[NoImmatureAdHom]

I think you're right about it being a bigger deal elsewhere, and you're right about legislative reactions. I have several thoughts:

1) The U.S. population is really big. 333M or so. New Zealand is 5M? So, inflate the base rate by 66x. When doing "intuitive statistics" about this sort of thing, people think at the country level and don't adjust for population. That will remove some of the effect, but even doing that there's going to be more school shootings in the U.S. per capita, of course.

2) Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best. People who want to murder will just use alternative means. There are plenty of ways to kill schoolchildren if someone decides to do it. Easy availability of guns probably does increase the rate and deadliness, but not by all that much. Something else is going on in the U.S. Media contagion is part of it, imho.

3) The extent to which people pay attention to astronomically unlikely things like school shootings really doesn't make any sense. As I estimate somewhere else in these comments, the likelihood of a child in the U.S. being shot and killed at school is about double that of being struck and killed by lightning. Though it's a tragic spectacle when it happens, it's not something worth worrying about. The irony is nobody gives a shit about stuff that might actually kill your kids, like drowning, car crashes, etc. People are so, so very nonchalant about things that are actually risky...

[dane-pgp]

> Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best.

Feel free to share a link to the best available work. Please also read this, though:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-is-cl...

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I appreciate you engaging! Really, I do.

I am sorry to say it, but Scientific American has become politicized trash under current leadership. It pains me because I remember it fondly from my childhood. The article you linked to doesn't even try to meet basic scientific standards.

Here is a good overview: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/key-findings/what-s...

TL;DR: evidence coming from academia (which is extremely anti-gun) only weakly supports a very small subset of gun laws as working. Taken in the light of publication bias and the file drawer problem, this is a nothing.

[dane-pgp]

Thanks for the link. That does seem to be a more thorough analysis than the one in Scientific American, although the latter was good at linking through to the actual studies, so you didn't have to trust the writer or editor of the article.

The RAND analysis doesn't appear to be as equivocal as you suggest though. It says that there are 3 types of laws which have the strongest level of scientific support for their success, but other laws have weaker support, which doesn't mean they aren't effective. Let me highlight two quotes:

"Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective."

"Still, even relatively small effects of gun policies are important to the people and communities affected."

So while it's possible that there are a lot of ineffective laws being proposed, that's far from being evidence that no laws are effective, and it might even be evidence that the problem lies with the Constitution itself (which is another type of law which could be changed).

I wonder, though, what it would take for me to convince you of anything, since you could just dismiss all scientific research as "coming from academia" and therefore tainted by political views that you don't like. Perhaps if the gun lobby commissioned their own researchers to produce a report, you would find that sufficiently neutral, but I won't go looking for such a report.

One area where we might agree, though, is in disapproving of immature ad hominem arguments, so perhaps we just need to make sure that we're both extending that disapproval to mature ad hominem arguments as well. ;-)

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Again, I really appreciate you engaging and I'm happy for the opportunity to talk dane-pgp. I don't have much time atm so a little rushed.

>so you didn't have to trust the writer or editor of the article

They're linking to a lot of their other stuff, iirc, and selectively citing things that support the position they want to disseminate.

> It says that there are 3 types of laws which have the strongest level of scientific support for their success

We have to differentiate between effect size and statistical "significance" (poorly named). The effect sizes (how much of a difference you would expect to see) are small iirc. For instance, the "assault weapons" one, which gets the strongest level coloring, is I believe a 0.9% decrease in murders if it's the study I'm thinking of. The "statistical significance" is, roughly, how much you can believe the effect size you're measuring is real, NOT how important it is. So you can have a 0.9% reduction in murders that is very "significant". I don't know what their coloring is, but my guess is they're using statistical significance, maybe with blending in some effect size.

>I wonder, though, what it would take for me to convince you of anything, since you could just dismiss all scientific research as "coming from academia" and therefore tainted by political views that you don't like.

I am from academia! I actually don't have a guns axe to grind specifically, it's a "we're going to poison the social sciences via publication bias and p-hacking" axe. Basically, people produce evidence for what's politically palatable (not even what they actually want to believe), and it's a huge problem. Another one is sex and behavior. It's abundantly clear that there are huge differences in behavior between the sexes, and that this is driven by genetics, and we've known this on the basis of good scientific evidence for 100+ years. It's not ~~socially determined~~.

>"Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective."

> "Still, even relatively small effects of gun policies are important to the people and communities affected."

Let me translate: "Guys, we know this doesn't look good, but we promise...there's a way you can talk about it such that we can still keep claiming the things we want to believe are true in spite of the avalanche of evidence coming from researchers that also want to claim the things. Also, jk jk, don't punish us we want to keep our jobs :-) :-D "

One of the key problems here (and the reason for my axe) is that it's tough or impossible to do real research on important stuff like this right now.

> extending that disapproval to mature ad hominem arguments as well. ;-) I've enjoyed this :-)

[dane-pgp]

It was a good discussion, and I'm glad we've both had a chance to give our points of view clearly. :-)

Thanks for discussing respectfully, and for the work it sounds like you are doing to improve standards in academia.