need debate help - liberal friend discredits CCW stats

[SMMAssociates]

Antsi:

The problem is that the anti's have "selective hearing" or something to that effect.

You can show them that one plus one equals two in ways that even a dead guy would understand, and they'll just stand there and tell you that it's wrong....

Meantime, we're in a situation where we're largely trying to prove that something didn't happen. That's tough to do even when preaching to the choir.

 

[AZRickD]

put briefly, there are many variables at play, and a statistically rigorous
analysis would control for the others before claiming to attribubte any
statistical significance to the presence (or lack thereof) of guns
specifically.

I have copies of Lott's book, "More Guns, Less Crime," as well as the paper he released in June of 1996 prior to the release of the book.

Lott uses multi-variate analysis. He controled for a myriad of factors. Was crime already going up or down in the state? What was the incarceration rate? Employment rate? Street price of drugs? Waiting periods? Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

To say that Lott didn't control for these things shows me that your idiot debate partner never read his books.

Flush 'em.

Rick

 

[another okie]

I've read Lott's book. He controlled for lots of variables. Social science, however, is not physics or math. It can never be as rigorous as those fields because you cannot control for all variables with human beings. I was not completely convinced by Lott's book that CCW reduces crime. However, it's obvious that CCW didn't increase crime, and in a free country that should be reason enough for freedom.

I think many gun-controllers think Lott has lost his credibility because he did something stupid on one of his surveys and either lost the data or made it up, I don't know which. But this was an attitude survey, not a crime rate survey, and basically irrelevant to his thesis.

I have also read some of the attacks on Lott, most of which were just stupid. I remember one writer saying Lott could not be trusted because he used different starting dates for each state in his CCW-crime survey. Well, duh! Different states adopted CCW at different times.

The bottom line:

1. Some of Lott's arguments and some of the arguments against him are extremely complex methodology questions that don't seem very important.

2. No one is going to be convinced by statistics. Attitudes about gun ownership is mostly based on your view of human nature and the community.

3. Constitutionally protected rights should not be subjected to utilitarian tests anyway, unless it's the survival of the nation. Even if private gun ownership did raise crime rates slightly, it's still a personal decision to be made by each individual, just like religion or political affiliation, not something to be decided by majority vote.