>> According to Fox News, a person is 3 times more likely to commit suicide if they own guns.
It is the same problem. You cannot conclude that gun possession is what makes these people more likely to commit suicide. In particular, it could be that a desire to kill oneself is what causes a lot of people to possess guns. Or, it could be the fact that suicide correlates heavily with drug use and drug use correlates heavily with gun ownership, so guns aren't causing suicides, drug abuse is. Further, women who were abused by their fathers tend to be both drug abusers and suicidal, so yet other ostensibly exogenous factors can have meaningful impact as well. (I'm not making these other claims as "causes" because you run into the same statistical issues, but I'm simply making the point that these regressions do not translate to the headline, "Gun Ownership Causes Suicide.")
>> When you factor in those shootings where a kid finds a gun and offs themselves, a playmate, a sibling or parent, well...
These do not represent cases where gun ownership decreases one's life expectancy. If anything, it suggests a decrease in life expectancy in other people (which includes lives of criminals who confront the gunowner).
This is the way minds of otherwise intelligent people are manipulated, often unintentionally, by statistics. I don't think for a minute that the writer at Slate or HuffPo or Fox News who repeats these incorrect statistical inferences understand the giant leaps they're making. |
