Remarks by the President on Common-Sense Gun Safety Reform

[Kulindahr]

He prefers to believe that white people don't shoot each other in small towns to a disproportionate degree.

But the map tells us not a thing about that. Just as an example, in Harney County, Oregon, the number of fatal shootings for the year got a huge rate spike as one batch of outsiders shot and killed another outsider (neither the FBI nor the protester were from that county). It's not the first rural county to have that happen; it isn't uncommon for fleeing felons to be caught in thinly-populated areas ad get shot by cops.

And that, too, shows that the map tells us nothing about our chances of being shot in a particular place.

 

[Kulindahr]

We are discussing the map at#164. Areas with high shooting death rates are dark red;those with lower rates are blue. Yet, every sparsely inhabited deserts and forests of the west, including Nevada are dark red while Chicago , Manhattan, Los Angeles and other high crime areas are blue. Apparently this is because it shows deaths per hundred thousand.AND it carves out large areas with a hundred thousand; then one or two death will result in a high "rate". So while it may be technically accurate, it tars some no-crime areas with a dark brush, making it appear that some counties with no deaths have high rates of shootings, which they do not. It should have been done county by county, so that counties with no shooting would be light blue or white, while counties with shootings would be colored to reflect its shootings. So T Rexx perversely gloates that all those Republican counties with little and often, no crime, appear to have high rates of shooting, while the high crime democrat areas appear to have low rates. Illinois--indeed, Chicago itself---has more shootings that all of Nevada, but the reverse appears to be true from the map.

And, further, the shootings in Chicago mostly happen in certain parts, not across the entire city.

Basically, if you don't associate with criminal types and stay out of their territory, you aren't likely to ever see a gun fired in public (shooting ranges and events excluded), let alone be shot at.

 

[Kulindahr]

Alas, the method used more complicated than it seems at face value. We are told that the Oregonian used the AVERAGE number of gun deaths per 100,000 county residents. BUT then they are SMOOTHED. The smoothing method is described: "Geospatial smoothing can be applied to national, regional, or state maps showing county-level detail. When a county-level map indicates many unstable (or undefined) rates, geographic patterns can sometimes be clarified by displaying smoothed rates. For a given county, the smoothed rate is calculated by using the data for that county plus the data from counties that border it. The result is a rate that represents the county “neighborhood”.

All this is being done by an anti gun or pro gun control publication.

Oh, yes -- we learned in ecological studies in college that data smoothing is a great way to lie, or to mislead yourself. Yes, it can clarify, but it can also present a totally false picture.

 

[Kulindahr]

7ou must know that the most important predictor of crime in an area is race.

Actually it isn't -- the best predictor is socioeconomic status.

Given the economic and social policies of GOP politicians these days, it isn't surprising, then, if crime is climbing in their areas.

 

[Kulindahr]

No, no, no. They were concocted by Mark Graves for the Oregonian, allegedly from data from the CDC: "The maps, based on data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention".

The twisting and "smoothing" and coloring etc cannot be blamed on the CDC. The map was concocted by democrats who, like you. wish to use them for your anti-Republican partisan agenda.

Conspiracy theory thinking....

The map was probably done without a lot of deep thought going into it, and smoothing used just because. The result is a map that doesn't really tell us much, though yes, it makes rural areas look bad. But as with our county, where several people from out of town killed each other one summer, those high rates by geographical location don't tell us what's really going on -- it doesn't tell us if the locals are violent, it doesn't tell us if the place is depressing, it doesn't tell us if cops are shooting criminals.....

 

[rareboy]

So Benvolio, having discredited the map as tool of evil Democrats against Republicans...I suppose you disagree with the other two maps from the same source as well.

http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths



I've sat here and read your nonsense about what the original map showed and couldn't believe that anyone was either that thick or that lazy to look at the other parts of the puzzle.

The original map showed gun deaths per 100K population.

The other maps show how this total number is divided into homicide and suicide.

Sweet Jesus wept.

Oh for fuck's sake. I'll repeat it again.

There are three maps.

Benvolio is so determined that the gun deaths per 100000 population is a Democrat conspiracy that he missed the fact that it is a combination of the other two data sets.

