Gun Death from Civilized nations not at war!” were “War” is defined as “Anything We Want”.

Of course “Gun Death” is a foolish metric, because it assumes that one form of murder or accident is more relevant than another. It also seems to think that if 15 people get stabbed, its better than 5 people getting shot.

That brings us back to this 30,000 number. Approximately 17,000 of these “Gun Deaths” are suicides. For anybody rational that’s a non-starter, and it cripples their shocking numbers. You see somebody who was going to kill themselves with a gun will probably figure something new out. Also “Gun Suicide” is only about half of the Suicides in America.

Also another thing to note is national suicide-rates are pretty well documented, and the United States is about the middle of the pack when it comes to suicide, and certainly there isn’t any correlation to guns CAUSING suicide (or restricting guns PREVENTING suicide).

Doesn’t stop the antis from Doubling-Down, and presenting “Studies” on suicide.

The drum the antis beat is this one: “Many suicide attempts occur impulsively during a crisis.”, implying that having guns around are somehow allowing suicide to happen. Let’s look at the study:

The Houston study interviewed 153 survivors of nearly-lethal suicide attempts, ages 13-34. Survivors of nearly-lethal attempts were thought to be more like suicide completers due to the medical severity of their injuries or the lethality of the methods used. They were asked: “How much time passed between the time you decided to complete suicide and when you actually attempted suicide?”

One in four deliberated for less than 5 minutes! And nine out of ten deliberated less than a day (Simon 2005).

24% said less than five minutes

24% said 5-19 minutes

23% said 20 minutes to 1 hour

16% said 2-8 hours

13% said 1 or more days

Wow! OK this is a bit of a Mess, let’s clean it up a little. First up this “Houston Study” was written in 2001, and I can’t find the original report, “Houston” is not the researcher name, so I suspect its the city. No word if the interviews were all from Houston, if so we have a sample error #1. Isolated geographical study might have atypical information. Just food for thought, it seems the places with the worst suicide rates are ones that have long dark winters. This isn’t isolated to America, Scandinavia has horrible suicide rates, and I suspect most of them are during the dark months.

Rock Solid Sample Error #2. N Value! The study doesn’t say if the samples were all gathered in one calender year, but even if they were, a sample number of 153 in a year when there were 33,000 suicides nationally. That’s a whopping 0.51% sampled. So we’re looking at a small isolated group. Also of that 13% go against their hypothesis.

Really this “Study” raises more questions than it answers, but I think its pretty clear that it stinks, and attempts to use such spurious numbers is little more than typical blood-dancing.

They SHOULD be ashamed, and the fact that they aren’t should be a concern.