This is what happens when science meets politics

[kenw 293]

The effort to move firearms regulation away from being a law enforcement/public safety issue to a public health issue has spawned a lot of false statistics and subsequent infringements (medical questionnaires asking if there are guns in the home, etc.), but this is the most egregious, slanted, and partisan piece of garbage I've seen in a while.

 

The comments are worth reading.

 

Gun ownership, carrying a gun linked to heavy alcohol use

[Kaiser7 33]

I own a gun, and I don't drink. I mean, there's really no data that suggests that law abiding owners commit crimes and things, so I guess you can't fault them for relying on making stuff up.

[Notsobittybuddha 1]

It doesn't necessarily have to be made up. There's other variables they may not have factored in or the results prove a correlation which they didn't interpret correctly. As exacting as they can be, there's always room for error. Also, the argument can be made that those in "free" america don't have to go through the hoops we do which can certainly attribute to the findings. Sampling larger populations is always difficult because there's no telling how skewed the results may be, especially with a sample size of only 15,000 representing tens of millions. I dont think it's slanted, egregious or partisan, they just need to work on a larger sample or do specific case studies.

[Babaganoosh 192]

Gun ownership, carrying a gun linked to heavy alcohol use Large, multi-state study shows certain gun owners more likely to drink excessively

 

Hmmmm. Cops? ha

[Mr.Shoot_It_All 13]

Very true. Disarm the state!!

[LorenzoS 100]

The author Garen J Wintemute has been writing anti gun articles for the Joyce Foundation, and anti gun group for years. Search the net for those two names together and they are seldom far apart.

 

In other breaking news, the KKK published a study that blacks and Jews are inferior to white Christians, while the tobacco industry published a study that cigarettes are safe.

[Mr.Shoot_It_All 13]

Hey if it has been researched and statistically shown then it must be true

[Krdshrk 3,877]

I own a gun, and I don't drink.

 

That's cuz you're not 21 yet

[MarkWVU02 47]

The only people who can carry in Jersey are police officers...are they suggesting more cops are alcoholics? I bet everyone who has used cocaine has had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich...could there possibly be a link?

[Mr.Shoot_It_All 13]

Well put

[kenw 293]

The only people who can carry in Jersey are police officers...are they suggesting more cops are alcoholics? I bet everyone who has used cocaine has had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich...could there possibly be a link?

That's my point. Statistically, any cause and effect can be demonstrated and proven to be true.

 

It may be statistically true that 99.6% of violent criminals drank milk as a child. Does that mean that drinking milk causes some wire in the brain to short out, causing a predisposition to violence? Of course not. Because 99.6% of perfectly normal, non-violent people also drank milk as a child. If you leave out the second part, the first becomes statistically true, even though it's obviously nonsense. It may be a flawed sampling, or it may just be that the people interpreting the results are ignoring the control results (regular people) to push their personal or political agendas (ban milk).

[Pizza Bob 1,488]

as Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damn lies and statistics."

[Sixtytwo327 14]

It's like the example of how ice cream consumption is linked to drowning... correlation (if it even exists) is not causation. In this case, a 15 year old data set form 8 states with voluntary questions won't hold up.

[bbk 188]

Correlation and causation arguments are proven to be fallacious, and, hence, illogical. In the case of this "study" the two reasons of why this argument is false is due to either, IMO, hasty generalization and/or argumentum ad ignorantiam (appeal to ignorance).

 

Hasty generalization: inferring a general proposition from an inadequate sample of particular cases¹

 

Argumentum ad ignorantiam: using the absence of proof for a position as evidence for the truth of the opposing proposition²

 

It's common for people and "legit" sources to make these (and other) fallacious arguments. In the end though, it just goes to show that people aren't interested in truth, but an agenda.

 

^{1 2}- Kelley, David. "The Art of Reasoning." 3rd Ed.

[raz-0 1,259]

Lets see. Police officer rate of alcoholism is over 2x the national average, are police in the survey? They ride around and carry loaded firearms. What about age? Children aren't likely to drive drunk OR own guns, are their children included in the original CDC survey that was meta-analyzed? Did the questions regard LEGAL ownership of guns? Then there's sex. More men own guns. The rate of alcoholism for men is roughly twice that for women. According to gallup, about 47% of men report personal ownership of guns, and only 13% of women.

 

I'm sure there are a ton of other things you can tear apart in the survey methodology when taking the survey questions as asked and subjecting them to meta-analysis.

 

IMO meta-analysis is the grade inflation of research. Academia wants to grow, they need to mint more professors as the BA becomes the new high school diploma. However, much like the degree getting watered down with marginal students, the whole publish or perish thing causes research to get watered down with lazy, uncreative research. What fiddly bit of info do 37 other studies imply in the margins etc. It's poorly constructed research.