 

[rareboy]

And the fact is that whether by suicide or homicide, the ammosexual culture of the US yields higher rates of gun deaths per 100000 people than most other countries on earth.

 

[Kabluey]

...the rate of crime is poorly associated with concealed carry, since the two apparently vary independently. Indeed it suggests that violent crime decreases at first when right-to-carry laws are enacted...

On the concealed carry front, are there any statistics on concealed carry individuals stopping things like mass shootings, versus starting them?

 

[Vitamin]

But your map looks like the other one.

Republican areas (primarily south and west) have higher gun death rates. Democratic areas (West coast, upper Midwest, and New England) have lower rates.

No, that's NOT what the maps show at all. You're even pretending the election map doesn't show a huge sections of the East Coast that vote Republican, and have lower gun deaths. Further, Texas is mostly blue on the CDC maps, but clearly red on the election, and most of the Northern Midwest, which went Republican, only scores higher on suicides by guns, then by actual gun crimes.

So yeah, your claims are bogus.

 

[Vitamin]

Btw, the CDC maps also let you zoom in so you can view more cities. Yes, Chicago is in blue, but cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are in red. So are Las Vegas, Phoniex, and Albuquerque. On the other hand blue cities besides Chicago include New York, Salt Lake City, and most cities in California.

There are other cities that I looked at that I'm not mentioning, but I don't see any correlation between gun deaths and living in cities either.

 

[opinterph]

The .. "smoothing" and coloring etc cannot be blamed on the CDC.

The CDC mapping module allows users to include or exclude geospatial smoothing.

Btw, the CDC maps also let you zoom in so you can view more cities.

Or individual states.

… data smoothing is a great way to lie, or to mislead yourself. Yes, it can clarify, but it can also present a totally false picture.

Oregon’s suicide rate is among the highest in the country.

Limiting the CDC output to only homicide by firearm, the map below demonstrates that most counties in the State of Oregon do not register enough deaths to generate accurate results in the determination of a rate to associate with the county.

---

Including geospatial smoothing adds more data to the otherwise unremarkable counties, which allows the observer to better differentiate the counties relative to each other. A larger data set renders the output more useful by allowing extrapolation to generate a comparison that better quantifies an associated value for each respective county.

---

It would be interesting to see how, if at all, the map has changed after the 2009 financial crash.

I think that data is available from CDC; however, the output does not appear to be available in the form of a visual representation (e.g. map).

Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System / Fatal Injury Reports, National and Regional, 1999 – 2014

 

[Benvolio]

"Smoothing" allows them to paint counties red or high crime rate, even though they did not have any murders. Thus: "Limiting the CDC output to only homicide by firearm, the map below demonstrates that most counties in the State of Oregon do not register enough deaths to generate accurate results in the determination of a rate to associate with the county."

OH what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

 

[rareboy]

^ So you still don't understand maps....is that what you are saying?

 

[Benvolio]

"Smoothing" allows them to paint counties red or high crime rate, even though they did not have any murders. Thus: "Limiting the CDC output to only homicide by firearm, the map below demonstrates that most counties in the State of Oregon do not register enough deaths to generate accurate results in the determination of a rate to associate with the county."
Their tiny footnote says" Rates based on fewer than 20 deaths may be unstable" In other words, if the country did not have any deaths, any rate would be unstable, so they just assign a rate based on what other counties have--and which fit their ideological agenda.
OH what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

Smoothing is intended to be used when accurate data exists for some counties but not all the nearby counties. It may sometimes by reasonable to guess that the counties have similar rates of disease, etc. As the CDC explains in the link: "Geospatial smoothing can be applied to national, regional, or state maps showing county-level detail. When a county-level map indicates many unstable (or undefined) rates, geographic patterns can sometimes be clarified by displaying smoothed rates. For a given county, the smoothed rate is calculated by using."

But, in this case the method is being totally misused, because to fabricate deaths where they did not occur. And, our poor liberals have willingly allowed themselves to be flimflamed into thinking that the desert has huge rates of deaths.

And, yes, this is all done pursuant to an Agenda to show a link between gun ownership and deaths. They explain: "See our longer post on the links between gun ownership and gun death rates."

