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> It holds that the opposite is true of owning guns: “In contrast, bringing a gun into one’s home clearly makes it more dangerous: A gun in the home substantially increases the likelihood that a household member will die by a gun, whether by homicide, suicide, or accidental shootings.”

This one grinds my gears so hard. FALLACY OF DIVISION

If you run the statistics and find that houses with guns have more violence than houses without guns, you CANNOT draw any conclusion about specific individuals, only their collective average statistics.

In a lot of cases, this can be confusing and counter-intuitive, but with guns it's really really concrete and obvious, and I have to believe that people are maliciously feigning ignorance when they go along with it.

There's a really simple solution to the problem of "guns in home makes more violence": DON'T DO A CRIME AND DON'T SHOOT SOMEONE. You have individualized knowledge of your own propensity towards violence that overrides statistical averages about the entire country. Whether or not bringing a gun into _your_ house makes _you_ more or less safe is not something that statistics can answer like this. Only you can answer it!

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Actually, I can word this in a way that, at least ten years ago, the technocrats who believe themselves our natural leaders used to say.

"CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION"

You might do statistics and discover a _correlation_ between "gun in house" and "experiences gun violence", but you CANNOT CANNOT CANNOT go from that to concluding the _causation_ that IF you bring a gun into your house THEN your violence rate goes up

When worded this way there's another obvious explanation: people who don't expect to ever experience violence, don't really have that much of a motivation to keep and bear arms. On the other hand, people who regularly experience violence (eg home breakins) have a really good reason to buy guns. Perhaps it is the case that "having a higher risk of experiencing violence" is what causes people to bring guns into their homes!

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It's also worth it to remember this idea that I really need to give a name to. Perhaps "the fundamental theorem of American Social Statistics":

All national statistics are completely meaningless because they are averaging over a highly heterogenous civilization to generate composite statistics that don't correspond to any specific individual's lived experiences

Perhaps it is the case that 'gun stuff' (ownership, violence, etc, all of that collectively) follows a bimodal distribution, with two very distinct models in conceptspace: Urban and Rural.

Perhaps it is the case that in Urban spaces, everyone has (illegal) firearms and are constantly doing and experiencing crime with them, such that statistically, having a gun in your home makes you 100x more likely to die in gun violence

And perhaps, in parallel, it is the case that in Rural spaces, everyone has (legal) firearms but basically no crime happens, such that statistically, having a gun in your home makes you 0x more likely to die in gun violence

Then, some ivory tower person does a nationwide study, plugs all his stats in, and concludes that bringing a firearm into your house makes you (100+0) / 2 = 50x more likely to experience gun violence.

This statistic is 100% true and accurate, but also completely fake and meaningless. The statistical correlation between those two things, at the national level, might be 50x. But depending on what community you belong to, the statistical correlation between those two things at the _you_ level is either 0x or 100x, and critically: YOU ALREADY KNOW WHICH GROUP YOU'RE IN.

If, AFTER YOU ALREADY KNOW WHICH ONE OF THOSE GROUP'S YOU'RE IN, someone comes to you with a study trying to convince you that actually your risk is 50x, the only reasonable response is mockery

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The new model is 0 for urban suicide by gun and 100 for rural suicide by gun so to add that to crime: (100 + 0 + 0 + 100) / 4 = 50, with each locale averaging to 50 as well. If you know you're a 0 for crime AND a 0 for suicide, when someone tells you you're a 50 you can mock them as well.

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100%

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"Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to know whether firearms provided similar comfort to gun owners, serving as a sort of psychological security blanket."

"'If you came from a gun-owning household, just having a gun present makes you feel more at ease,' said Dr. Buttrick, whose study has not yet been published."

A source of comfort in uncomfortable situations can be of two kinds, placebic or causal. Normally, the placebic comfort *becomes* a placebo precisely *because* it is causally effective in other situations. A safety blanket makes you feel more comfortable just to hold because it *actually* makes you more comfortable on cold nights. So if a gun gives a person familiar with them ease just by holding it, it's a pretty good bet that it has *actually* helped them in the past.

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I really hate when people bring this up like it's a way to discredit guns. The idea that "the gun doesn't actually make you safer, but because you are so fragile and hysterical, it gives you emotional comfort" is brought up a lot by certain political factions, usually to simultaneously discredit the idea that guns make you _actually_ safer, and to mock pro-gun people as emotionally broken.

But, like, our entire society has gotten into an hysterical psychosis over the past decade and made its highest priority "protecting the fragile and hysterical psyche of that same political faction". It is so brazenly shitty and hypocritical and yet everyone takes it seriously.

So, foot in the sand: if guns don't make you actually safer, but they do make you feel safer, THATS STILL A GOOD THING

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LMAO I literally can't even with that 'study' from U dub madison. These people are so incredibly useless

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If you follow the link to Yamane's work cited by OSD you find he's also reviewed a Nick Buttrick study from 2020, I think Buttrick was at UVA, not UW at the time. Buttrick seems to specialize in silly experiments that really don't tell you anything valid about gun owners. I mean comparing the comfort a spouse has by holding the hand of her partner to a college student either holding a friend's hand (not the same), holding a metal object (it could be anything), or holding a fake plastic gun as your only options to claim guns are "coping mechanisms" for people who supposedly come from gun-owning households seems absurd to me.

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