(May 12, 2023 at 5:36 pm)arewethereyet Wrote: If the bad guys would just wear their N95 masks we would know to pelt them with sesame seeds.

He seems to be convinced that if everyone had guns, only The Bad Guys would get shot. 

Boru

(May 12, 2023 at 6:46 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(May 12, 2023 at 5:36 pm)arewethereyet Wrote: If the bad guys would just wear their N95 masks we would know to pelt them with sesame seeds.

He seems to be convinced that if everyone had guns, only The Bad Guys would get shot. 

Boru

I am convinced that he is confused about many topics.

I say we do it. Later... we laugh when they whine about how all of their terrorist thought leaders keep dying because they look like rapists and they were trying to ring doorbells to get out word of the great replacement before getting gunned down by whatever toddler was home and within distance of their safety rifle.

(May 11, 2023 at 5:43 am)FlatAssembler Wrote:

(May 10, 2023 at 10:57 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Excellent, and so..we can scientifically say that there are @ 300k unreported crimes involving a firearm going on every year.  Brandishing and threatening are, ofc, illegal in the us.

No, it's almost an order of a magnitude more. There are, according to the Gary Kleck's study (and quite a few other studies arrive at a similar result), around 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. In about 20% of them, the gun is actually fired. The 300k is just the Gary Kleck's estimate of the number of people who have been actually saved by guns, who would die if they hadn't had a gun. And, to the best of my knowledge, no other study tried to estimate how many lives are saved by guns each year. So, the Gary Kleck's study is the best data we have on this, and we have to accept it.

It should be pointed out that "estimates" are not data. They are extrapolations. What data are these estimates based upon, that we should regard the extrapolations as useful?

(May 11, 2023 at 10:59 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: Why exactly would you need some high-tech weapon to commit mass shooting? I understand why you would need a high-tech weapon, which can shoot very fast and with high precision, to stop a mass shooting: if the weapon you are trying to stop the shooting (by injuring the shooter) with is not precise, you might harm innocent people while trying to do that.

You don't need a "high-tech" weapon to commit mass-murder. The AR platform is sixty years old as a design, and utilizes nothing more than machined metal, the same as guns of the preceding 80 or so years (i.e. going back to 1880 with the Maxim). And a weapon can be highly accurate without being modern; indeed, American snipers in WWII often preferred the Springfield 1903 to the M-1 Garand precisely because the older weapon was indeed more precise.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that in a mass-shooting, the crucial point is not whether the shooter has more-modern weaponry than the responding units. The fact is that no matter how "modern" the ARs in the trunks of cop cars are, they are still going to be three or four minutes later than the opening shots. You can give the cops the best weapons in the world, but they will always be later than your putative mass-shooter. Their Boyd loop is already interrupted before it's started to work at all, because a mass-murderer holds the initiative of choice of time and place.

I mean, until we get the boys in blue some Jewish space lasers and whatnot.

(May 11, 2023 at 11:04 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: A terrible study is still better than a-priori reasoning, and a-priori reasoning is better than intuition.

A terrible study proves nothing -- except perhaps that the author is a sloppy investigator or bad at designing experiments. It is just as useless as intuition, so neither should be taken as gospel. At that point we should design and execute a well-designed study.

I suspect that on this topic, the public opinions have hardened so much that no researcher will get a straight answer.

(May 11, 2023 at 9:34 pm)Jackalope Wrote:

(May 11, 2023 at 11:07 am)Helios Wrote: Sorry but it's a garbage study written by a hack 

Not to mention that absent some objective criteria "better" is a subjective value judgment.

Also, as someone who works with data every day - garbage data is garbage. It's a bit like a syllogism with garbage premises. Garbage in, garbage out. "BuT iT's ThE bEsT wE HaVE!!!!!1111!!!". It isn't. It's one that produced a result gun nuts like. It's methodology is trash, as a result the data is trash, and it's conclusions are trash.

Kleck's work is oft-refuted garbage and nobody ought spend additional effort to debunk it.

Then point me to any other study that tried to estimate the number of lives saved by guns. As far as I know, there isn't any. There are some other studies that tried to estimate the number of defensive gun uses per year, the vast majority of them concluding there are millions of defensive gun uses per year. But no study other than Gary Kleck's one tries to estimate the number of lives saved by defensive gun use.

(May 13, 2023 at 2:24 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(May 11, 2023 at 11:04 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: A terrible study is still better than a-priori reasoning, and a-priori reasoning is better than intuition.

A terrible study proves nothing -- except perhaps that the author is a sloppy investigator or bad at designing experiments. It is just as useless as intuition, so neither should be taken as gospel. At that point we should design and execute a well-designed study.

I suspect that on this topic, the public opinions have hardened so much that no researcher will get a straight answer.

Oh really? Keep in mind that, to the vast majority of doctors at the time, the Semmelweis'es work seemed like a terrible study. It seemed to use bad methodology and to arrive at pseudoscientific-sounding conclusions. Levy commented both that the methodology is bad (he said: "Why wasn't a simpler and more convincing experiment performed, to simply stop all the anatomical work?") and that the conclusions are implausible (that "implausibly small" particles from a corpse can turn you into a corpse if they touch your blood, and that washing your hands with some substances solves that). So, was it the right conclusion that Semmelweis was incompetent? Of course not.

(May 13, 2023 at 2:15 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(May 11, 2023 at 10:59 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: Why exactly would you need some high-tech weapon to commit mass shooting? I understand why you would need a high-tech weapon, which can shoot very fast and with high precision, to stop a mass shooting: if the weapon you are trying to stop the shooting (by injuring the shooter) with is not precise, you might harm innocent people while trying to do that.

You don't need a "high-tech" weapon to commit mass-murder. The AR platform is sixty years old as a design, and utilizes nothing more than machined metal, the same as guns of the preceding 80 or so years (i.e. going back to 1880 with the Maxim). And a weapon can be highly accurate without being modern; indeed, American snipers in WWII often preferred the Springfield 1903 to the M-1 Garand precisely because the older weapon was indeed more precise.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that in a mass-shooting, the crucial point is not whether the shooter has more-modern weaponry than the responding units. The fact is that no matter how "modern" the ARs in the trunks of cop cars are, they are still going to be three or four minutes later than the opening shots. You can give the cops the best weapons in the world, but they will always be later than your putative mass-shooter. Their Boyd loop is already interrupted before it's started to work at all, because a mass-murderer holds the initiative of choice of time and place.

I mean, until we get the boys in blue some Jewish space lasers and whatnot.

Which is basically what I said.

(May 13, 2023 at 6:38 am)FlatAssembler Wrote:

(May 13, 2023 at 2:24 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: A terrible study proves nothing -- except perhaps that the author is a sloppy investigator or bad at designing experiments. It is just as useless as intuition, so neither should be taken as gospel. At that point we should design and execute a well-designed study.

I suspect that on this topic, the public opinions have hardened so much that no researcher will get a straight answer.

Oh really? Keep in mind that, to the vast majority of doctors at the time, the Semmelweis'es work seemed like a terrible study. It seemed to use bad methodology and to arrive at pseudoscientific-sounding conclusions. Levy commented both that the methodology is bad (he said: "Why wasn't a simpler and more convincing experiment performed, to simply stop all the anatomical work?") and that the conclusions are implausible (that "implausibly small" particles from a corpse can turn you into a corpse if they touch your blood, and that washing your hands with some substances solves that). So, was it the right conclusion that Semmelweis was incompetent? Of course not.

This is just ‘they laughed at Galileo’. Simply because Semmelweis was right doesn’t justify concluding that Kleck is.

Boru