leftyg wrote:
[/color] No Michaels you post non-scientific gobbledegook.
So now according to you the CDC findings that I referenced is gobbledegook. But when you reference the CDC it is not gobbledegook?I post academic studies like this one from Live Science which asserts guns do not deter crime.
Lets note that your article from Live Science, written by Stephanie Pappas, was published in July of 2015 And it did not study Defensive Gun Uses. It said: Monuteaux and his colleagues wanted to test whether increased gun ownership had any effect on gun homicides, overall homicides and violent gun crimes.
The article later went on to say: Another recent study highlighted just how little researchers know. In July 2013, researchers published a paper in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, attempting to mathematically model the trade-off between increased gun crimes with gun ownership and
gun use for self-protection. The study that Monuteaux conduted did not study Defensive Gun use, which as explained from Wikipedia is:
Defensive gun use (DGU) is the use or presentation of a firearm for self-defense, defense of others or in some cases, protecting property.
Monuteaux said "because the available data isn't comprehensive enough, the researchers weren't able to make specific policy recommendations
It says:
"We found no support for the hypothesis that owning more guns leads to a drop or a reduction in violent crime," said study researcher Michael Monuteaux, an epidemiologist and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. "Instead, we found the opposite."
https://www.livescience.com/51446-guns- ... crime.html So Monuteaux, who is not an expert in Criminology, who is not an expert in gun usage, conducts a study of correlations, does not study Defensive Gun Uses, and from the data that he produced, in his correlations, said that they found no support for the hypothesis that owning more guns leads to a drop or a reduction in violent crime. [* When your not looking for something, you are not going to find it, whatever it happens to be.]
Now lets look at actual studies that looked at Defensive Gun Use and not statistics to correlate homicidal rates.https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-the-cdc-asked-about-defensive-gun-uses/#46fe370b299aThat Time The CDC Asked About Defensive Gun Uses
By Paul Hsieh Apr 30, 2018,
In particular, a 2013 study ordered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and conducted by The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council reported that, “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence”:
Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.
From Wikipedia:
A commonly cited 1995 study by Kleck and Gertz estimated that between 2.1 and 2.5 million DGUs occur in the United States each year.[1]:64–65[7][10] After Kleck and Gertz accounted for telescoping, their estimate was reduced to 2.1 million DGU per year.[7] Kleck and Gertz conducted this survey in 1992, and Kleck began publicizing the 2.5 million DGU per year estimate in 1993.[11] By 1997, the 2.5 million per year number from Kleck & Gertz' study had been cited as fact by news articles, editorial writers, and the Congressional Research Service.[12] Besides the NSDS and NCVS surveys, ten national and three state surveys summarized by Kleck and Gertz gave 764 thousand to 3.6 million DGU per year.[7] In the report "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms" by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, projected 4.7 million DGU which Cook and Ludwig explained by pointing out all of the NSPOF sample were asked the DGU question.
*
Marvin Wolfgang, who was acknowledged in 1994 by the British Journal of Criminology as ″the most influential criminologist in the English-speaking world″,[17] commented on Kleck's research concerning defensive gun use: "I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. [...] The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well."[18]
A 1994 study examined NCVS data and concluded that between 1987 and 1990, there were approximately 258,460 incidents in which firearms were used defensively in the United States, for an annual average of 64,615.[21] An article published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, drawing its DGU from the NCVS, said: "In 1992 offenders armed with handguns committed a record 931,000 violent crimes ... On average in 1987-92 about 83,000 crime victims per year used a firearm to defend themselves or their property.
A study published in 2013 by the Violence Policy Center, using five years of nationwide statistics (2007-2011) compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that defensive gun uses occur an average of 67,740 times per year.[35]
Leftyg, your LiveScience article from 2015 also said of their research:
The results do need to be interpreted with caution — this study method proves that more guns are linked to more gun crime and overall homicide, but not that access to guns directly causes this criminal uptick, said study researcher David Hemenway, the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
. So, accepting the note of caution let me just take a stab at a "possible interpretation;" A group of people in a city lets say a gang has access to a large number of guns that they use to commit a large number of crimes and homicides in that city. A larger group of people who are not in that gang, also own a gun or guns. These people live throughout the city and have a total of more guns than the gang does. These people are not committing the type of crimes that the gang are committing. And they are not using their guns for the same purposes that the gang members are doing. These people do on occasion use their guns to defend themselves, their property or someone else. They may only need to pull out their weapon and not even fire it to defend themselves, or someone else, and because no crime is committed, it is not reported and/or not normally publicized by the local media. And as a result, these Defensive gun uses are under reported, which means that the crimes that did not happen because they pulled out their weapon and stopped from happening (that is called deterrence) are not noted statistically. I would say that that is a reasonable interpretation.
Conclusions. We observed
a robust
correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates.
Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.
How about just looking at large cities or large areas with a high population and compare them to smaller cities. Don't you believe that even without looking at the actual data, you will find more crime in areas with larger populations? You know you want to use the statistic of number of homicides per 100,000 people. You could use the number of homicides from Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and I am sure I could find cities with 100,000 people that have fewer or zero homicides and that would throw a wrench into your correlations.________
You wrote and I repeat:
Whatever training in the scientific method you thought you received didn't manifest in your posts on Evolution.
One reason that conservatives like you survive as long as they have in arguments like these is their utter ignorance of the scientific method.
