From tribune.usask.ca!canopus.cc.umanitoba.ca!newsflash.concordia.ca!utcsri!utnut!torn!howland.reston.ans.net!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!eff!news.kei.com!yeshua.marcam.com!zip.eecs.umich.edu!umn.edu!gaia.ucs.orst.edu!news.uoregon.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.u.washington.edu!tzs Thu Jan 27 09:38:18 1994 Path: tribune.usask.ca!canopus.cc.umanitoba.ca!newsflash.concordia.ca!utcsri!utnut!torn!howland.reston.ans.net!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!eff!news.kei.com!yeshua.marcam.com!zip.eecs.umich.edu!umn.edu!gaia.ucs.orst.edu!news.uoregon.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.u.washington.edu!tzs From: tzs@u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns Subject: Re: "1 Clasroom full of children every two days" Date: 21 Jan 1994 21:27:36 GMT Organization: University of Washington School of Law, Class of '95 Lines: 89 Message-ID: <2hphc8$644@news.u.washington.edu> References: <1994Jan21.163330.29764@newsgate.sps.mot.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: stein.u.washington.edu In article , Jon Buck wrote: >> On the morning drive the talk show hosts quoted some >> study which said that among other things: > >> 1) The equivalent of a class room full of children are shot >> and killed in America every two days > >Sure; remember that "children" means anyone under the age of 24 when >the gun controllers start throwing statistics around! If you use the >definition of children that's a bit more reasonable (0-14), your class >room is only going to contain one or two children. Using 1988 numbers, there were ~6 firearm homicides per 100,000 children 14 and under. In 1991, there were about 55 million children 0-14. Ignoring the fact that the years are different (hey, we're just trying to see where they got their numbers), we get ~3000 per year, or ~9 per day, which would indeed be a classroom every two days. They might also be including accidental shootings of children, which are in the same ballpark as the homicides (suicides would add a little too if included, but not much...suicide is not that big among children 14 and under). (Note: I'm pretty sure I blew the calculation of the rate of ~6 per 100,000. Don't worry about it. As I show below, the whole approach is wrong). I suspect that the above is the kind of calculation that they are doing. The problem with it is that black homicide and white homicide take place at very different rates, and whites outnumber blacks by a rather large amount, so to get the total number of deaths, you really have to compute them for each group, and then add. Below are the firearm homicide rates for various race/sex/age categories. I've also included an estimate of the number of people in each category, obtained by taking the population numbers for each age group (19 million under 5, 18 million 5 to 9, 18 million 10 to 14), and assuming each age group is 50% female, and 10% black. I've rounded to the nearest million. Finally, the last column is the number of deaths. Black male, under 5: 1.1 1 million 11 Black male, 5 to 9: 1.1 1 million 11 Black male, 10 to 14: 4.5 1 million 45 White male, under 5: 0.3 9 million 27 White male, 5 to 9: 0.3 8 million 24 White male, 10 to 14: 0.8 8 million 64 Black female, under 5: 0.6 1 million 6 Black female, 5 to 9: 0.7 1 million 7 Black female, 10 to 14: 2.5 1 million 25 White female, under 5: 0.2 9 million 18 White female, 5 to 9: 0.3 8 million 24 White female, 10 to 14: 0.4 8 million 32 This gives a total number of deaths of ~300. Thus, it looks to me that they got their bogus numbers not by defining children as everyone under 24, but rather by improperly combining rate data for distinct segments of the 14 and under population, and then applying those rates to the whole under 14 population. >> 3) It is more dangerous to live in Wichita, Kansas, who had over >> thirty hand gun fatalities, than Belfast, Ireland, which only >> had 9, last year > >Uh huh. That's why all those people in Wichita are lined up at the >airport, waiting for the shuttle to Chicago so that they can catch >their flights to Belfast. Not! > >The folks in Belfast prefer to blow each other up, don't they? And >isn't that the place where you don't dare stray out of your own >neighborhood for fear of getting the daylights beaten out of you if >you happen to profess the wrong religion? Nice place. Uh huh. That's why all those people in Belfast are lined up at the airport, waiting for their flights to Chicago so that they can catch the shuttle to Witchita. Not! :-) --Tim Smith ps: all data is from _The American Almanac_. This is the most useful almanac I've seen. It doesn't waste a lot of time with summaries of the news for the last year, and all that other fluff. It's instead crammed full of stuff that the others don't bother with. For example, where the others would just have a summary of the Federal budget, this one has dozens of tables, including fairly detailed breakdowns of the individual items on tax returns (gross income, taxable income, the various major deductions, etc.) from each income range. Anyone who posts regularly to the political groups should grab a copy of this.