13 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
  2. Sep 2022
  3. Jun 2022
    1. gun rights advocates often push to arm more people, citing prominent examples where a “good guy with a gun” stopped a “bad guy.”

      A "good guy with a gun" stopped a "bad guy" on average less than 3% of the time in active shooter situations in 433 events through 2021.

    2. “It’s direct, indisputable, empirical evidence that this kind of common claim that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with the gun’ is wrong,” said Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, who has studied mass shootings for more than a decade. “It’s demonstrably false, because often they are stopping themselves.”
    1. 97.8 Percent of Mass Shootings Are Linked to This

      What is the total number of Citizens using antidepressant drugs? What were the underlying conditions of those who did perform mass shootings?

      What does the data suggest here? Are there identifiable trends and correlations? Is this predictable? Or is it largely random?

  4. Oct 2020
    1. Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment.

      Knowing a little of what is coming in advance here, I can't help but thinking: How can this riot theory potentially be used to influence politics and/or political campaigns? It could be particularly effective to get people "riled up" just before a particular election to create a political riot of sorts and thereby influence the outcome.

      Facebook has done several social experiments with elections in showing that their friends and family voted and thereby affecting other potential voters. When done in a way that targets people of particular political beliefs to increase turn out, one is given a means of drastically influencing elections. In some sense, this is an example of this "Riot Theory".

  5. Sep 2019
    1. Variation in Rates of Fatal Police Shootings across US States:the Role of Firearm Availability

      Hello! This article is about the relationship between firearm prevalence (the IV) and the rates of fatal police shootings (the DV). The authors hypothesize that the greater the prevalence of firearms, the grater the rates of fatal police shooting.

      This article follows the classical structure of social science research -- abstract, introduction, literature review/theory, research design, findings, and conclusions.

  6. Jul 2018
    1. Researchers have found time and time again that more guns mean more deaths. And Americans have a lot of guns, and easy access to them. Americans own almost half of the 650 million civilian-owned guns there are in the entire world, and gun homicide rates in the US are 25 times higher than in other high-income countries. States and developed countries with more guns have more gun deaths.
    1. Analyzing data on hundreds of shootings in Boston from 2010 to 2014, Anthony Braga of Northeastern University and Philip J. Cook of Duke University found that on a bullet-per-bullet basis, shootings committed with a large-caliber firearm are much more likely to result in a fatality than those with a smaller-caliber gun. Caliber is a measure of the diameter of the bullets fired by a particular gun.
    2. But they found stark differences in shooting outcomes depending on the caliber of gun used. They divided the calibers of guns used in the shootings into three categories: small, which included .22-, .25- and .32-caliber handguns; medium, including .380s, .38s and 9mms; and large, including .40s, .44 magnums, .45s, 10mms and 7.62 x 39s.
  7. Jul 2016
    1. When you ask why such "bad" cops are  armed and allowed to patrol the streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal menace.

      It is not fair to our cops to be under so much pressure! I am so relieved this article has pointed out the need to address the root of the problem, rather than simply get caught up in the tired "all lives matter" and so on take. This is very refreshing. I hope we all work to address this locally. Reduce fines. Reduce crime. Reduce the danger to our beloved force AND people. Do not expect them to become cash cows with their lives on the line. IMHO

  8. Dec 2015