Guns? Suicides? Why Can’t People Actually Derive Logically From Statistics?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state

Note: The District of Columbia and Louisiana (i.e. New Orleans) have the highest murder rates by a multiplier of 2x-10x higher than any other state. Both of these two areas have a city, which has the highest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States

Note: Suicide Rate, Japan’s is more than 2x the US’s at 26 per 100k vs. our 11 per 100k. Again valuable derived information can be found by this extreme lack of correlation. Remember, Japan basically has zero guns, the United States has tons. Japan is greater than 2x our suicide rate yet they have nowhere near as many lethal options to commit these actions. I’ll lay it out simply, that provides proof that having or not having guns to commit suicide is not the key to decreasing said incidents, but instead changing one’s cultural characteristics is the key. In other words, banning guns is very likely to have almost no affect on suicides over the long term if the United States can’t fix it’s cultural issue, the same is obviously true for Japan, since they’ve already banned firearms and as far as I know from the data, there are zero suicides by firearm. If there are any in Japan, it is such a small number they don’t even differentiate the mechanism used.

Needless to say, the statistics and single data points the anti-gunners, and the pro-gunners use are often nefariously used at best and often completely irrelevant without looking at more data points around culture, habits, behaviors and other indicators within social groups. Until we as a nation learn to do that and mold our society into something more closely that we actually want, we won’t get very good results by screaming about gun crimes and guns and the horror of the tools we employ.

Strangely enough, this goes the same for the automobile vs. any other mode of transport argument. Until we realize the costs, the REAL costs, we’ll keep making absurdly stupid as hell policy decisions around these things.