Poll of the Day > Florida man shoots Burger King employee dead over slow service

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Zeus posted...

And it's worth noting that the areas with the lowest gun ownership rates have been home to many mass shootings, while the ones with higher gun ownership rates haven't.

Mass shootings are exceedingly rare events and make up substantially less than 1% of all shootings. It's rather telling that you're focusing on this for your statistic and zeroing in on a single state rather than looking at the data as an aggregate. In the world of statistics, we call this "cherry-picking".

I also note that you're not bothering to correct for population on this point. Not that it would help, because the event you're discussing is such an outlier that it is subject to enormous statistical skew.

Zeus posted...

And the state with the highest gun ownership rate -- Montana -- has one of the lowest murder rates in the country.

The highest rate of gun ownership is Alaska (61.7% of its population), not Montana (52.3% of its population). Montana is actually sixth. Alaska, for the record, had the fourth-highest homicide rate in the US as of 2018.

You appear to have lifted your data from the number of people living in households with guns, in which Montana is, indeed, number 1, but that's not the same as the gun ownership rate.

Zeus posted...

But if you want to argue access, look at Mexico.

Yes, let's look at a developing country that's running rampant with illegal guns, massive gang problems, police corruption, rampant poverty, and ineffective law enforcement and assume it will make a good comparable for the US. America's getting there, I'll grant you that, but you guys aren't quite at that level yet.

Again, you may want to steer clear of the cherry picking - the fact you need to focus on carefully selected examples rather than overall trends just highlights how bad your position is on this.

Or you could, y'know, look at literally any other developed country and recognize that the US has a murder rate multiple times higher than theirs.

Zeus posted...

So basically you're arguing that whether or not he had a gun, the kid's life was in danger... something that would have only been stopped if other people there had guns.

The kid's life would have been in substantially less danger if his attacker wasn't armed.

And no, if the attacker was unarmed it would not require a gun to stop him. That's one of the many reasons you want attackers to not have guns.

Not to mention, if there were people around with guns, all that would mean is that there would have been two bodies (or more) rather than one, which is not an improvement on the situation; by contrast, if no one was armed, there's an excellent chance that there would have been no corpses at the end of the night, which is the ideal outcome for that scenario.

Zeus posted...

Before you were distorting statistics, now you're just making them up.

If you picked a random adult out of the US, there's a 30% chance they have a gun. But police aren't doing pure random selection; they're far more likely to pick criminals than a pure random selection and criminals are more likely to be armed.

I gave 50% as a high-level estimate (hence why I qualified it with the tilde); I don't know what the exact number is, but that's in the ballpark (I would guesstimate it's within +/-10%).

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Zeus talks out his ass in a topic and gets shut down. Todays usually around when he shows up and refutes it. Praying everyone lost interest and he can say he wins by default.

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Zeus posted...

More importantly, it's certainly possible that he was an immigrant so it could be *another* country's education system you'd need to improve.

you never answered why you think he was an immigrant.

FrndNhbrHdCEman posted...

Zeus talks out his ass in a topic and gets shut down. Todays usually around when he shows up and refutes it. Praying everyone lost interest and he can say he wins by default.

I've mostly stopped expecting a response. He gives maybe two replies and then stops entirely, and once a new political issue arises the cycle begins anew.

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