El Scotch posted:

Nostalgia for MTG art from junior high ITT.

spacetoaster posted:

MinionOfCthulhu posted:

ATP_Power posted:

quote:

Studying the impact of gun control laws in the US is notoriously challenging. A variety of demographic factors influence the prevalence of lethal violence, and it's difficult to find states that share all these factors and differ in terms of gun laws. In addition, laws get enacted at times when the nation as a whole may be experiencing changes in the rate of crimes, violent and otherwise.

These issues make it difficult, but not impossible. Last year, Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health performed an analysis that tracked what happened before and after a single state (Missouri, in this case) loosened its gun control laws. That work suggested that killings using firearms increased by 25 percent after the law was passed. Now, Webster is back as part of a team that did essentially a converse study: what happens after a state significantly tightens its limits on gun sales? In this analysis, the rate of gun homicides dropped by 40 percent.

The state in question is Connecticut. In 1995, Connecticut tightened its laws for handgun purchases. It raised the age requirement from 18 to 21, thus cutting off part of an age group that's statistically prone to violence. It also required purchasers to apply for a permit at their local police station, which would perform a more extensive background check. Finally, the permits would not be approved without proof of attendance of an eight-hour safety course.

So, there was a clear before-and-after the implementation of these laws to track gun-related homicides. The question is how to find an appropriate population to serve as a control for Connecticut.

Quite cleverly, the authors created one. Rather than looking for a single state that matches Connecticut's demographics, they performed a statistical analysis that created a synthetic state that tracked Connecticut's pattern of firearm homicides before the law's passage. This state was composed of a weighted rate from a number of different states. So, for example, neighboring Rhode Island accounts for about 70 percent of the synthetic state's composition, Maryland another 15 percent. Then the authors created a similar synthetic state that tracked Connecticut's non-firearm homicides.

(Because the study period overlapped the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, where a number of Connecticut residents worked, that year was dropped from the non-firearm analysis.)

The synthetic state analysis also took into account a large number of factors that tend to influence rates of homicide, such as the percentage of the population at or below the poverty line, the percent between 15 and 24 years of age, and the number of police per unit of population.

For homicides from all causes other than guns, the synthetic state tracked Connecticut both before and after the passage of the 1995 gun control law. A few years after the implementation of implementation of the law in late 1995, however, firearm homicide rates diverged, with Connecticut's continuing to drop along a previous trend, while the synthetic states (like the national average) saw this rate stabilize.

Overall, the authors estimate that there were nearly 300 fewer firearm homicides in Connecticut between 1996 and 2005 compared to what would have occurred otherwise. That's a drop of 40 percent.

As a control, they ran another 39 states through the same process. None of them showed a pattern like Connecticut's.

Why the several year delay? The authors suggest a combination of a spike in gun sales immediately before the law went into effect, and a time lag after before the handgun supply became significantly constrained. Consistent with the idea of the law having an impact, Connecticut police are now finding that half the guns they recover were originally sold in other states; that's 15 percent above the national average.

If there's one weakness in the study, it's the heavy reliance of this analysis on Rhode Island. While you would expect it to be very similar to Connecticut in general, its small population size may leave it subject to fluctuations that have an overly large impact over short time periods. At the same time, however, the authors note that states that account for about 20 percent of the synthetic Connecticut (MD and CA) also tightened their gun control laws during that period, which should have made the differences less dramatic.

The federal government has effectively stopped funding research on firearms (this study was funded through private foundations). But, as its authors lay out, controlling homicides is a major public health issue. It's the second leading cause of death among people between 15 and 34 years of age in the US and more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm. Understanding if policy interventions can effectively limit these deaths— and which ones are effective—is a valuable area of research.

KazigluBey posted:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/connecticut-gun-controls-estimated-to-have-cut-fatal-shootings-by-40/

Renaissance Robot posted:

Civil rights more like civil wrongs

mlmp08 posted:

This is Jamie Clayton, an actress.

These spoilers are very mild from a plot perspective and maybe less mild from an impact perspective, because it occurs in the first episode of Sense8, a Netflix series. The show is very clever not to reveal that Jamie Clayton is transgender (in the show and in reality) until after the first rather explicit sex scene she has with her girlfriend on the show. It probably upset some people to be tricked into thinking they were looking at two women having sex, both of whom had been born female, genetically, but I found it pretty effective without being a big gotcha that's filmed in such a way as to be a making fun of viewers who wouldn't have chosen to watch such a scene if they'd been warned. It's all handled candidly and almost casually in a way that, to me at least, minimizes any jeering at the audience while also highlighting how this should not be such a big deal in the long run.

The show has all sorts of other problems with characters and pacing, because it has 8 main characters and the Wachowski brothers are involved.

Accretionist posted:

Absurd Alhazred posted:

(from the relevant GBS thread)

Volcott posted:

Absolutely none of this would have prevented Newtown.

Freakazoid_ posted:

Washington state is only .22 cents higher than Oregon's minimum, but it was enough to push most of its rural counties into the positive? That seems kind of suspicious.

HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:

sugar free jazz posted:

Now let's talk about male circumcision too




i think that's as good a segue as any into an Israel discussion...or is it??

Bohemian Nights posted:

Bohemian Nights posted:

Bohemian Nights posted:

LeJackal posted:

Such strong, gendered hate.

Guavanaut posted:

So is that just referring to the guy in the middle, or is it also a point against the militarized ATF agents, the Islamic extremists, the helicopters, and the target pistol enthusiast in the background there?

Renaissance Robot posted:

"These things aren't real, and even if they were having a gun wouldn't save you from them".

Guavanaut posted:

Militarized SWAT and government departments are real though, and I'm fairly sure they're 'pussies' in the same way that the paranoid fantasist depicted is, being as many other places manage to serve warrants without driving tanks over dogs or setting babies on fire.


Coming to rescue the poo poo out of you.

Bohemian Nights posted:

LeJackal posted:

Pictured: A grateful toddler smiles from the hospital after police bravely blew apart his chest and face with a flashbang grenade.

'Fanks fo' wescuin' me misser poweeceman.

Pictured: A grateful child rescued from a nightmare where ponies could talk but only to be mean.

I'll never wake up one day with a super gross pimple! Thanks police!

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

If only those small children had had guns they could have killed the police officers?

Armyman25 posted:

Look at this pussy over here.

LeJackal posted:

Lets at least try to stay on topic. We're posting people with guns, so called 'pussies' cowards
Try keeping up.