Re: Riding a bike a protection and in general

On 6/20/2025 9:18 AM, AMuzi wrote:

On 6/20/2025 5:06 AM, zen cycle wrote:

On 6/19/2025 11:25 AM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 6/19/2025 4:05 AM, Catrike Ryder wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:31:23 -0400, Frank Krygowski
<frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
"If a person does get a gun for "protection," they or someone in their
household becomes much more likely to get shot"
--Krygowski
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Nonsense. There are probably more people who bought a gun for
protection who have not been shot, than people who bought a gun for
protection who have been shot.

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Wow.
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Can one of Mr. Tricycle Rider's allies please explain his logic mistake to him? I'm beyond trying to help him learn to think.
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If he would have bothered to read the study, he'd know that there are in fact more people who bought a gun for protection who have not been shot than people who bought a gun for protection who have been shot.
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The fact that he thinks the study is bogus because more people who bought a gun for protection who have not been shot than people who bought a gun for protection who have been shot shows that he didn't read the study, and if he did, he didn't understand it.
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The claim "there are more people who bought a gun for protection who have not been shot, than people who bought a gun for protection who have been shot" does not negate the the conclusion of the study that having a gun in your home makes you more likely to get shot.
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It's likely that the dumbass will never be able to understand the distinction because:
a) he reading comprehension is too weak to understand statistical analysis
2) his automatically dismisses anything not fed to him by his magatard echo chamber.
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but as I mentioned before, trying to expose him to new concepts and use objective rationale has little more possibility of success that trying to convince a dog not to lick it's own ass.
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IOW - it's just the willfully ignorant dumbass being a willfully ignorant dumbass.
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 A new paper by Jens Ludwig (could not find a not-paywall copy) elucidates the area well. Here's a synopsis:
 https://www.vpm.org/npr-news/npr-news/2025-05-23/a-new-theory-on-gun- violence
 also:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26635450-100-how-a-study-in-the- stockholm-subway-could-help-prevent-violent-crime/

I don't want to do a subscription, so I couldn't read the New Scientist article. Perhaps you could summarize? But I assume it's got some similarity to the NPR article - that knowing how to deescalate should reduce gun deaths (and other deaths).
I agree in principle. Many decades ago I read a very brief little book on the same theme. It contained an anecdote about a somewhat elderly woman in a bad neighborhood walking to her apartment with two bags of groceries. Two men appeared and began walking right next to her, one on each side, probably to steal her stuff or harm her as soon as they were all hidden from the view of others. But she flipped the script, so to speak, by handing each a bag of her groceries and thanking them for being so nice as to help carry them.
The point, as I recall, was that those planning bad acts have a mental script in mind, a prediction of how things will go down. If they are sufficiently derailed, they are defused. Sort of psychological judo.
I think we could stand to learn a lot more about psychological techniques to calm enraged people and defuse fraught situations.
--
- Frank Krygowski