Re: AW: AW: crime in big cities and Europe

From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Wed Jun 21 2000 - 17:16:26 MDT


Karsten Baender wrote:
> Though I have a list of the crimes per state and per city (for the bigger
> ones) I lack a corresponding list with the gun control laws so I could do
> this comparison. But I'm sure something like that can be found on the net.
> It is indeed a big problem of comparing the two continents. Anyway, the
> social differences are big and so I doubt that we would get to good results
> using this method. But as I would like to present this to my course, could
> you perhaps give me your source of data or a hint where I can find facts to
> prove your theory?
>

I recommend you go to www.guncite.com, which is an excellent resource on
gun stats and references...

>
> Well, there's a word: I trust only in the statistics I have falsified
> myself. I have studied political economics before switching to law, and my
> statistics teacher began his second course with the book "How to lie with
> statistics". It was very, very interesting to see how this can work. As most
> people do not understand this, they put a blind trust in anything that is
> shown with numbers.

Yes, this is why I recommend John Lott's book "More Guns, Less Crime",
because he studied all FBI crime stats from 1979 to 1995. The next
largest study done by anyone else on geographic areas was a cherry
picked study done by an anti-gun researcher of five different counties
at five different period where numbers were selected so as to give the
desired result.



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