Saturday, October 31, 2009

The Brady Campaign on the Lou Dobbs Shooting

The Brady Blog posted the details about the Lou Dobbs shooting, mentioning that Mr. Dobbs thinks it was anti-immigration activists. They provided the FOX News report on Lou Dobbs' statement as well as that of the New Jersey State Police, via Huffington Post.

What I found most interesting though, are the closing remarks.

By the way, The Dobbs family lives in New Jersey, a state with some of the strongest gun laws in America, with the nation’s sixth lowest gun death rate.

Across the border in Pennsylvania, the gun death rate is twice as high.


Can anyone explain, after reviewing that table showing the comparative gun death rates by state, how they feel gun laws don't work? Are the gun enthusiasts who insist gun control doesn't work looking at the same numbers I am? Are they really in agreement but exercizing that old strategy of never giving in and never admitting anything? Could people be so unscrupulous as to deny the obvious for fear of being inconvenienced?

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

8 comments:

  1. "mentioning that Mr. Dobbs thinks it was anti-immigration activists."

    Quite the opposite actually.

    You can't even make it past the first sentence without getting it wrong.

    This is why you have no credibility.

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  2. Can anyone explain, after reviewing that table showing the comparative gun death rates by state, how they feel gun laws don't work?

    What is that chart trying to say? There are some very lax states near the "good" end of the list.

    When I compared Brady scores vs FBI violent crime and then ran the results through an independent online correlation calculator, I found a correlation that was about 1/4 of minimum statistical significance, with the direction of the sign depending on if DC was included. I did not cherry pick, I didn't try various methods until I found one that works, I didn't try to find excuses when the data didn't match my notions. (I was expecting a correlation showing that more restrictive laws meant more crime)

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  3. Death rate includes suicide. It's not nearly as dramatic if you look at just crime. Murder rate in NJ is 4.3 per 100,000. Rape is 12.9. Robbery is 143.3. Aggravated Assault is 163.0.

    PA's murder rate is 5.6, Rape is 27.9, 151.9 for Robbery, and 224.8 for Aggravated Assault. Overall our violent crime rate is about 20% higher.

    But New Jersey's violent crime rate being lower is actually a recent phenomena, and can be directly linked to New York reducing its crime rate under Giuliani. crime rate. I did a chart on this a while back here

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  4. "Can anyone explain, after reviewing that table showing the comparative gun death rates by state, how they feel gun laws don't work?"

    Easy first up >50% of that number (and given ratio) is suicide (I assume you're still arguing that bullshit, but I'll let you make an ass of yourself in another post) then on top of this the number is simply "Death", so it also includes defensive gun use both by police as well as private citizens.

    Also while it includes gun deaths that are GOOD for society, as well as things like suicide which are sad things, it doesn't hurt innocent people and is part of a larger issue *you'll note that nobody is claiming Jersey or New York, or California have lower Suicide rates, despite their lack of guns*

    These "wonderful" numbers do NOT include non-gun violent death rates.

    So in this we get the magical numbers where the Bradies brag about New York's low gun violence rates while NYC's murder rates RISE!

    So yeah we're looking at the same numbers, just we don't cook them to make our wrong agenda look right.

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  5. "on top of this the number is simply "Death", so it also includes defensive gun use both by police as well as private citizens."

    Taking these "deaths" out of the numbers IS cooking the results. While you might be able to shoot someone in the back who is breaking into your car and call it a good defensive shot, in our state it's called "murder."

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  6. I never agreed with removing the suicides. They are as much a part of this as murders. And about removing the DGUs, I've never accepted that they're all legit. Some of them were unnecessary, you know like the ones where the fleeing criminal is shot in the back.

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  7. Of course you wouldn't. That would mean you'd have to admit you're wrong.

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  8. "Can anyone explain, after reviewing that table showing the comparative gun death rates by state, how they feel gun laws don't work?"

    This whole story is about how gun laws don't work. If New Jersey has such tight gun control that will protect us all, how could the incident have even happened?

    And unless I missed the part about this being a gang of Pennsylvanians, what does Pennsylvania have to do with this story? The part about not knowing who did it also precludes them from knowing where the guns used came from.

    The whole, "we have laws so it can't be us" excuse doesn't fly.

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