How's That Working For Ya Venezuelans?

[Dill]

(04-24-2017, 09:44 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Flawed research is worse than no research.  I am far from the only person who has claimed that the methodology of those studies renders them useless.  Let's stick to provable facts shall we?  Gun ownership is up and crime is down.  Both are trends extending back years.  Not disputable.  

Just to focus you a little bit here.  No one was disputing gun ownership was up and that crime is down. What is disputed is any causal relation between gun owner ship and lower crime.

You want to "stick to provable facts" and claim gun ownership is up.
But then you yourself undermine ownership stats by claiming gun owners do not report honestly.

By he way, flawed research is at least research. It is something, and may be corrected.  You talk about "outliers" while offering story about a single incident in Iowa. Then you state  "The basic point is that the higher the sample size the more reliable the data."  So what is unreliable about "sample size" based upon crime data of entire states and nations?  It appears you plucked a rule out of the air and claimed it applied to my sources, without explaining how.

Then after raising the issue of sample size, you inform me I am talking to a man who "deals with criminal behavior for a living" by way of dismissing the correlation I made between a drop in alcohol use and a drop in crime. I guess sample size and "outliers" are no longer a problem when talking about your experience?

Were I writing an article for a law review or a political science text on guns and crime, I could not refute a statistical correlation between alcohol use and violent crime by citing your claim that "it,s not so much"--even if I add a footnote explaining that "SSF is a cop who deals with criminals every day and this is his impression." Yet you appear to believe yourself a perfectly reliable source whose impressions trump statistical data complied in multiple sites by professional researchers.

Further, if after offering your impressions, you blow off reasonable, supported arguments with answers like "your data sucks," "throw a dart," and "shut your pie hole," while calling your opponent "desperate" you are really undermining any claim to know what you are talking about. Your argument reduces to "I just know" plus ad hominem.