Obama supports ban on assault rifles

[Cbear]

Maybe Darwin will rid us of the gun extremist crowd.

If a guy sits on a chainsaw or blows his hand off loading his gun then he didnt respect the tool and Darwin will weed them out.

[Ash]

Wait a moment, I thought it was impossible to love guns and get shot? I thought guns only shoot bad guys?

[seansloan]

I just ****ing shot myself,son of a bitch

[don king]

I guess no one will ever address the elephant in the room. We're a member short.

[split decision]

Quick Draw McGraw was just a little too quick on that one.

[Cbear]

Wait a moment, I thought it was impossible to love guns and get shot? I thought guns only shoot bad guys?

Oh no, not at all. There are idiots all around us. If you are in a room with 3 people, then there is a good bet one of you is a complete and total idiot. And I will take that a step further, you use the word "love" in regards to guns and that is true; there are people who love them such as the idiot 22 year old who has been photographed in Idaho walking around shopping malls with his AR 15. Those people give sportsmen like me a bad name. To me, a gun is a tool like a chainsaw, wood lathe, computer, car; it has its purpose and if misused it can hurt you or others. Its a hunk of metal and not good or evil. Only man can make that so.

[Cbear]

Quick Draw McGraw was just a little too quick on that one.

Apparently, that happens regularly on police firing ranges. Ive known several cops and every one of them has a range story of a cop having an accidental discharge and its always hushed up.

[Wahoo08]

Wahoo, after a long night of drinking and just stumbling out of bed, I'm more calm, and I think I can explain it to you this way:

There is a correlation between height of parents, and height of children. Now there are plenty of factors that can throw a monkey wrench. For instance in a hypothetical world where the children of everyone over 6ft tall, get their legs shattered with sledge hammers, that correlation would be destroyed.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a correlation, in our world, between the height of parents, and height of offspring. Or logically speaking: because something can be different in a hypothetical world, doesn't mean it is different in ours.

Exactly!

A third, independent variable (in this case, your societal norms/legalities of smashing the legs of every child of 6ft tall) does not negate the correlation between the height of parents and their offspring. The biological workings are still the same. Taller people, on average, will have taller babies. Your sledge hammers won't change this. Now, if a researcher (or a Washington Post journalist) did not take in to account the sledge hammer smashing, he might conclude that their is no relationship between the height of ones parents and their offspring. Luckily though, we're able to see why this is incorrect.

Here's another way of putting it:

Partial correlation analysis is aimed at finding correlation between two variables after removing the effects of other variables. This type of analysis helps spot spurious correlations (i.e. correlations explained by the effect of other variables) as well as to reveal hidden correlations - i.e correlations masked by the effect of other variables.

http://www.statistics.com/index.php?...ry&term_id=538

Or from Wiki:

Partial correlation is the relationship between two variables while controlling for a third variable. The purpose is to find the unique variance between two variables while eliminating the variance from a third variables

http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/What_i...correlation%3F


In the case of the chart you posted, the obvious third variable would be gun control legislation for the various nations compared (i.e. access to guns). Let's say that there is a direct causal relationship between gun murders and video game spending (which, for the record, does not equate to the time spent playing said games. Just another of the many, many flaws of this 'study'). That is, every time a person plays a violent video game (which I believe is what the debate centered around, although the Washington Post journalist never attempted to compare the types of video games purchased across the nations he chose to use. Another deep flaw.), a psychological switch flips in their brain and they instinctively reach for the the closest gun and kill the first person they see. If they don't have access to a gun, this does not change the physiological workings of the brain, just as smashing ones legs does not change the biological workings that relate one's height with their parents.

Once again, my issue is that you took a conclusion from a very specific set of data and extrapolated it to a much wider scenario.

[spasgur]

What happens on Gun Appreciation Day? Well, people get shot, of course!


http://gawker.com/5977377/gun-apprec...olina-and-ohio

Bwahahahahahaha it doesn't get much more redneck than that

[Cbear]

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013...n-threat?lite= 5 year old girl suspended from Kindergarten for her bubble gun comments. Seems wrong to question a 5 year old for 3 hours without parents present.