Bad Statistics in the Gun Debate

I saw an article pop up on my Facebook recently, and I wanted to respond to some of the statistical manipulations that are being used. Gun control is a debate that ends up getting very heated, but a lot of the problem is the use of dishonest statistics and dishonest rhetoric that doesn't facilitate discussion, but rather makes people talk past each other. I'm going to attempt to respond to some of the ones that I found in the article.

Mistake 1: Talk about gun homicide, but not all homicide

The first mistake that I noticed was in their Myth #2 (also present in #7). In the fact check, they cite gun-homicide statistics. Okay, fine. Not really a surprise that more guns is connected to higher gun homicide and gun murder. The problem is that gun murders shouldn't be the specific concern, murders generally should be. While it is certainly true that gun homicides get rarer if guns are rarer, that does not imply that the overall rate of homicide will go down.

In Myth #7, they note that women in states with higher gun ownership are more likely to be murdered by a gun, but the straight comparison of murder rates is not presented. If they want to make the honest case for gun control, they would need to demonstrate that reduction in gun availability lowered the rate at which women were murdered overall. Removing guns would not help if all the people were stabbed to death instead of shot to death.

Mistake 2: Mass shootings stopped by good guys with guns...

In Myth #4, they talk about armed civilians stopping. Mass shootings that end before the third victim are not mass shootings, and so don't get counted. Basically, they are stating that once a shooting became a mass shooting, armed civilians didn't rush in to stop the shooter. Fine. But an armed civilian who stops a shooting before the shooter hits three people prevents it from counting as a mass shooting. 

Basically, the good armed civilian is in a no-win situation here. If they stop the shooter before they kill at least three people, then they didn't stop a mass shooting because there was no mass shooting. But if they let three people get hit then they didn't stop a mass shooting, they just ended it a little early. It is still a mass shooting. 

Mistake 3: Self defense with a gun = killing someone

This mistake spans two of the myths (#5 and #6). They talk about the rates of people using firearms for self-defense, but do it in only in terms of shooting people. The only self-defense uses that they count for these statistics are cases where the gun is fired. A gun doesn't need to be fired to be used in self defense. The exact numbers are murky, but the estimates of defensive uses of firearms would put them somewhere above the gun death rate overall.

When talking about the defensive use of firearms, it is very important not to assume that all defensive use ends with the death of the attacker, especially since (I would hope) that killing the attacker is not the primary goal. Eliminating the threat is the goal, whether this ends in the death of the assailant or not. If the attacker runs away, that is still mission accomplished.



Some of the points in the article are interesting food for thought, like myth #3 about an armed society being a polite society, and some points about the loopholes are interesting, and might merit some discussion. I can't trust that it is honestly presented though, since they aren't willing to present honest arguments about reducing violence generally (which has been trending down, as one of their sources notes). If they want to attempt to convince me that additional laws will help reduce violence, they need to show that violence on the whole will actually be reduced, not just gun-related violence.

First Principles or Bust

So over the weekend, I got into a nice little... discussion with someone that had a very different view of the world that I do. They were a progressive, so most of our disagreement was about economics and the governmental involvement in education, and things like that. This is not particularly unusual. The problem was that we would approach historical events from different perspectives, which would, of course, change our analysis.

History is an important empirical test for theories of economics and other social sciences, but there are some insurmountable problems with the study of history. Mises pointed out that historical circumstances are always different from case to case, there are no fixed values (Human Action). Because there are no fixed parameters, it is impossible to parse the historical record perfectly. Instead, we have to approach from the other direction. We develop a theory and we look at history through that lens or 'understanding' as Mises terms it.

Some people might disagree that this is how history should be done, and that history needs to capture all of the relevant facts, and then form judgments from there. But what facts are relevant?  When we are choosing what facts to include in the analysis, we are using some theory already to decide if a fact might be useful. History is messy, which means that unraveling the true cause and effect is difficult. Discarding a fact you think is irrelevant might make deciphering the events impossible.

This means that we need a good way to determine what actions, events, and people are important before looking at the data. We have to have an a priori theory to give a proper understanding of history, rather than having a theory that twists in the wind and cannot bring insight to the facts of the present, or worse, a theory that can bring any insight to the present. A purely empirical theory will not know what data needs to be gathered and what data can be safely ignored.

So how do we get around this issue? All the data that we look at will be cherry picked to some extent, since we don't have the time to go through all of the facts of any specific event, and so the data we get will have a selection bias. I think the solution is as Mises presented in Human Action. We have to develop an a priori theory that can explain the phenomena that we are interested in, and then look at the data in that light. It is also important to understand that this theory has to be logically consistent, otherwise it is useless. No a priori theory will be completely falsifiable, since there will always be confounding factors to various degrees. Conflicted data with the theory would highlight these areas where additional explanation is required.

We need to make sure that we correctly select the axioms and starting points of the theories we end up using. It is extremely important that the first principles are solid, otherwise any theory will fall apart, or worse, be correct in some cases for all the wrong reasons.

The way I see it, historical theories can either be specific enough to be falsifiable, or general enough to be somewhat predictive. Some mix of the two, and specific parts of the theory can be falsifiable, but the overall structure will not be. As an example, we could say that in general, higher taxes will lower the growth of GDP (or something similar). Specific test of the theory will be if we raise taxes, the rate of growth of GDP might go up, which would mean that in this specific case, the theory didn't hold. But there are other confounding factors that would make that a bad conclusion, and we can't go back in time and try holding taxes at the same level.

I guess the main thing I'm trying to get at is that when it comes to history, it is impossible to get all the facts, and the facts you get have a selection bias. Therefore it is important to get the theory explicit and established beforehand so that others can challenge it directly. If people are operating with different theories, this needs to be discussed both before and after discussion of the historical facts.