Underseer
Contributor
http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1814426
http://www.realclearscience.com/blo...een_gun_ownership_rates_and_higher_crime.html
This is a hot button issue, and I'm hoping to shy away from the usual partisan hollering on the gun issue. We've got two meta-analyses showing conflicting results, but what you should take away from both studies is that whatever conclusions we can draw on this topic are weak at best.
I bring this up because as many of us are very concerned with poorly supported science claims. Even if you pick the metastudy that supports "your side" of this issue, if you read the study you should come to the conclusion that at best you get a very weak conclusion from the metastudy, and strong claims about the correlation or lack thereof between gun ownership rates and gun crime rates should be avoided.
We spend a lot of time either yelling at anti-science people or yelling about anti-science people. If we're going to be consistent about things, then we should probably not focus on the question of whether or not gun availability correlates with crime rates, because any conclusion you try to draw either way will be a weak conclusion. There are still plenty of other aspects of the gun control policy discussion to yell yourself hoarse if that's what you want to do, but if we're going to yell at people for drawing poor conclusions about GMO, vaccines, etc. from the available science, then we should probably avoid claiming that there is no correlation or that their is correlation, because quite frankly the evidence is all over the place,
http://www.realclearscience.com/blo...een_gun_ownership_rates_and_higher_crime.html
This is a hot button issue, and I'm hoping to shy away from the usual partisan hollering on the gun issue. We've got two meta-analyses showing conflicting results, but what you should take away from both studies is that whatever conclusions we can draw on this topic are weak at best.
I bring this up because as many of us are very concerned with poorly supported science claims. Even if you pick the metastudy that supports "your side" of this issue, if you read the study you should come to the conclusion that at best you get a very weak conclusion from the metastudy, and strong claims about the correlation or lack thereof between gun ownership rates and gun crime rates should be avoided.
We spend a lot of time either yelling at anti-science people or yelling about anti-science people. If we're going to be consistent about things, then we should probably not focus on the question of whether or not gun availability correlates with crime rates, because any conclusion you try to draw either way will be a weak conclusion. There are still plenty of other aspects of the gun control policy discussion to yell yourself hoarse if that's what you want to do, but if we're going to yell at people for drawing poor conclusions about GMO, vaccines, etc. from the available science, then we should probably avoid claiming that there is no correlation or that their is correlation, because quite frankly the evidence is all over the place,