Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
Mark Addinall writes:
Tim Lambert writes:
I looked in the reference you cite: "How Firearm Crime is Declining"
It claims that the number of firearms owned in Australia has increased from about 2.5 million to about 4 million (Graph 1). I do not believe that "quadrupled" is the appropriate way to describe this increase.
I have graph 1. 18" from my hose and I'm sure that bar 1. is less than 1.5 million.
The thing's right in front of you and you STILL can't read it correctly. Sad. Graph 1 shows the firearms homicide rate AND an estimate of the numbers of firearms owned. It has two scales, one on the left going from 0 to 3 per 100,000 for the firearms homicide rate and one on the right for the number of firearms owned going from 0 to 5 million. Mark has mistakenly used the left scale for interpreting bar 1 to get an incorrect answer of less than 1.5 million for the number of guns owned in 1979.
He then compounded the error by dividing 4 by 1.5 and getting the answer 4.
Let me show you the relative length of the bars on the histogram:
1979 *********** 1994 *******************
Mark claimed that it was a "fact" that the second bar was four times as long as the first one.
So all of those guns imported into Australia actually emigrated and are living in secular communities in rural Australia.
Gibberish.
If the Australian Bureau of Statistics states the 3 million firearms have been imported since 1979, where do you think the are hiding?
The 3 million comes from your misreading of a graph created by Ted Drane, not the ABS. It is quite possible for the total number of guns owned to go up, while the percentage of Australians owning to go down.
