Internet Scofflaw

Ezra Klein (of Journolist fame) is running a list of “facts” about guns in America. Most of them are nonsense, but for most of those showing so requires some analysis that I will leave to other commentators. I want to focus on just one, this chart:

The chart shows the US with a significantly higher rate of assault deaths than all “other OECD”. Klein adds: “We are a clear outlier.”

Now, you can’t tell with them drawn atop each other, but there are 24 graphs on that chart. (They are shown separately here.) But there are 34 OECD members. If you include those (which the graph’s author did later, after being questioned on the point) you get a very different picture:

Not so much of an outlier with eight more countries put in — particularly if you look at 2010 and not the late 1970s — are we? The original graph left out all the countries with a higher or similar rate.

But wait, eight more countries? Weren’t we missing ten? If you peruse the list, it is still missing Iceland and Turkey. I wonder what’s going on in those two. The author (who does not study violence, by the way) says he couldn’t get data for Turkey. He doesn’t mention Iceland at all.

Finally, I should mention that other measures of violence paint a very different picture (see number 6, here), but that gets into the realm of analysis, so I’ll stop here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Media Failure, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.