Excellent Daily Show on the topic of guns. Jon Stewart nails it with a combination of humor and passion.
Scapegoat Hunter: Part 1
Annotations by Rebecca Eisenberg, at Upworthy.
Highlights: At 3:08 he makes a great point about what part of our culture we should look at when we talk about media influencing violent behavior, at 4:00 you'll see where the headline for this post came from, and from 5:40 onward, get ready to facepalm right along with him.
Scapegoat Hunter: Part 2
Highlights: At :36, he asks the perfect question, at 3:46 the "Bourne" film franchise is improved with help from Woody Allen, at 4:23 there are no bad ideas except maybe these two, at 5:32, as promised, he gets very angry, and then, finally, at 6:44, he gets to the bottom of this whole problem: an imaginary Hitler.
ORIGINAL: Part 1. Part 2. By "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."
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Charts
Do the charts speak for themselves? I know correlations aren't causation, but we are looking at the tools for death and the death rates, so there is some direct connection.
"Curious as always, this led me to wonder: in countries like ours that do have a strong, well-institutionalized rule of law — countries that can control guns if they choose to — do less guns mean less gun killings?
"Short answer, Yes." (Asymptosis)
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"In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, Mark Reid, a machine learning researcher at Australian National University, has run a quick statistical analysis of gun death data in industrialized nations. His charts show how unique the U.S. is among its peers when it comes to the way the country handles guns.
"The first chart shows gun deaths per capita graphed against gun ownership per capita. Notice the upward trend — the more guns per capita, the more gun deaths per capita. The US has the most guns, ergo it has one of the highest rates of gun deaths." (Business Insider)
The disparity persists when we take suicides out of the chart. Switzerland, Canada and Finland go down on the death axis. U.S. does too, but still stands out. See the second chart. (For a blow up of the countries cluttered on the second chart, visit Mark Reid.)
*****
"You can quibble all you want about correlation and causation, but the simple fact is: if you live in a red state the odds of your children dying of gun violence is 75% higher than if you live in a blue state." (Steve Roth, Angry Bear)
