22 Comments
Apr 11Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Good stuff. Your focus on numbers over rights in importantly correct. In the post-constitutiobal country we are in, holding up a copy of the constitution is rather like holding up a "no bear attacks" sign to a charging grizzly bear.

Rights written on a piece of paper are irrelevant unless all parties involved recognize the validity of the document. Neither political party does so.

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Mao was right that power (and therefore rights) flow from the barrel of a gun.

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Apr 11Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Maybe the best hope now is that David Hogg can use the graphs to find "a guy whos name escapes me" and follow the numbers. I think that may actually be a great result if he can keep an open mind.

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Regarding gun ownership v. homicide rate, I'm willing to bet everything I own that if you were to subtract the gun-related homicides in Fulton and Dekalb counties (Atlanta metro) from the Georgia state total, Georgia would have one of the lowest homicide rates in the country.

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You can subtract certain *neighborhoods* out of Baltimore and the literal City of Baltimore would have European rates.

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I haven't run out the numbers myself, but my understanding is that if we subtracted the homicides from our 10 largest Democrat-run cities, the U.S. would rate 40th in the world.

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Here in sunny Minnesota, about 90% of homicide happens in four zip codes.

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Leave Ramsey and Hennepin counties, and your odds of dying in a homicide go off a cliff. Those two counties hold (roughly) 31% of the state population. According to the 2023 MN BCA report, they held 78% of the homicides.

And my friends all act surprised when I want to leave the city after college.

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“But the cuisine!”

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I have roots here, my house is here, my career is here, but holy fucking hell is the Minneapolis City Council doing everything in their fucking power to make me look for another place to live, and I don't even live in Minneapolis itself.

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I found it frustrating that David Hogg dismissed all the defensive gun use information and thought it all came from the national rifle association. Sloppy thinking and debating from him

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I would have liked Spike to challenge Hogg's assertion that research is banned. That's explicitly not true, the CDC can and does do gun research and lots of gun research happens in universities nationwide. The CDC is banned from spending money on advocacy campaigns.

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Apr 12Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

It's laughable. the Obama administration commissioned a gun violence study from the CDC, and when the results didn't support the narrative they quietly buried it.

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Can you post a link for that, please?

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My observation is that the sloppy work done by the CDC amounts to advocacy.

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It is a common "fact" tried out by gun control advocates isn't it? But yes I think it an important distinction. Hogg likely thinks he can just trot out the name "Dickey", and some people will assume he knows what he is talking about.

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And this guy went to Harvard.

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Apr 12·edited Apr 12

Hogg repeats the canard that the CDC was somehow prevented from studying "gun violence", but that never happened: The Dickey amendment specified that the CDC could not engage in "gun-control" advocacy research, which they had a habit of doing.

That it took 2 decades and an explicit permission slip from congress for the CDC to begin doing objective research, lays the responsibility for "gun violence" research squarely on the shoulders of the CDC, rather than on congress or the "gun lobby".

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I found it frustrating that David Hogg dismissed all the defensive gun use information and thought it all came from the national rifle association. Sloppy thinking and debating from him

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Could have ask Hogg head where the money went. Flying, eating, hotel rooms, etc. etc. etc. Just like BLM accounting.

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