They don't have to be accounted for. They're meaningless overall. The gun control pill either lowers the homicide rate or it doesn't just like the blood pressure pill either lowers the blood pressure or it doesn't. I have provided numerous examples of the gun control pill not lowering the homicide rate. I don't need to explain it. I just need to show it.
Wrong. Wrong. Correct, but you don't understand what is meant by that statement and the implications. No you have not. Yes you do. You do need to show it but you have not.
If a blood pressure pill appears to lower blood pressure in one group and, at the same time, doesn't appear to lower blood pressure in another group, you have to conclude that the blood pressure pill doesn't actually lower blood pressure in any group and there are other factors at work. It should work regardless of the group. When gun control appears to work because you can point to low homicide rates in areas that already have historically low homicide rates but you can't point to examples of it working in areas that have historically high homicide rates, you have to conclude that the gun control doesn't reduce gun crime which aligns with what we all already know, that guns don't kill people, people kill people and that directing your gun control legislation primarily at law abiding populations will have minimal effect on criminal populations. This does not require a degree in statistics to understand.
Unless you have controlled for other possible factors, you can only conclude that the effect is smaller than the other effects and that there could be an effect (either positive or negative) or possibly no effect. Until the other factors are assessed, there's no way to say more.
California's per 100,000 homicide rate is almost always used as prima facie evidence of the success of California's strict gun control and as justification to employ similar strict measures elsewhere and on a larger scale. I'm simply showing that that evidence isn't actually prima facie, that it is not sufficient to prove their case.
I have said many times on this thread that looking at homicide rates, either per capita or gross number does not provide enough information to assess the effect of gun control measures on homicides. That is because there are clearly other factors (as you acknowledged in a sadly transitory flash of insight) that affect homicide data far more.
Certainly you must see after all of this that the state's per 100,000 homicide rate doesn't tell a complete and accurate story about its actual homicide problems.
No statistic tells a "complete and accurate story", but if you want to know about homicide problems, a good place to start is homicide statistics.
The bigger problem is your fixation on per capita figures. I don't know any other way to say it--you will be unable to converse intelligently on this topic until you somehow get past this mental roadblock you've set up in your mind.
The gun grabbers use the state level per 100,000 rate as evidence that gun control measures reduce gun violence and then go on to use that as prima facie evidence to support further encroachments on the 2A at the federal level and at other state levels.
That is a flawed approach which is just as futile as your attempt to use them to prove that gun control has no effect on homicide statistics. As demonstrated numerous times and beyond any shadow of a doubt, the homicide figures, whether per capita or as gross numbers do not correlate well to the gun friendliness (or unfriendliness) of a state.
And I also want to provide an example of what I'm talking about but in a different post. H
ere we have Everytown doing exactly what I'm talking about-using the state level per 100,000 homicide rate as prima facie evidence that more gun control results in fewer homicides and as justification for further encroachments on 2A rights at other levels of government. Notice they place California right at the top as their "flagship" example.
Do you really believe anyone here is unaware of this?
All you have to do to counter this approach is to show what I have shown more than once on this thread. Look at post #39, #74 and #107. No problem--no need to try to rage against the legitimate use of per capita homicide statistics--they can be used to demonstrate the lack of correlation between gun control policies and homicide rates.
But when you click on Louisiana, they guilefully use a different metric to show how the state's lack of gun control is evidence of how well gun control works. They use city level data, NOLA specifically, the most violent city in Louisiana and the city which accounts for over half of Louisiana's homicides.
Do you really believe anyone here is unaware of this?
All you have to do is demonstrate that by cherry-picking cities that one can likely show whatever they want to--because there are clearly other factors that affect homicide rates much more strongly than gun control policies. No problem--no need to try to rage against the legitimate use of per capita homicide statistics--they can be used to demonstrate the lack of correlation between gun control policies and homicide rates.
I don't see how this kind of comparison proves that California's gun control laws are evidence that gun control reduces homicides and Alaska's lack of gun control laws is evidence that lax gun control result in more homicides. California cities are just as dangerous and more so than Anchorage but Anchorage will exert more influence on the overall state homicide rate which is, frankly, not that much worse than California anyways.
The two states were actually only separated by 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people in 2020.
Well, would you look at that! Those per capita homicide figures actually are legitimate and do provide insight, don't they!
the variables don't matter to my specific argument even though they matter to other aspects of the gun control debate. They're certainly important when establishing WHY homicide rates are higher in cities.
If you want to establish causation--which is exactly what "WHY" means, then the variables do matter. If you want to say that homicide rates show that gun control doesn't have any effect on homicides you have to be able to take all the pertinent variables into account. Otherwise, the best you can do is show that the effect of gun control on homicide rates is too small to be detected in the presence of the other pertinent variables.
The fact of the matter is, race is a huge component of U.S. homicide statistics.
True or not, that's off topic for THR. As in,
nothing more on that topic will be posted here. The irony is that while trying to repeatedly discount the importance of other variables or effects on homicide rates, you have repeatedly pointed out at least one other variable that you say has a huge effect.
state level per 100,000 homicide rates are not prima facie evidence that gun control measures reduce homicide rates as evidenced by county and city level homicide rates which are not significantly correlated with a state's overall level of gun control one way or the other
Neither are city level per 100,000 homicide rates. Neither are gross homicide statistics. The fact is that in the U.S. homicide statistics do not correlate well with gun control. It's got
nothing to do with whether you look at them at the state level, the city level or the county level, whether you look at per capita rates or gross figures. Absolutely nothing.
btw).
