Joe Olson writes: > Australian Prohibitions Have Had No Favorable Impact: In a new peer-reviewed > study, Dr Samara McPhedran from the School of Psychology, and her colleague > Dr Jeanine Baker, who also hold executive positions in the International > Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting, show that the accumulated > studies on Australia's 1996 ban of all handguns, and certain rifles & > shotguns and the half billion dollar gun 'buyback' do not point to a negative > impact [i.e., a reduction in incidents]. The authors say that this provides a > clearer foundation for evidence-based policy development, particularly within > the area of suicide prevention. > > http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2240
I wanted to see more detail, and since the "new peer-reviewed study" isn't cited, I went to the transcript mentioned - and found more confusion. Samara McPhedran made the very sensible claim, "Firearm homicides were declining well in advance of the legislative changes and that downwards trend just continued at the same rate after the laws came in as before." OK - a basic rule in statistics is "correlation does NOT imply causation." Then the other side speaks, "The conclusions that they have reached are in fact absolutely reversed if you do the analysis properly." OK - a counter-assertion - backed up by, "What we've been able to show is that there has been a 59.9 per cent fall in the rate of decline of male firearm suicide between 1997 and 2005. In absolute terms, it fell from 3.4 per 100,000 to 1.3. That's a big, big fall." Which neither disagrees with the first claim, nor is really understandable. (What does "a 59.9 per cent fall in the rate of decline of male firearm suicide" mean? I can interpret it as a 2nd derivative type of explanation, but that seems to say "less decline" which wouldn't make sense as a counter-assertion, or I can interpret it as a repetitive statement - but then it doesn't counter the earlier assertion.) It might be interesting to look at the actual publication (no citation is given) and at whatever opposing publication(s) can be found. -- --henry schaffer _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
