Funny how once again it is perfectly acceptable to ignore that Micheal Moore's mockumentary is a total fabrication and how still it just makes so much sense to a certain element in this forum. Just like other sources of information like BBC and CNN who admit that they have been lying or at the very least not telling the whole story to their viewers about Iraq. "They send the viewers signals" so that they know what is really meant.lol Since when has lying, covering up facts, distorting the truth, and outright manipulation of footage been considered nonbias? Oh how some must miss that warm fuzzy feeling that a good watchtower magazine gave them.
Bowling for baloney
by Jayson 18 Replies latest jw friends
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ThiChi
The Gun Supply Myth
Source: Data points from Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York 1997, and FBI Uniform Crime Reports. (Handgun homicide rates became available in 1966.) [More recent gun suppy figures are available here and here.]
Discussion
More guns more crime? More guns less crime? Without the entire picture, one could play all sorts of statistical games with the above data. Depending on the starting year and time frame, we could find "evidence" to support either position. However taking the long view it appears that the gun supply does not have a significant impact on total homicides or suicides. (Since 1945 the handgun per capita rate has risen by over 350% and over 260% for all firearms.)
Kleck in Targeting Guns commenting on the gun stock relationship:
"About half of the time gun stock increases have been accompanied by violence decreases, and about half the time accompanied by violence increases, just what one would expect if gun levels had no net impact on violence rates. The rate of gun suicide is correlated with trends in the size of the gun or handgun stock, but the rate of total suicide is not, supporting a substitution argument--when guns are scarce, suicide attempters substitute other methods, with no effect on the total number who die. Trends in the size of the cumulated gun or handgun stock have no consistent correlation with crime rates."
Incidentally regarding non-lethal violent crime:- Offenders were armed with a firearm in 10% of all violent crimes; a knife in 6% and some other object used as a weapon in 5%.
- Offenders used or possessed a weapon in an estimated 27% of overall violent incidents, 8% of rapes/sexual assaults, 52% of robberies, and 25% of assaults.
Why is violent crime decreasing?
The FBI lists many major contributing factors to violent crime in their 1997 FBI Uniform Crime Report.
As for the declining violent crime rate over the last several years:
"There is, at present, little consensus among criminologists, legal analysts and law enforcement officials about the explanation or causes of the decrease. Possible explanations include: increase in the incarceration rate; community based policing; changes in drug markets; aging of the criminal population; and cyclical trends in the homicide rate." (Conference announcement: Why is Crime Decreasing, Northwestern University School of Law).
Reporting a record 7-year plunge in crime rates a Los Angeles Times news article stated:
"Law enforcement experts credited a variety of factors, including a booming economy and declining unemployment, greater attention to community-based policing, more prison beds and tougher sentencing in some areas through measures such as California's 'three strikes' law. But they stressed that no one factor can explain the downward spiral" (May 17, 1999, p. A6)
Excerpted from the abstract of the Koch Crime Institute's paper, The Falling Crime Rate (April 1998):
"The consensus on the falling crime rate is that there is no singular event, policy implementation, or social action that can account for the decrease during the last six years. Individuals and organizations assessing the cause and implications of this decline are arriving at a unified theory attributing collective efforts and change as the reason or reasons."
The Chicago Tribune reported a surprising finding:"Two widely respected scholars studying the causes of the declining U.S. crime rate, one of the intriguing social puzzles of the decade, have reached a provacative conclusion: Legalizing abortion in early 1970s eliminated many of the potential criminals of the 1990s..."
"Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and John Donohue III, a Stanford University Law professor, conclude that legalized abortion may explain as much as half of the overall crime reduction the nation experienced from 1991 to 1997..."
"[T]he authors conclude that the women who chose abortion were those at greatest risk for bearing children who would have been most likely to commit crimes as young adults. These women are teen-agers, minorites and the poor--all groups of women who have abortions at higher rates than the overall population of women of childbearing age..."
[I]t is not simply who has the abortion that leads to the lower crime rate...but the ability of the woman to choose better timing for childrearing that lowers criminality." (Los Angeles Daily News, August 8, 1999, pp. 1, 18)
What about the Brady Bill and other gun control measures?Didn't the Brady Bill play a big part in reducing gun crime? See GunCite's analysis of that claim.
Four scholars discuss "Does Gun Control Work?" in PBS's moderated panel discussion, Think Tank (aired June 3, 1995).
What can be done about violent crime?
To read where enforcement of the numerous, already existing laws is working and achieving dramatic results in reducing gun related violence and homicide, without additional gun control laws, see enforcing the laws we already have.
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ThiChi
"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would."
--- John Adams, Boston Gazette, Sept. 5, 1763,reprinted in 3 The Works of John Adams 438 (Charles F. Adams ed., 1851). -
Jayson
Canada has a tenth the population of the US -- relevant if raw numbers, rather than rates, are used. To be fair, Canada also has lower rates.
