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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 23 2019, @02:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the urban-rural-divide dept.

Swiss voters on Sunday approved a measure to tighten the Alpine nation's gun laws, bringing the country in line with many of its European partners despite the objections of local gun owners, Swiss media reported, citing official results.

Switzerland's public broadcaster said more than 63% of voters nationwide agreed to align with European Union firearms rules adopted two years ago after deadly attacks in France, Belgium, Germany and Britain.

The vote Sunday was part of Switzerland's regular referendums that give citizens a direct say in policymaking. It had stoked passions in a country with long, proud traditions of gun ownership and sport and target shooting. Switzerland, unlike many other European nations, allows veterans of its obligatory military service for men to take home their service weapons after tours of duty.

The Swiss proposal, among other things, requires regular training on the use of firearms, special waivers to own some semi-automatic weapons and serial number tracking system for key parts of some guns. Gun owners would have to register any weapons not already registered within three years, and keep a registry of their gun collections.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/05/19/tighter-gun-laws-appear-pass-switzerland-despite-opposition/3731629002/


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:44PM (13 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:44PM (#846672) Journal

    Well, yes and no. They don't have america's mass shootings. They do have exceedingly high suicide rates, the second highest in the world, which a lot of pretty solid research connects to firearms per capita(of which they're also second highest in the world).

    Obviously the research is epidemological, but the nature of the observed connection where regionally more guns reliably correlates with more gun suicide with a large effect size, and gun suicide correlates with higher overall suicide rate, though the mediating variables for that are more numerous. With an attached underlying theory based on findings that guns in the home correlate with suicide in home.

    And while epidemiology isn't controlled experiment, a coherent model with consistent data for multiple layers of analysis is about the best you get from public health in general.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:50PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:50PM (#846676)

    Astronomy has no controlled experiments but doesn't have the same issues. I'd say its more that people studying public health "don't like math", so they are incapable of making any sort of quantitative predictions to test their theories.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:58PM (6 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:58PM (#846678) Journal

      When you typed this up, did you ever ask yourself "Am I making a meaningful point?"

      Of course people studying public health like math. That's what public health is: applying rigorous mathematical analysis to health trends. And most of these papers fit a fairly clear hypothesis, observation, conclusion paradigm.

      • (Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:05PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:05PM (#846683)

        Plugging stuff into SPSS/SAS isn't rigorous mathematical analysis. I mean real math where you start with assumptions and then derive a quantitative model that you believe may be more or less true (there will of course always be "perturbations").

        Something like 99% of that field is just misinterpreting the coefficients of arbitrary linear models. Change the model, change the coefficients. If you include interactions you can even get stuff like a positive "effect" of guns when male/female is coded as 1/0, but negative "effect" when you use 0/1.

        • (Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:21PM (3 children)

          by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:21PM (#846693) Journal

          Yeah, I can totally see wanting a non-linear model on this dataset [aphapublications.org]

          Stop shitting out ad-hoc justifications for why the evidence and analysis is wrong, and if you're not completely and utterly full of shit posit a counter hypothesis and model that better explains the data. Or fuck off. One of those two. Not this lazy pseudointellectual shit.

          • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @06:11PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @06:11PM (#846731)

            Sorry but you are not following at all.

            1) The y-axis says "adjusted" suicide rate. These adjustments are probably including other variables in a linear model.
            2) There could be some third variable that correlates with both suicide rate and gun ownership, if you further adjust for that this plot would look totally different. The variables included in such models are inevitably a matter of convenience, which is why these coefficients and plots don't mean anything. It all depends on what you include in the model.
            3) I would definitely use a non-linear model for the purposes of prediction on such data. There is still quite a bit of scatter there, and you can probably do better than the linear model (but sometimes it isnt worth the effort).

            As I said, 99% of public health research amounts to making this exact same error of interpreting coefficients of arbitrary statistical models meant only to be used to predict some outcome. And the issue is hardly limited to public health research. Scary to say, but random anon person on the internet knows better than all these PhDs, it is true.

          • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @06:20PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @06:20PM (#846734)

            Also, "linear" does not mean fitting a line. That may be another place you are confused.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_combination [wikipedia.org]
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_regression [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @07:24PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @07:24PM (#846750)

            This guy has a really good analysis on all these graphs:

            http://freakoutery.com/2018/07/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between-gun-ownership-and-homicide/ [freakoutery.com]

            and especially the tricks related to getting a line through the origin as in your pic:

            http://freakoutery.com/2018/12/lying-with-gun-data-again/ [freakoutery.com]

        • (Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:21PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:21PM (#846694)

          Same AC. Try this:

            set.seed(12345)
            treatment = c(rep(1, 4), rep(0, 4))
            gender1   = rep(c(1, 0), 4)
            gender2   = rep(c(0, 1), 4)
            result    = rnorm(8)

            summary(lm(result ~ treatment*gender1))
            summary(lm(result ~ treatment*gender2))

          "Treatment effect" is 1.17 vs -0.38. That is just a particularly egregious example though. In general unless you believe your model is "true" the coefficients have no meaning. You can still use an arbitrary model to make predictions, but usually you would just use gradient boosting or neural networks for that these days.

          Now think about all the damage these people have probably done to society from drawing conclusions about pretty much random numbers.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:02PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:02PM (#846681)

    "presence of guns correlates with gun suicide"

    presence of rope correlates with rope suicide.
    presence of drugs correlates with overdose suicide.
    presence of knives correlates with knife suicide.
    presence of bridges correlates with bridge suicide.
    etc. etc.

    You aren't talking epidemiology -- your talking tautology. Many of the countries with the highest suicide rates have low or no gun ownership. Countries with similar suicide rates have different levels of gun ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 1, Troll) by ikanreed on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:06PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:06PM (#846685) Journal

      Man, that sure is a purposeful and willful disregard of the second half of the analyses you've got there.

      You're one of those people who blockquote single sentences from posts to refute them aren't you?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday May 23 2019, @06:58PM (2 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday May 23 2019, @06:58PM (#846742)

      Effectiveness of suicide intent by guns is much higher than any of these other categories.
      Lot of people miss or chicken out, when it's not as easy as pulling a trigger.

      I'm all for letting people off themselves, if they want to and don't hurt anyone else in the process. That doesn't prevent me from acknowledging that guns are excessively good at turning a bad day into an irreversible mistake.

      ANYWAY, reading the list in TFS, this has nothing to do with suicide.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 24 2019, @01:35AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 24 2019, @01:35AM (#846876)

        It could be that the level of one's intent to commit suicide is at play. A serious person will choose an effective means while a person seeking attention or whatever, will not. How many people just looking for attention choose guns? And will banning guns have any effect on those who are serious and capable of choosing other just as effective means?

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday May 24 2019, @04:36PM

          by bob_super (1357) on Friday May 24 2019, @04:36PM (#847155)

          As my last sentence alluded to, the list of restrictions in TFS is not a "ban".
          It's also not a "reduce suicides" list. It's a "responsible ownership and traceability" list, driven by the open borders with the EU next door.
          IF you're gonna have a lot of firearms in your society, that is a fairly reasonable list. The Swiss are typically not dreaming of armed uprisings against their violent dictator.