Why only study gun owners?

Because, evidently, they have figured out the bathroom thing...


That, and hating the Police hasn't polled well lately. So, if nobody has firearms, humans wouldn't get drunk and fight, thus using proper separate bathrooms and not needing to call the Police...

Make sense?

"The results suggest that restricting firearm purchases among people convicted of driving while intoxicated might help decrease the incidence of violent crimes...."

Yeah you get where they wanna go with all of this.

Because if you get a DUI and buy a gun a few years later, you MIGHT commit a felony....

We already know that substance abuse is linked to an increased likelihood to commit crimes so the findings are not particularly surprising. As you said though, the key link is substance abuse leads people to be more likely to commit violent crimes rather than people buy handguns in order to substance abuse and then commit violent crimes. You can get a pretty good idea of the trajectory of someone's life more or less by high school by looking at their school disciplinary and grade reports. The trajectory of someone's life can be changed but it takes a considerable individual effort with some external support and usually requires completely excising their background that might serve to tempt a return to the bad old life. The question is like in Minority Report, is whether or not we should use imperfect predictors to more or less "nip it in the bud" before heinous crimes are committed. The problem is that usually studies leave out variables that might explain the real relationship (this is called a misspecified model). For example, it is possible that gang members are more likely to get DUI's and commit violent felonies over time. If they are in the dataset without being identified, then DUI linkage to violent crime is should be attributed to gang membership and not getting a DUI. I suspect that if they looked at marijuana users and firearms that they would have a similar result or cocaine, heroin, etc.

My best guess is that substance abuse reflected in DUI's is based on some people having an impulsive nature and a genetic predisposition to abuse of alcohol. Both of which would increase the likelihood of committing crimes in general as violent ones as the age old saying in vino veritas (in wine there is truth) about an individual. Anyone who has been in a bar knows that there are sad drunks, happy drunks, and angry drunks. The last category is probably more likely to commit violence against others.

There are a lot of misconceptions based on the left's idea that people are naturally good and that they would be good in the absence of _____________ (fill in the blanks such as firearms, unemployment, bad education, and so on). I tend toward the idea that humanity is a mixed bag where some are saintly, others are bad, and most folks have a mixture of good and bad in them depending on the circumstances and very possibly genetics.

boom boom said:

The question is like in Minority Report, is whether or not we should use imperfect predictors to more or less "nip it in the bud" before heinous crimes are committed.

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That isn't the way of free people. Basically, a whole bunch of various "indicator" misdemeanors would potentially disqualify you under these schemes. They will add to the list of disqualifying crimes over time. Basically, the 2A version of a chinese social score.

So 9% of people with a prior DUI get a conviction for a violent crime sometime in the next 12 years. I suppose that’s a high %, but you can’t punish the other 91% that won’t commit any violent crimes.

What about the Florida study that showed that permit to carry holders were 1/6th as likely to commit crimes when compared to a police officer. And police officers are convicted of crimes at half the rate of the normal population. The gun control advocates in the Florida legislature required that the crime statistics be tracked and the result proved the opposite of what they had hoped.

DUI is indicative of a lack of responsibility. The results are not surprising.

But, as has been said, the progressive left believes that people are basically good and that evil only exists as a result of environmental factors that they can exercise control over. Our Founding Fathers knew of the evil that resides within unrestrained humans and human institutions, placing checks on the tyranny of large groups of people, and leading to the institution of representative government in an attempt to reign in the evil of the masses while maintaining personal rights.

This is nothing less than a war between two polar opposite worldviews.

Absolutely ALL gun violence is by people that were not aborted as fetuses.

Therefore a direct link exists between the Right to Life and gun violence ...

The Government tried banning alcohol in the 1920’s and we know how well that turned out. People still wanted their booze so it directly lead to the rise of powerful crime organizations which we are still dealing with today.

Based on that experience it is not much of step to predict how banning firearms will turn out. The need for self-protection is one of humans basic instincts.

Cuz propaganda

I wonder if there are other civil rights which need to be denied those with a DUI. If they are inclined to be violent felons, should they be denied the right to vote? Hold office?

This is a dangerous line of reasoning.

Well, if you are desperate to find something "gun owners" are "guilty" of, you will snatch at the first thing you see.
Even if that violates the collaboration is no causation test of a hypothesis.
It's also an example of "confirmation bias," too.

Blind people seldom are convicted of DUI. Does that suggest that we blind the sighted?

I mean, really, I can make an assertion that female gun owners with a DUI conviction are less likely to have a DV conviction. (A flat-out "duh"-DV arrests are about 60/40; convictions run 90/10; water is wet.)

The term-of-art is "cherry picking." Which is why such things used to be peer reviewed, to expose such flaws in reasoning and evidence offered.

fireside44 said:

That isn't the way of free people. Basically, a whole bunch of various "indicator" misdemeanors would potentially disqualify you under these schemes. They will add to the list of disqualifying crimes over time. Basically, the 2A version of a chinese social score.

