TexasCHLforum.com

Small Arms Survey is not what you would call a 2A friendly organization. They bill themselves as a fair, impartial source of information on guns and policies, as long as you understand that seeing firearms ownership as a threat and control as a solution is fair and impartial...

JALLEN wrote:67.3% of statistics are misleading and the rest of them flat wrong.

I think the only reason statistics are used is to fill pages of articles by ignoramuses with a axe to grind.

It's probably just dashed off as "click bait" to get people to see all the advertisements. The content wasn't important, only the page views.

Warning! Thread Hijack!

I grew up in a lightly populated county in Indiana with a very small town as the county seat and hub of most things. It had a once-weekly newspaper. Small, but usually interesting to locals, loved the "Sheriff's Log" (my Dad used to draw cartoons to adorn the annual "Best of the Sheriff''s Log" feature: stuff like "Woman called to say she there is a raccoon and a naked man in her house. Wants deputy to come remove raccoon.") The reporters and staff were all locals, but they could spell and write and construct sentences and stuff.

Anyway, when I went into the Air Force, my mom paid for a subscription for me so I could keep track of doin's at home. I kept it going throughout my career until the late 90s. At that point the guy who owned and edited the paper, a guy a couple classes ahead of me in high school and married to one of my classmates, sold the paper and moved on. Some of the staff moved on as well.

The new editor was younger, and hired some new reporters...and the quality of the writing went right in the toilet. It became so painful to read that I finally skipped renewing my subscription because it made me angry instead of homesick.

I think this, and the article linked above, generally track with the deterioration in education over all. Sad and maddening. [/Hijack]

By the way VMI, I'm not hatin' on you for bringing up the article, it would be an interesting piece of statistics. It just annoys me that such a shabby piece of "journalism" is allowed to exist. Even apart from it's little anti-2A digs, it is such a poor piece of writing.

It might have been an interesting set of stats, but the writer clearly has no capacity to write on either statistics, or gun laws, or even basic logic (but she does manage to inject some anti-gun "facts" along the way. That was painful to read.

The title loudly proclaims "States with the most Federal Firearms Licenses (Hint: not Texas)" (which is an absolute number), but then in the text states "Texas does lead the country in firearm permits overall ...".

Then you find out she is actually writing about number off FFLs per 100,000, which is a rate, not an absolute number...but then uses these rates to declare "we found that it’s not the southern states that are manufacturing and selling the most guns...". The absolute number or rate of FFLs would have only an indirect relationship with the number of guns manufactured or sold. Holy smokes. And then she butchers what the nullification laws do, confuses the issue of background checks and records of the mentally ill. Also links to little factoids from antigun organizations, but nothing from, oh, I dunno, NRA or NSSF or even an actual FFL...

Just an unsubtle anti-gun hack piece...I wouldn't trust her to even get the rate calculations correct.