Your always arguing that your opponent does not know what they are talking about. But I will remind you, and the readers here of what I told you about the scientific method:
From my February 24, 2014 post in Texas Public Schools Teaching Creationism:
As a matter of review: The Scientific Method is a way to ask and answer scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments.
The steps of the Scientific Method are to; ask a question, do background research, construct a hypothesis, test your hypothesis by doing an experiment, analyze your data and draw a conclusion, and communicate your results.
From my February 26 post of the same thread:
leftyg wrote:
That was 1874 Michaels, 140 years ago. A lot has changed.
What has changed Leftyg? What scientist has used the scientific method to confirm a hypothesis of the evolution of species from one species to another?
Answer...waiting....waiting....waiting...Oh that's right, none!
- And you did not respond to that post.First, virtually all scientists (99.85%) believes that some evolutionary process took place.
Ben Stein showed his interviews with numerous professors regarding Evolution in his movie Expelled.
In that movie he showed what happens to professors who spoke out against Evolution, and that there are many who publicly state their belief in Evolution to keep their jobs and for the money. In the thread I exposed Stephen Gould who said that Haeckel (who invented the discredited Ontrology recapitulates phylogeny theory) used fake drawings to promote his theory. Stephen Gould went on to write a book on the subject of Ontology recapitulate phylogeny, and made money off of it. But the scientific method says that to be scientific a study must be
falsifiable, [color=#FF0000]Yes that is right, and I presented an experiment by Dr Thornton who tried in his own words: Thornton wanted to delve deeper into the puzzle of how complex systems with tightly interacting molecular parts evolve. It was a long standing conundrum. As Charles Darwin wrote in n the Origins of Species, if it could be demonstrated that ANY complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
Dr. Thornton's experiment - Theoretically, if an organism evolved along a certain natural path of acquiring new features and abilities, then it should be able to retrace their supposed evolutionary history.
The proteins in question help vertebrate tissues recognize the stress hormone cortisol. Three researchers synthesized and characterized the various hypothetical evolutionary incarnations of the proteins. Each version had the mutational changes that were theorized to have taken place if the protein had evolved from an earlier form. Given the sequence and structure of the versions known today, the scientists wanted to see what biological functions the transitional proteins would have if the modern form were to evolve back to its supposedly original version.
The scientists found that none of the transitional proteins functioned at all
Since none of the theoretical "backward" transitions produced functionality, this begs the question of whether evolution ever crossed the bridge going forward in the first place.
And how did Joseph Thornton describe these findings? He told New Scientist:
Effectively, the five mutations burn the bridge evolution had just crossed.[/color]
testable and
repeatable. Dr. Thornton conducted his experiment and it failed. It Failed by Charles Darwin's own standards. The experiment falsified Charles Darwin. And Dr. Richard Feynman, University of Cornell Physicist, said in a lecture on the Scientific Method, "Theories that failed the test of data or experiment are falsified ("wrong") and must be discarded."
See the 9 minute and 59 second video on You Tube, from Cornell University, (1964).
The very last post of that thread was addressed to you:
Leftyg:
And now it is your turn to review your comments made prior to the presented material on the predictions of the Evolution and the Creationism models.
Remember, you said: "“I was trained in the scientific method in a rather rigorous program in grad school....."
You also said: "Remember you cannot prove evolution,"
And,: "NOBODY has proven the exact theory behind evolution. I will give you that."
But after these statements, your "training" and knowledge really comes into question. Because you also said
"But the record is very clear that humans evolved in some way, probably over millions of years."
And:
“Now back to creationism. Evolution is suggested by science and every scientist except a few faith-based crackpots thinks it exists in some manner. Why? Because of the available evidence."
Now I presented a lot of evidence in the material comparing the predictions of both models,(most of which was furnished by scientists who consider themselves to be evolutionists) that the "so-called" evidence for evolution does not exist. And although you did not offer any "evidence" to support your statement - "The record is very clear that humans evolved in some way", perhaps you care to do so now.
And regarding the predictions of the evolution model you said:
"And evolution is probably the best predictive model.. So what is your point? Michaels it boggles my mind that you do not understand that absolute certainty is part of the scientific method. Evolution is testable, falsifiable and it can be predicted.”
You said:
"“hmmmm, my comment was a general comment about how conservatives ignore evidence, that's all. It could be about creationism where they ignore evidence or science,”
Leftyg, did you review the evidence presented here in this thread on the predictions of the Evolution and the Creationism models or are you ignoring it as you claim conservatives do?
I have presented the Scientific Definitions of a Scientific Theory and the Scientific Method.
After reviewing all of the presented material, which includes statements made by evolutionists referring to the Scientific Method, has 1) The Scientific Method been used (through observation and experimentation) to corroborate a hypothesis of Evolution? And 2) According to the stated definition set by Science, does Evolution fulfill the requirements set forth to be classified as a Scientific Theory?
Well?... [* Again, you never responded.}
But now your back again in your latest post acting like this never happened. You said:
One reason that conservatives like you survive as long as they have in arguments like these is their utter ignorance of the scientific method.
BOOM!
Leftyg: Now I know your response will not address this because you cannot address this. It is either too sacred or too arcane for you.
BOOM!
The Liberal Creed: Take all the money you can, from all the people you can, in all the ways that you can, for as long as you can.