On Jun 13, 2006, at 9:09 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
>> Switzerland is another frequent counter-example.
>
> I'm always troubled by 'counter examples' to flawed points.
> There's no counter-example to the claim that the combination of
> American "culture" and millions of guns and gun owners results in
> 10,000 murders/year.
>
> It's just bad statistics.
How's that? You have some examples that show both similiarities and differences. Similarity: lots of guns. Differences: on the dependent side, murders; on the independent side, imperial history, frontier culture, inequality, racial heterogeneity... You control for the similarities and try to see if the dissimilarities are significant. That sounds like standard stats to me.
>> Again, Archer says Australia, New Zealand, and Canada had similar
>> frontier stories, but currently have comparatively low homicide
>> rates.
>
> Do you realize how dumb this sounds? Looking at historical
> artifacts from over a hundred years ago, about countries that were
> tiny fractions of the size they are today with very little
> resemblance to the modern version, and trying to suss out reasons
> for differing homicide rates!?
So history's bunk?
Doug