Taypo wrote:Pure statistical manipulation to achieve a desired outcome.
You have to take any study with a grain of salt. Those folks conducting "studies" like to gather huge volumes of data and apply selective metrics to get whatever result they, or the people who commissioned the study, want to get.
One of the most ridiculous examples involves the way that groups like Bloomberg's Everytown use the CDC statistics to calculate gun deaths involving children. The common Bloomberg/Brady practice is to use an age range of 0-24 years old when gathering their data in this particular case. Obviously no reasonable person would consider a 24 year old a child but the reality is that these special interest groups are trying to get a statistically high number of "children" killed by gun violence to support their arguments, so they widen the age range to scoop up all the 17-24 year old gang members and criminals and lump them in with the 10 year olds and report the whole number as "children". If they used an honest age range their data would show that very few actual children are killed by guns and in fact much more likely to accidentally die in many other ways.
By contrast, when the CDC calculates deaths by drownings involving children, the commonly accepted age cut off is 14 years old. Most of us would consider a 14 year old a child and the CDC is does not have a swimming pool banning agenda, so they are not motivated to skew the data.
Statistics can be very valuable when honestly tabulated, but usually they are just selectively tallied to achieve a predetermined result.
