Luis M. Rocha @lmrocha@qoto.org

@freemo @mike805 I posted papers in response to you saying there is no evidence that more guns increase mortality. The papers I posted are 100% relevant to the discussion. In both individual households and society at large, greater availability of guns leads to higher mortality (after controlling for all sorts of demographic factors) , not just in suicide but also in homicide rates.

You want to argue that such analysis is irrelevant to our discussion, which is absurd. It is very much the central point.

You also want to argue that those papers are not considering the whole gestalt of the problem, because they don't account for crimes guns may have prevented. First, that is an orthogonal problem. Even if guns were shown to prevent some crimes (no evidence of that in gun use by civilians), the papers I referred show that, OVERALL, more guns, more death. That is, any putative reduction in crime due to guns, is not sufficient to prevent an increase in mortality with more guns. Now, if this is a topic that interests you, by all means go ahead and publish research that shows that guns reduce some forms of crime, if you can. But a loose hypothesis you have without evidence, does not invalidate the overwhelming conclusion of the papers I showed you. Your dismissal of those, without any peer-reviewed counter evidence is, to use the expression you so like to use, dishonest.

@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj "be prepared" is not the same as "be armed". I was raised Catholic, and the idea of using a Christian conception of God to defend gun-based self-defense is, frankly, diabolical---especially when we know it leads to incident children being killed over and over again.

@freemo @mike805 the papers I sent are not irrelevant. They are precisely on topic, well performed analyses. You just don't like their results. That's a different matter. Hell, I think that gravity is a bitch, but won't waste time arguing against newton and falling apples.

@mike805 @thatguyoverthere @freemo @pj wow, so we do have the Gun-Jesus figure after all. Who needs the cross when you have the guns....

@freemo @mike805 alas, science is not based on the criteria *you* set forth. I've sent you a large list of peer-reviewed papers from the best medical journals in the world. You say they don't meet *your* criteria and don't send me any paper that remotely validates your claims. Well, good luck with the Dr.Freemo journal!

@mike805 @freemo the argument for uncontrolled guns access is not logical. It comes from some metaphysical belief in "God given rights” or from "that's what the founding fathers wanted." It is not based on any logical induction from real evidence. You guys claim guns reduce violent crime, but evidence shows exactly the opposite. This is not logic, it's belief. My take is that you have drunk so much Kool aid that you cannot distinguish belief from evidence and also lost empathy for others, even kids in school.

@freemo @mike805 you keep talking about those numbers about guns and reducing rape and such, but I'm still waiting for the peer-reviewed analysis of those numbers. Can you send the DOIs?

@freemo @mike805 no, the literature is quite clear: more guns, higher mortality, in the home, in society

@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj God is besides the point here. The constitution is to establish a secular society for believers and unbelievers. Besides, I take take issue with equating guns at least with Christianity. The gospels are very clear about Jesus' thoughts on self -defense. You need to be diabolical (in the original sense of the word) to make a connection between "turn the other cheek” and the 2A. I think his surrender to crucifixion is quite clear on that note.

@freemo @mike805 you don't understand, the "professional distinction" you care about is irrelevant for the fact that 1) guns are the leading cause of children death in there USA, and 2) a lot of people make money from that.

Thought experiment: you guys are such believers in the 2A. Surely you think it is of such great importance that we should at least consider that the role of government is to provide guns at cost (no profit) to the population. Do you think that if we removed cost from the equation the NRA would exist and there would be so many guns in the population?

Your are siding with the gun profiteers who value profit over life, not some grand constitutional principle.

@freemo @mike805 you are not the arbiter of "proper analysis" on your own.

@freemo @mike805 no, you say that the copious literature on the topic---unequivocally showing that more guns, more crime---is wrong. So you, not I, have to demonstrate with peer-reviewed analysis that that body of work is incorrect. Otherwise you are just some guy shouting from the speaker's corner of the internet

@freemo @mike805 you are easily dismissed, and sound like l you need a voight-kampff test, when you want to tell the parents of children who had to identify body parts of their 6 year-olds that the carnage was not really from an automatic weapon, but a semi-automatic. Your distinction my be relevant to the "professional" profiteering gun apologists, but certainly not to the victims.

@mike805 @freemo @thatguyoverthere vehicles ARE massively regulated! That is the point.

@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj that is not the point I made. I was pointing to the capriciousness that gun profiteering apologists use when interpretating the 2A. All concepts that it trades in have changed dramatically, but the apologists treat the inconvenient bits as, well 'it's not like that now”, and the bits they care about as immutable, reified text that only other amendments can adapt.

As I said, all this is legal interpretation that depends only on a few lackeys the profiteering oligarchy pays up to sit on the supreme court---in another profound constitutional blunder. It is very hard to fight oligarchy, but the youth whose lives it values less than profit may yet have the power to change things.

@freemo @mike805 yes, but those are not the ones used in school shootings and which the majority of the population wants to regulate. It's they killing machines.

Also, no one, except killing machine profiteering apologists, cares about the distinction between automatic or semi-automatic. The available high capacity, semi-automatic models are automatic enough in their killing design and need to be regulated.

@freemo @mike805 you can repeat your beliefs all you want. That does not demonstrate anything. Send me your peer-reviewed analysis and I'll check it out.

@freemo @icedquinn @mike805 I did not see your great detail explanation. Randomized control trials, and their pseudo variants, are hard for network causality, but excellent for the number of variables in these studies. Without them there were be no pharmaceutical approvals. The A/B testing on which tech and consumer services depend, similarity. Granger causality is a very nice measure, but it is still a correlational predictive measure that does not do well beyond pairwise interactions, etc. But if you have a peer-reviewed paper with granger causality analysis of the gun/mortality/violence situation, by all means send it.

@freemo @thatguyoverthere @mike805 no it's not. Comparison is essential for making laws and argue about them.

@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo so why do you need driver's licenses and insurance to operate a vehicle?