This is a group that has an agenda, after all. I don’t buy that their data collecting methods were random. They skew the statistics to lean in a manner they want them to.
Interviewing kids from the inner cities and mixing those results with interviews from kids in different areas may give them the ratios they present, but it’s not an honest depiction of reality.
If 25 kids in one school see the same shooting take place, and 80 kids in another school have never seen a shooting take place, there is your 1 in 4 ratio. It sounds like there were multiple shootings but in this example it was just 1 incident. They present the 1:4 ratio in an attempt to make it seem like there are more shootings involving teenagers than there actually are.
To be fair, you have no idea since you don’t know much about statistics in general nor about the data gathering methodology of the studies in question.
You have an instinctive distrust of the conclusions and that may be valid. But you are leaping to the assumption that the study is incorrect and then looking for any way to justify your conclusion. Why don’t you start by familiarizing yourself with how the data was gathered and then decide if it is accurate?
It doesn’t sound anything like multiple shootings to me. The 1 in 4 simply means, to me, that if you put a population into a hat, and picked out a name, there is a 1 in 4 chance that person witnessed a shooting sometime in their life. That’s all. That statistic is not saying anything about how many shootings there are, just how many people have direct experience with a shooting.
Now, will some people not stop to think about what the statistic is telling them? Probably. But there’s nothing I see as sneaky or disingenuous about it and, as I said in the closed thread, I’m neutral on gun control, and actually slightly pro-private ownership of firearms, so it’s not like I have an agenda.
Dunbar’s number says the average person knows 150 people. If one in three people know somebody who’s been shot, that works out to one person out of every four hundred and fifty. And the statistic doesn’t say how people got shot. You have to figure a lot of them were veterans shot in military service.
On the statistic that nearly one in four American teens have witnessed a shooting, I want to know what they consider witnessing. Does it count if they see it on TV or online?
Are you saying one in 450 sounds high? Because that doesn’t sound high at all to me, especially given that about 100,000K people a year have gotten shot over the last few years.
Whoops, that should be “100K” and not “100,000K.” And, yes, I understand this represents shootings with injuries or death, not unique individuals who have gotten shot. There will be some people over a period of time who will be double, triple, etc., counted in the statistics. But one in 450 over a lifetime sounds plausible to me. Hell, I know four people, all dead: three suicide, one random victim of violence. ETA: Actually, there’s a fifth, but I’m not counting my uncle as he got shot in the military. He’s the only one I could think of that survived a shooting.
Ugh. Missed the edit. I should also rephrase “a shooting” to “a gun shot.” Bit of a semantic difference there. Most of the people I know who were shot were suicides. And there’s probably a couple I’m forgetting/
No, that is not true. I can also promise you that I know more about statistics than you do just based on chance alone but not all claims fall into the realm of statistics. You can also have other huge study flaws like the tendency for teenagers to exaggerate or lie that statistics alone can’t tell you anything about.
This is a case where fuzzy math can tell you about the plausibility of claim #2 without diving diving into sample sizes or the nuances of any individual studies.
Let’s check claim #2 (Nearly one in four American teens have witnessed a shooting) for plausibility just by using some fuzzy math:
Fact #1: There are about 90 million people in the U.S. under 20 years old give or take a few million based on my quick numbers.
Fact #2: There are about 52,000 deliberate shooting in the U.S. per year (2/3rds of those are suicides).
Let’s do the fuzzy math here. For teenagers in general to have a 1 in 4 chance of witnessing an actual shooting personally, it would take (90,000,000 people under 20 years old/52,000 shootings a year) divided by 19 years in that age range and divided again by 4. That means that each shooting would need on average about 22 personal witnesses under the age of 20 not including older people. That also includes all the suicides (2/3rds of all shootings) and take into account any duplicate young people that witnessed more than one.
Conclusion: Not plausible. A large number of our teenage population simply lies on surveys. I am shocked, shocked I tell you. It has nothing to do with statistics. It simply isn’t a plausible conclusion and it shouldn’t be displayed as a real number because it obviously isn’t.
On the second page of that PDF - third bullet point from the bottom - the definition seems to include “witnessing or hearing a shooting”.
Hearing a shooting - IMHO - is not the same thing as “witnessing” it. To me - I think of witnessing being either seeing someone shoot a gun at another person - or see a person get shot.
But I guess if you hear a gunshot - and later find out someone was shot - you have been a witness that gun violence exists.
Not what I think they are implying by quoting that stat.
But I have no trouble believing that stat - if you include hearing a gunshot as “witnessing”.
I can think of one off the top of my head. A friend back in Texas who accidentally shot himself in the foot while he was being driven by a friend to a shooting range. And this was someone who prided himself on his gun safety and really was conscientious about it from what I could tell.
I’d be uncomfortable including merely hearing a shot in that category. There are parts of town where you can hear gunshots every two or three nights, all year round. The sound can travel quite a distance; thousands of people could hear a specific gunshot.
So, yeah, if that’s how they define the term, then it’s entirely believable.
(The fascinating thing about the “Law of Large Numbers” is how small a number can be, and qualify as a “large number” for these purposes. The average roll on a pair of dice, for instance, converges to very close to 7.0 after only twenty or thirty rolls.)
Well, this does seem to be the most-quoted and most-commented part of your OP among the responding posts, doesn’t it? This may be GD territory more than GQ territory. Here’s my take: Yes, I think they put it that way to jack up the numbers. It’s propaganda. (Disclaimer: To be sure, if they’re trying to make a case for gun control, that’s fine with me.)
We see exactly the same thing in campaigns about illegal drugs: The statistics are jacked up to make the problem sound much worse than it is (as if the drug problem isn’t bad enough). The common meme: Some large XX% of all people know (or work with) someone who’s using.
That makes the problem sound much worse. If a certain company has 100 employees who work in one office, and one of them is a drug abuser, that’s a statistic of 1 if you count, you know, the drug abusers. But if you count employees who work with a drug abuser, you get to count 99 of them (or even all 100, if you count the perp himself too).
This gives you a much scarier statistic to bandy about!
Right. My 'shot" are (not counting combat) a dude who was hit by a pellet when hunting*, another while cleaning his gun, a suicide- and a couple of cops who were nodding acquaintances. What does “know” mean? I have hundreds of LinkedIn connections- do I “know” them?
In other words, as far as friends or family members, I know no-one who was the victim of a criminal shooting.
do I count? when skeet shooting a pellet bounced off and stuck itself about 1mm deep into my arm, barely breaking the skin. Was I 'shot"?
This was my original thought about the second stat. But if they do include “hearing” shots as “witnessing” a shooting, that’ll skew things quite a bit. And, in that case, what is defined as “a shooting?” Just someone popping a cap in the air? Because those guns sound the same as those being aimed at people.
And, yes, I understand this represents shootings with injuries or death, not unique individuals who have gotten shot. There will be some people over a period of time who will be double, triple, etc., counted in the statistics. But one in 450 over a lifetime sounds plausible to me. Hell, I know four people, all dead: three suicide, one random victim of violence. ETA: Actually, there’s a fifth, but I’m not counting my uncle as he got shot in the military. He’s the only one I could think of that survived a shooting.
but not all claims fall into the realm of statistics. You can also have other huge study flaws like the tendency for teenagers to exaggerate or lie that statistics alone can’t tell you anything about.