Friday, January 18, 2008

Baseless Data

Coming from the corporate world there is nothing that ruffles my feathers more than someone arbitrarily throwing on statistical numbers, that they pulled from their ass, as fact. What , you ask, have I read that brought this up? I'm glad you asked.

Hilary Clinton Recently said:
"I would also work to reinstate the assault-weapons ban. We now have, once again, police deaths going up around the country, and in large measure because bad guys now have assault weapons again. We stopped it for awhile. Now they're back on the streets." Full Article Here

WHAT?!?!?!? By we, I'm assuming she is referring to Bill Clinton & the Brady Campaign's Assault-Weapons ban of 1994. And since she was married to Bill "used car slime ball" Clinton, any and everything done during his presidency she can claim credit as being apart of. I'm going to ignore the fact that this was actually written and introduced by the Brady Campaign and latter sponsored by the President . I'm not even going to tackle the validity of her actually playing a part in the bill. We all know that when a politician says "we" or "I" they use it in the lossiest possible fashion. I'll give you another example of Hilary using the "We" term: During one of the first DEM presidential debates, she said: "We have all been against this war from the very beginning." By "We" she meant "Herself , then everyone else on the stage" and "beginning" was referring to the "beginning" of the presidential debate.

Putting all that aside, I would like to know from what black hole Hilary was able to pull the statistics she stated above. After about five mintues of digging I came accross this little nugget of information: "study commissioned by the DOJ found that "Assault weapons (AW) were used in only a small fraction of gun crimes prior to the ban: about 2% according to most studies and no more than 8%. Most of the assault weapons used in crime are assault pistols rather than assault rifles." Further more, statics has shown (DOJ Reports and others) that the Assault weapons ban had no discernible effects on crime during or after the 2004 expiration of the ban.

While I'm sure a the act of a politician completely fabricating statics and facts comes as no shock to anyone, we need to be extra carefully about who is elected in 2008 or rhetoric like this will become common place (even more common then it currently is)

1 comment:

Houston said...

I was doing some research of my own and found that it pretty much all matched up with what you are saying. So it makes you wonder, where do politicians get these magical numbers? Also, what else would they be willing to throw vague assertions at in order to get people, too ignorant to do any research, to support. I believe we should start holding politicians accountable for the claims they make, so that all the fear mongering and peddling to the masses can stop. Man, when you get me going, I sound like some conspiracy nut Keith, though you know I think that stuff is stupid.