Reply #32: sorry [View All]

[iverglas]

There is not a single testable / verifiable element about these surveys that makes anything about them credible.

They all elicit responses from people who are in a particular class that has particular features by definition -- people who cart firearms around with them are a particular kind of people. They're really not too likely to respond to surveys by saying that they cart the bloodty things around with them for no reason at all, are they?

There simply is no reason to believe a word any of them says. Any one of them may well be telling the truth, at least about some element of their tale. But any one of them could also be making a story up out of whole cloth because s/he is seeking to buttress the case for carting firearms around, and knows full well that there is no checking of the story possible.

There is no way in the world to verify the truth or accuracy of the reports, or of the characterization of the events reported.

And I'm still waiting for someone to do what I have repeatedly asked for, and figure out how many people w/o firearms were unable to avert crimes because of their lack of access to firearm. That figure simply has to be multiple multiples of the crimes allegedly averted by people using firearms. Unless the differences between the two populations are so extreme as to make them essentially different species living in different times and places.

There are orders of magnitude more people walking around at any given time with NO immediate access to firearms than there are people with access to firearms.

There must necessarily be orders of magnitude more crimes committed against people with no immediate access to firearms than there are crimes averted by people with firearms.

And yet there aren't.

How obvious is this little problem with these, er, data?