Canada is also more rural than the U.S. (It has one-tenth the population density of the US, although to be fair it has a lot more unoccupied land which "pads" that figure. The US has unoccupied land, too: in Arizona, 113,000 square miles, a majority of the population lives in just two cites; same with Nevada, 110,000 square miles.. But while the US has lots of unpopulated land, Canada has... well, lots and lots, what with the ice [outlawed in Arizona]).
Don't cite me figures for "urbanized" populations -- yes, the firgures for US and Canada are in the 70-80% range, but Canada counts as urban an area with 1,000 people, while the US requires 2,500, a considerable difference. Rural areas are relatively crime-free: 85% of U.S. counties reported no (as in zero) youth homicides in 1997; in any given year, about a third of them will report no homicides at all. In large expanses of the non-urban US, homicide is almost unknown. I know of one Arizona county (I represented the sheriff in court), nearly as large as Connecticut, which averaged one homicide and three robberies per year.)
If Moore wanted to find places where you can leave the door unlocked, he didn't need to leave the U.S.. I do that now (in fact the door is open behind me as I type. I did it when I lived in the Washington DC metropolitan area, at a time when it was the homicide capital of the U.S. . I lived in a suburb where crime was close to unknown, and locking the doors when you were home was just an obstacle to going outside. And, no, it wasn't a fancy gated community populated by millionaires. A hispanic family lived across the street, a fellow government worker next to me, a Navy vet diagonally across from me.
Another aspect, suggested in the Canadian Journal of Criminology, is the spread between low and high incomes (not absolute poverty, or median income, but the spread.). The article concludes: "When Canadian provinces and U.S. states are considered together, local levels of income inequality appear to be sufficient to account for the two countries' radically different national homicide rates." The same might well (alright, this is a guess on my part) explain part of the traditional rural-urban crime rate differences. My experience is that small towns have less of an income spread than large ones. Most folks are middle class, with fewer very rich or very poor. Go to an urban area like Washington DC, where there is no industry, and there are a lot more very rich and a lot more comparatively poor. Lots of executives and janitors, as opposed to a population of miners, shopowners, and factory workers.
Off of one of the above web links.
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Jayson
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel040403.asp
OH, CANADA! After over an hour spent on the horrors of the United States, Moore switches to the peaceful society of Canada. He begins by arguing that Canada and the United States are very similar — except that Canada has a generous welfare state, and no culture of fear.
It's true that Canada does have a lot of guns compared to England or Japan, but Canada's per-capita gun ownership rate is about a third of the American level.
Moore films the over-the-counter purchase, no questions asked, of some ammunition in a Canadian store. The Canadian government has pointed out that such a transaction would be illegal, since the buyer is required to present identification. Moore did not respond to a request from the government's Canadian Firearms Centre to explain whether he staged a fake purchase, edited out the ID request, or broke the law.
Moore then tells the audience that 13 percent of the Canadian population is minority ethnic, the same as in the U.S. Actually, it's about 31 percent in the U.S. More significantly, blacks and Hispanics, who are involved in well over 50 percent of American homicides (both as victims and as perpetrators) make up about 2.5 percent of the Canadian population. In the United States, each group makes up about one-eighth of the U.S. population.
Comparing U.S. gun-death totals with Canada's, Moore offers a U.S. total that includes death by legal intervention (e.g., a violent felon being shot by a police officer) while omitting this same category from the Canadian total.
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Mary
Here in Canada, no one has guns, not even the Army. They use plastic knives from Kentucky Fried Chicken.................the real danger is trying to get it out of the wrapper.........
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ThiChi
Hey Mary:
Very astute comment. Notice how the knives come from an American based business? The plan is working........
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searchfothetruth
So what your trying to say is that this documentary is full of lies and deceit and yet it has won every prize that it could possibly win from the Cannes film festival, tha Bafta's and the Oscars for being the best FACTUAL film.
All those people who have voted it the BEST FACTUAL film must be so stupid that they haven't checked out the facts before voting for it.
Stupid White Men has also been at the top of the best seller list for nearly 18 months now, so obviously a lot of people believe him, or is that a lie too?
just answer this...Did G.W.Bush legitimately WIN the election that took him to the Whitehouse?
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funkyderek
All those people who have voted it the BEST FACTUAL film must be so stupid that they haven't checked out the facts before voting for it.
Well, have you checked out the facts? Do you think the statements made above about Michael Moore are incorrect?
Stupid White Men has also been at the top of the best seller list for nearly 18 months now, so obviously a lot of people believe him, or is that a lie too?
It certainly contains a lot of lies and half-truths.
Being popular doesn't make him right. Check the facts, not the polls.
just answer this...Did G.W.Bush legitimately WIN the election that took him to the Whitehouse?
The Supreme Court seemed to think so, or did they not check out the facts?
