It's High Fructose Corn Syrup, damn it.
Last edited Tue Dec 18, 2012, 04:31 PM - Edit history (5)
This post is offered to say something about correlation.
I do not think that obesity causes shootings. It may, however, correlate slightly more with gun violence state-by-state, than gun sales. (It is close, either way.) A state voting for McCain in 2008 is the highest correlative factor for state gun violence. Obesity and gun violence both are red state pathologies.
There are a thousand factors in gun violence, of course. Aside from guns, the biggest would be alcohol and poverty for shootings in general. In terms of these mass-shootings, mental illness.
Since the link between guns and all shootings is direct, however, insofar as all shooters have access to guns, rather than merely most shooters, guns are a very good factor to consider. Better than obesity, surely.
That doesn't prove that guns are the problem, but it's a lot more to the point than mere correlation, like that shootings are more common since the development of SSRIs, or cell phones or video games... or since "Friends" went off the air.
On the other hand, video games or drugs or laws or cell phones could be factors. Certainly. Even prime movers. But it requires a darn good argument beyond correlation.
(And optimal policy may not be the same as obvious policy. For instance, I suspect that prohibition reduced alcoholism while increasing fatalities from alcoholism. Policy depends what specific result you're after.)
And a lot of correlations are really correlations with something else. The lowest state gun violence correlation is the percentage of college educated people in the state, but it does not follow that Pell grants would reduce gun violence more than background checks. Maybe they would, but the negative correlation doesn't mean that by itself.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I've had the same DU identity for more than 10 years.
How many have you had in that time? He'll, how many different identities have you had since DU3 went live.
Personally, I don't think it's fair to the thousands of DUers who've never been tombstoned, that a poster like you can just start over again every time you get banned.
Do zombies deserve to have their previous identities kept secret? How about a zombie that ran another board where posters shat upon DU and DUers for years, with the ferocity of teabaggers? That's a question that I'm struggling with. My gut tells me no. Zombies don't deserve a fresh start. DU3 is all about transparency. IMO, they should be responsible for what they posted, regardless of when it was posted, or what name they were using at the time. But my gut hasn't convinced my head and fingers of that yet.
Sid
It's your bod & brainpan. You have right to rot them.
for more information.
Thanks for posting this. 
