Gun control working well in Connecticut

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Bone

Like I said, if you want to argue inconsistency in treatment based on graduated age scales of adulthood that’s great. I’m not really interested.

I don’t get your point. Why is it inconsistent to have one age at which EVERYONE can purchase a firearm and another age at which EVERYONE can purchase a handgun?

Why do we have to use the same age for everything?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Bone

Forgot to add: the reason I’m not interested in the age discussion is because we’ve had the exact same discussion before in which I made the case very clearly.

SCOTUS turns down 2 2nd Amendment appeals from NRA - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board

OK that’s fine. We have that age distinction for handguns in Virginia and a lot of other pro-gun states. It sounds like you just have a difference of opinion but no real constitutional argument. That’s fine.

[Bone]

@Damuri_Ajashi

I don’t get your point. Why is it inconsistent to have one age at which EVERYONE can purchase a firearm and another age at which EVERYONE can purchase a handgun?

Why do we have to use the same age for everything?

Like I detailed in the other thread, if an 18 year old enjoys a second amendment right then that person must be allowed to purchase a handgun. The only way an 18 year old can be prohibited from purchasing a handgun is if you conclude that the 18 year old doesn’t have a 2nd amendment right.

I believe all law abiding non mentally adjudicated adults ought to have 2nd amendment rights. The 5th circuit court of appeals disagrees and believes that 18 year olds don’t have 2nd amendment rights. They can be conscripted, deployed in armed conflict, but can’t purchase a handgun for home defense.

[pkbites]

@Bone

Like I detailed in the other thread, if an 18 year old enjoys a second amendment right then that person must be allowed to purchase a handgun. The only way an 18 year old can be prohibited from purchasing a handgun is if you conclude that the 18 year old doesn’t have a 2nd amendment right.

What’s absurd is, here in Wisconsin (and other states) an 18 year old can possess a handgun, but cannot legally buy one. Which means I can legally give my 19 year old nephew a Glock as a gift, he can even legally open carry it in this state. But he couldn’t legally buy one in a gun store and he can’t get a concealed carry license until he’s 21. The law is goofy.

[Habeed]

@Bone

The 5th circuit court of appeals disagrees and believes that 18 year olds don’t have 2nd amendment rights. They can be conscripted, deployed in armed conflict, but can’t purchase a handgun for home defense.

If 18 year olds don’t have those rights, why does anyone? Can’t I bring a big book of statistics into a state legislature and show that the minimum age to own a gun should be 130? The argument could be made by a liberal, with the audience a liberal legislature, that human error leads to more gun deaths than any lives saved by people defending themselves. (that is, for every clear-cut case where a person having a gun saved their own life, there are more situations where someone shot someone by accident or committed suicide because they had access to a gun)

Therefore, no human can be trusted to own a gun until they hit the age of 130. Or until they have their brain replaced with cybernetic computer chips that eliminate cognitive errors. Whatever.

So, if tommorow, Louisiana passes a law that restricts handgun ownership to individuals over the age of 35 but less than 55, and they have to pass a $10,000 training and safety program, the 5th circuit would uphold?

[Bone]

@Habeed

So, if tommorow, Louisiana passes a law that restricts handgun ownership to individuals over the age of 35 but less than 55, and they have to pass a $10,000 training and safety program, the 5th circuit would uphold?

before I amswer, have you read the other linked thread? The 5th circuit addressed this issue in their opinion.

[DinoR]

@lazybratsche

Does anyone else want to talk stats methodology in a gun control thread?

I do and really appreciate your look at the methodology.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@pkbites

What’s absurd is, here in Wisconsin (and other states) an 18 year old can possess a handgun, but cannot legally buy one. Which means I can legally give my 19 year old nephew a Glock as a gift, he can even legally open carry it in this state. But he couldn’t legally buy one in a gun store and he can’t get a concealed carry license until he’s 21. The law is goofy.

Well that’s kind of weird. Parts of Long island has a requirement that 2 people in your school district [zip code?]vouch for you before you can get a gun. I think the long island rule is a bit silly but it makes more sense than your Wisconsin rule.

[tim314]

@puddleglum

If the data in the link is correct, it looks like this is an example of data mining. The Connecticut gun homicide rate relative to the rest of the country went up for three years after the law passed, then went down for seven, then went back up for five years. By choosing to look only at the next 10 years the study got all of the relative decline and none of the relative increase that followed it. In fact the gun homicide rate in Connecticut as of 2010 was higher relative to the rest of the country than it was before the gun control law.
It seems to me that looking at the data the gun control law seemed to have no effect on the gun homicide rate. That is what has been seen in other studies which have shown no impact on homicide rates and only impacts on suicide rates.

Thanks for this. The fact that they cut off their analysis at 2005 for no good reason is a big red flag that I’d missed. As mentioned in your cite, the explanation they give is terribly unconvincing:

The authors say that they limit the data to 2005 because one paper that they cite looked at only 10 years after a law that they were investigating (p. 4: “We conclude the post-law period in 2005 to limit extrapolation in our predictions of the counterfactual to 10 years, as has been done previously”). But just because a study on to cigarette smoking looks at 12 years (not 10 as claimed (Proposition 99 went into effect on January 1, 1989 and their sample went until 2000)) after the law was in effect, doesn’t explain why a study on crime would do the same thing. Indeed, the reason given by the authors that Rudolph et al. cite isn’t applicable to the current paper (p. 16: “It ends in 2000 because at about this time anti-tobacco measures were implemented across many states, invalidating them as potential control units”).

Bolding mine. That’s such a deficient explanation that it makes me more inclined to suspect they were deliberately manipulating the result.

@lazybratsche

I would be more confident in some sort of empirical distribution of synthetic states, though I admit I don’t know exactly how to do this. In biology we use bootstrapping to create an empirical distribution of control samples, which allows more robust analysis of an experimental subset of the data. Maybe a population of synthetic states could be created by sampling, say, a Connecticut’s worth of counties, and then appropriately weighting the sample counties to match the demographics of Connecticut?

This is a very good point, too. (You had me convinced even before I read puddleglum’s – I was catching up on the thread in reverse order.) The methodology they used doesn’t seem to give a good way to estimate how likely such a large difference was due to chance (even assuming they didn’t choose date range of the study to take advantage of such a chance). A bootstrapping procedure like you’re suggesting could give you that.

Now you’ve got me thinking about what the right way to do it is… Do you draw from a uniform distribution of every county in America, and then re-weight the counties in each bootstrap sample (hopefully by some automatic procedure) to try to make the sample as close to Connecticut as possible? Or do you draw from a distribution of counties which is somehow weighted so the average sample is demographically like Connecticut (allow some samples to be demographically quite different)? It’s not obvious to me… Whatever you do, hopefully you wouldn’t end up with most of your samples being 70% Rhode Island.

@lazybratsche

Does anyone else want to talk stats methodology in a gun control thread?

Who knew such a well-trodden topic would end up being so much fun?

[tim314]

@adaher

I have no problem with believing that reducing access to guns reduces gun deaths. Seems like Economics 101 to me.

I certainly would have thought so, which is probably why I didn’t question this study’s methodology as much as I now feel I should have.

@adaher

If you reduce access to cars, you’ll save even more lives.

Well sure, and we do that with minimum age limits and licensing tests and such. And I suspect similar requirements have a similar effect when it comes to guns. But it would be nice to have that suspicion tested by a more rigorous study.