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I don't disagree with your take but unfortunately far too many voters seem susceptible to it. The number of disqualifiers are growing in a number of states and the red flag laws proposed might catch people that have not been arrested, let alone convicted of any crime. Given a large enough dataset, I can pretty much get a correlation with most things such as speeding tickets or failure to pay parking tickets will be have some correlation with violent crimes. James Q. Wilson's Broken Windows thesis was based on if you allow people to commit petty crimes without consequence, a certain percentage will go on to worse and worse crimes until they are incapacitated. Thus, most violent criminals will have a long list of offenses including DUI's but not all DUI's perpetrators will have a long list of violent offenses.

BTW, the study also uses arrests rather than convictions and I do know that sometimes placeholder arrests are made of violent criminals such as gang members, not for convictions, but rather to simply get them off the streets now and again.

CapnMac said:

Well, if you are desperate to find something "gun owners" are "guilty" of, you will snatch at the first thing you see.
Even if that violates the collaboration is no causation test of a hypothesis.
It's also an example of "confirmation bias," too.

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Causation is unimportant if it doesn't fit the narative.

Blind people seldom are convicted of DUI.

Click to expand...

It's disquieting, though, to see the Braille writing on the drive up ATM's.

The term-of-art is "cherry picking." Which is why such things used to be peer reviewed, to expose such flaws in reasoning and evidence offered.

Click to expand...

No one reviews anything anymore, takes too much time and they're all in a race to come up with damning statistics first

Kind of like Sylvester Stallone wanting to abolish the Second Amendment after his friend Phil Hartman’s murder...by his wife...who was a coke addict and drank to excess...but that had nothing to do with anything. It was the gun...

SharpDog said:

Absolutely ALL gun violence is by people that were not aborted as fetuses.

Therefore a direct link exists between the Right to Life and gun violence ...

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Don't give them any ideas.

boom boom said:

My best guess is that substance abuse reflected in DUI's is based on some people having an impulsive nature and a genetic predisposition to abuse of alcohol. Both of which would increase the likelihood of committing crimes in general as violent ones as the age old saying in vino veritas (in wine there is truth) about an individual.

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Correct (+many)

Chicken or Egg -- Correlation Not Causality -- etc, etc, etc
The weapon as witness to anti-social behavior... not its cause.

And yes, I'd "Red Flag" habitual Drunks/Mood-Altered Junkies/D&D Dastards . . . the Devil as usual . . . being in the details.

Yep, and transgenders are dramatically higher risk to commit suicide, but propose restrictions on their rights and watch the left flip time. It’s all about the end agenda of no firearms for citizens.

I would like to know the backgrounds of the 9% and the 2%.

This was a California based study.
What do you expect the results would be?

FlSwampRat said:

Causation is unimportant if it doesn't fit the narative.



It's disquieting, though, to see the Braille writing on the drive up ATM's.



No one reviews anything anymore, takes too much time and they're all in a race to come up with damning statistics first

Click to expand...

This is a peer reviewed article--Journal of American Medical Association Internal Medicine is one of the biggies--the Marketwatch website is summarizing the original article which is behind a paywall. I read the original posted on the JAMA website

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/ja...ign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=093019

One concern that I have is the dataset itself does not seem to reflect all CA handgun sales accurately as the study seems to have adopted the lowest point of California handgun sales and picked a certain demographic. They also do not adequately account for why older firearm purchasers are excluded as substance abuse with alcohol can often worsen with age. This makes me suspect the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. The fact that the law changed in 2000 which is not adequately accounted for in the data ignores a surge in purchases before the law changed.

"Lytton said concern over increased regulation likely contributed to the jump in handgun sales right before a 2000 state law limiting the number of handgun purchases to one per month took effect. Between 1998 and 1999, when the law was passed, handgun sales increased nearly 30 percent." https://www.revealnews.org/article/in-california-handguns-enter-2nd-decade-of-rising-sales/

The surge in this buying before the study data begins could actually skew the data as I would suspect that those most attuned to obeying laws were buying prior to the change in the law.

There is also a consolidation of race into white/nonwhite that is not adequately explained.

If I find the time, I might do a more detailed critique as they rely on a research method that I am quite familiar with and which I have a suspicion that it might be inappropriate with the dataset used.

Peer review, while better than nothing, does not generally try to reproduce the results--thus we have the problem of replication of studies. This is a systemic problem where it is hitting all of the sciences and social sciences https://infogalactic.com/info/Replication_crisis and it has also affected medical research. Even the hard sciences are having issues with most subfields demonstrating over one half of the studies published could not be replicated and even the same scientists are having issues replicating their own studies.

Pat Riot said:

Kind of like Sylvester Stallone wanting to abolish the Second Amendment after his friend Phil Hartman’s murder...by his wife...who was a coke addict and drank to excess...but that had nothing to do with anything. It was the gun...

Click to expand...

Yeah the psychic powers of guns are really powerful. It's amazing how they can beam telepathic homicidal and evil thoughts into our minds. They are clearly the most diabolical and manipulative of all inanimate objects.

Coke and booze are not to blame.