Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by Acrobatic_Road on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @10:35PM (#31513657)

Because they are sneaking suicides into the numbers. If you split the data up between suicides and homicides, the correlation disappears.

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Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by jka on Thursday May 26, 2022 @04:46AM (#31516113)

Upvoted and agreed, that's a reasonable complaint. Can you provide sources that illustrate the absence of correlation after dividing the dataset?

I haven't yet, although I did find this publication from Boston University positive correlation between increased gun ownership and increased non-stranger homicide rates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/

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Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by Acrobatic_Road on Thursday May 26, 2022 @12:03PM (#31520019)

This post basically explains the bait-and-switch being used.

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-...

The post also questions how studies like the one you linked are measuring gun ownership rate. Every reliable study uses % of suicides with guns as a proxy for gun ownership rates. RAND notes the same thing: "A fundamental limitation for all of the studies is the lack of direct measures of gun prevalence. All of the authors use FS/S as a proxy for gun prevalence" https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...

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