My family is 90 percent conservative, as are my in-laws, and the last 5 churches I've belonged to (which is why I keep trying to find a new one). Because of this, my Facebook feed is at least 75 percent Conservative. This means that most of the weekend I have seen the continuous stream of "guns don't kill people..." and every other imaginable logical fallacy regarding the gun control debate. The most common argument expressed on my page by far has been the idea that if we arm civilians, it would stop these mass shootings. Of course, Daily Kos has been full of diaries debunking this, but I wanted to focus on the most common meme that I have seen. Follow me over the squiggle for my findings.
After seeing this image well over a dozen times, I decided to check into it a bit more. A quick caveat: All of these finding were from quick searches this morning in order to debunk a Facebook meme. I did not do the jurisprudence I normally would on research, but the person who did the study seemed pretty open about all of these things, so I am going by that for now. I would greatly appreciate any further fact-checking or corrections on my findings - I am inserting final grades for my students this morning, so my time is limited. Anyways, here is what I found:
1. The person that created this graphic writes on the web site "The Daily Anarchist" and has no background in statistics, no background in research, and really no background in anything that would qualify him to make these assertions.
2. He used very questionable and misleading numbers and even more questionable and misleading sources (some of his main sources: Murderopedia, TruTV, and Newsmax. No reliable statistician / researcher would use these type of unreliable sources.
3. The most misleading part of this graphic is that it suggests that the shooting rampages were stopped by "armed civilians". In actuality, when he says "stopped by civilians", he is including the vast majority of the cases where civilians tackled the assailant - having nothing to do with being armed, and he even includes in the "stopped by civilians" category when the shooter commits suicide. So, according to his methodology, the Newton massacre was stopped by civilians - and he suggests armed civilians. We all know this was not the case.
Finally, this is the message I included at the end to my friends who posted this: It is one thing to believe that people being armed would help (which I disagree with and have seen a lot of data suggesting this is factually incorrect); however, people like the person who did this so-called study are truly irresponsible and destructive to any constructive discussion on what we can do to save lives. As always, I highly recommend fact-checking before posting; however, if something gets by you, or gets by me on something I post - please correct me from data or non-partisan sources. This is the only way we can have a constructive debate that will solve problems rather than just dividing us.
P.S. Perhaps a productive discussion in the comments could be modest, common sense solutions to gun control - perhaps with ideas that we think that our moderate gun loving friends might agree to. I would love to brainstorm and hear some more ideas. Thanks!