Isn't this charming: Utah has officially declared the Browning model 1911 semi-automatic pistol their official state gun. How lovely! I remember when our kids were growing up in Utah, one of their school assignments was to compile all of the state symbols into an illustrated report, so I knew the Utah state bird was the California gull, and the state insect was the honey bee, and the state fossil was Allosaurus, but they weren't pasting pictures of firearms into their scrapbooks. That will all change now.
If I were helping a kid through the Utah school system, and I had to help them find pictures for that assignment, I'd point them to this page on the geography of gun deaths. It has some pretty illustrations.
Look! Utah is a lovely orange!
This is also useful, but it might be a little difficult for elementary school kids…although it might be a springboard to teach them about statistics and correlations. Every fourth grader should know about those.
So celebrate your gun culture, Utah! And celebrate poverty and ultra-conservative politics, too — they all go so well together.
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I appreciated Brownian's motion to end the worst arguments for killing animals. I will likewise do what I can to keep my political allies in line.
AC Smith,
The author, John Lott, is a confirmed liar who made up a sockpuppet named Mary Rosh to improve his books' rankings on Amazon, calling himself "the best professor I ever had".
He cannot be trusted. Citing him is like citing someone who works at the American Enterprise Institute.
If this handwaving dismissal is the depth of your willingness to engage with the statistics, then you had no business citing any statistics in the first place, even if they weren't from a professional liar. It is dishonest to act like statistics matter to you and then ignore the ones that aren't politically useful to you.