 

[rareboy]

Yet the annualized crude rate for Oregon remains the same.

The same total number of people still killed themselves using a gun.

 

[opinterph]

"Smoothing" allows them to paint counties red or high crime rate, even though they did not have any murders. Thus: "Limiting the CDC output to only homicide by firearm, the map below demonstrates that most counties in the State of Oregon do not register enough deaths to generate accurate results in the determination of a rate to associate with the county."

The colors are included merely for convenience to help the viewer differentiate each of the counties from others. In the images I provided for Oregon, I used a different color palette (Blue-Yellow-Red) from the one used by The Oregonian (Blue-Red). I also used 9 intervals, rather than 8. You can use the CDC mapping module link to create your own map image from the same data.

The counties in Oregon that included 20 or fewer homicides by firearm are represented with a diagonal crisscross pattern in the image without geospatial smoothing.[SUP]*[/SUP]

In our discussion, geospatial smoothing involves combining the data from each county with the counties that surround it. That is the same process used in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. Smoothing increases the spatial correlation of the data.

In the following set of images, the data is not smoothed:

While in this next set of images, the data is smoothed to increase each display point to include smoothing of the surrounding area to 6 millimeters (about ¼ inch).

The second set of images allows the viewer to quickly assess which areas include the greatest concentration of activity. The base data did not change. What changed is how that data is presented visually.

[SUP]*[/SUP]In the Oregon images, you will note that even with geospatial smoothing, 7 of the counties still do not include enough deaths to generate accurate results in the determination of a rate to associate with the county.

 

[Benvolio]

I have been more concerned with the map at 164 perporting to show gun deaths nationally, and which purports to show high rates in the sparsely settled desert and mountain areas. The counties tend to be large, so the smoothing, to color some counties based on neighboring counties, appears to be the cause of exaggerating the rates in many of the counties and of entire states. But, the counties surrouning Chicago, for instance, do not appear to have been smoothed with data from Chicago. If you look at the map to, as you say, "quickly assess which areas include the highest contraction of activity" you would conclude the greatest contractions are in the deserts and mountains with little in Chicago and Illinois. My point is that it is misleading and, indeed, has misled our liberals here.
I also do not think it is a coincidence that the high rate areas are colored red as in red for Republican while allegedly low rate areas are democrat blue. The admitted purpose of the maps is to show a supposed link between gun ownership and gun deaths. Less candidly , the purpose to associate them with Republicans. Does anyone seriously believe the designers did not make that connection of red with Republican?

 

[rareboy]

You still don't understand it all do you?

But since you believe that the map showing all gun deaths is a Democrat plot to destroy America, It holds that you also don't accept the maps that show the high rates of incidence in urban areas on the other map.

To begin with you (and maybe one or two others) seemed to think that the composite map was somehow illustrating criminal activity. It wasn't

Some of us can look at the map, understand what it shows, and as Opinterph notes, we then hone in on the trends and anomalies since outliers can often be highly informative as well.

For many of us, colours are only colours...in this case from cold blue to hot red. It was pointed out that the colours do not in any way co-relate to how people voted.

Everything is a conspiracy to you, isn't it.

 

[TX-Beau]

You still don't understand it all do you?

But since you believe that the map showing all gun deaths is a Democrat plot to destroy America, It holds that you also don't accept the maps that show the high rates of incidence in urban areas on the other map.

To begin with you (and maybe one or two others) seemed to think that the composite map was somehow illustrating criminal activity. It wasn't

Some of us can look at the map, understand what it shows, and as Opinterph notes, we then hone in on the trends and anomalies since outliers can often be highly informative as well.

For many of us, colours are only colours...in this case from cold blue to hot red. It was pointed out that the colours do not in any way co-relate to how people voted.

Everything is a conspiracy to you, isn't it.

Rareboy, he doesn't WANT to understand, he just wants to dismiss.

 

[rareboy]

I think at this point, having been exposed as not having looked carefully enough at all the maps and to have completely misunderstood the concept of rates per 100,000 and that smoothing doesn't do anything but extrapolate data to arrive at the same end crude rates...now he's just focussing on how the colours are a Democrat plot.