Why does nobody talk about how both sides of the gun debate cherry pick the same 3 stats?
I sat through a city council meeting in Boise last month where two guys quoted the exact same FBI numbers to argue opposite things, and neither would touch the other 47 tables in the report. One side leans on defensive gun use surveys, the other leans on Australia's 1996 buyback, and both skip anything that complicates the story. Where do you all actually land on this, and what stat made you change your mind, if any?
Two guys in Boise quoting the same FBI tables at each other and ignoring the other 47 is wild to me. What gets me is the defensive gun use numbers, the range on those surveys runs from like 100k to 3 million a year depending on who ran the study, and people just grab whichever end fits their sign. I had no idea the spread was that huge until someone walked me through the Kleck and Hemenway back and forth, and that's the one that made me stop trusting any single stat thrown at me in a debate.