Gun controlFollow

That the line was drawn to show an exponential growth of intentional gun deaths compared to gun ownership, when it is not nearly as that.

I wasn't saying that there was no increase in numbers. It's obvious that there is. The more chances you provide for something to happen the more often it will happen. That's pretty basic statistics.

An exponential relationship is y = c ^ x (y = intentional deaths, x = Household percentages.)



I'm saying that it is more linear, possibly parabolic. y = c * x^2.

Edit:
The parabolic best fit would probably follow the black line until the point of intersection, and the red line on from that point, making a fairly nice parabola.

Edited, Oct 27th 2008 7:33pm by TirithRR

What's your problem? Is it the because I wasn't arguing for or against a certain point of view?

I was merely pointing out that regardless of your point of view, stretching stastics to try and prove your point isn't right.

It'd be like saying "Well if you ignore Japan cause they are pussies without a gun toting police force and draw a flat line, you can clearly see that there is no increase at all!".

Why should children be allowed to play with any guns, at all? I know it's a right of every citizen to carry/own a gun, but it's also the right of every citizen to vote but you won't let them do that until they're 18, so why not allow gun use to people only 18 or older? Don't like 18, how about 16, since that's when you're old enough to handle another potentially deadly item, a car.

For the same reason that you can ride a bike at a younger age than a 4-wheeler and drive one of those earlier than you can drive a car. Less potential to hurt others as well as slowly scaling up the potential danger level of the item. You can still kill yourself or another with a bike, but it's less of a danger than operating a car, and people still need to learn and get used to the rules of the road to operate one safely.

I agree with requiring 16/18 for semi-automatic/high caliber guns, but have a lower age requirements for less high powered guns.

Lol. Only because the trendline was drawn as an exponential graph function. The thing here is that we can't say for sure what a "typical" slope should be. If we take a straight 1-1 ratio (every doubling of guns, doubles the rate of firearm deaths), we end up with about half the nations plotted (which is a pretty small sample already) above the line and about half below. We plot an exponential line, and about 2/3rds of the nations are above the line with about 1/3rd below.

What does that say? No way to know for sure. It means that some nations will have a higher slope than others. That's really it. And interestingly enough, more nations have a higher slope than the US when calculated as an exponential than as a linear trend. What does that mean? Again. That's hard to say except that for some number of factors some nations will have a greater ratio of increased firearms deaths as the percentage of people in the nation own firearms as others.


We can run around in circles trying to find out why (and honestly, it's not a bad thing to study), but to simply assume it's the guns themselves that cause this is silly. If that graph shows us one thing it's that there really isn't a universal correlation between the two.

And simplistic as it sounds, the expression that it's not guns that kill people, but people who kill people would seem to be born out by that data...

Edited, Oct 27th 2008 5:13pm by gbaji

Not nearly as much as the phrase that accompainies it "people without guns can't shoot other people or themselves."

if the equasion is guns + people = deaths and you can't take people out of the equasion maybe you should take out the guns instead.

Are you honestly trying to say that in a world with no guns people would die of gunshot wounds?

Do you have any idea how much harder it is to kill someone with a knife or a blunt instrument compaired to a gun? or how much easier it is to control the situations where those kind of deaths would occur?

Man you're starting to sound like a total berk.

look at the figures above.

Do you think that the UK has a total ban on blunt instruments? the reason that the gap is even wider than the gun figures would allow is because we also restrict knives and other "weapons" making it extremely difficult to access a weapon of opportunity. thus we have lots of assults with broken bones and feww deaths, and for me i'll trade a guy being treated for a broken nose to stop the funeral TYVM!

No you can't say it's the exact same thing. An eight year old should not be firing an uzi. End of story. There shouldn't be any risk assessment involved.

Because changing the name of the incident doesn't make the kid any less dead?

In a way. It's certainly a cultural artifact that we feel we deserve, need, and should flagrantly use firearms.