Fair! I was thinking of it as three instances, where we have three different statistics being used to support policy changes that don’t fit their underlying causes, but you’re right that they’re all on gun policy.
Thinking a bit, here are two other cases where you see similar things:
Transportation, with people using “road deaths” to push for making buses safer after high-fatality crashes, even when buses are already far safer than cars and it’s cars that are the reason for high road deaths (even adjusting for mode share)
Domestic hunger, where the examples people give are people starving, but the statistics are for food insecurity which is defined very broadly. I think it’s likely that this is pushing us towards the wrong policies here but would need to look into this more.
Another example: using statistics about the frequency of abductions to argue that children should need to be pretty old before being on their own outside the house. Except a huge fraction of kidnapping is parental custody disputes, and if you’re a parent making this decision you know whether that’s a relevant concern.
Fair! I was thinking of it as three instances, where we have three different statistics being used to support policy changes that don’t fit their underlying causes, but you’re right that they’re all on gun policy.
Thinking a bit, here are two other cases where you see similar things:
Transportation, with people using “road deaths” to push for making buses safer after high-fatality crashes, even when buses are already far safer than cars and it’s cars that are the reason for high road deaths (even adjusting for mode share)
Domestic hunger, where the examples people give are people starving, but the statistics are for food insecurity which is defined very broadly. I think it’s likely that this is pushing us towards the wrong policies here but would need to look into this more.
Another example: using statistics about the frequency of abductions to argue that children should need to be pretty old before being on their own outside the house. Except a huge fraction of kidnapping is parental custody disputes, and if you’re a parent making this decision you know whether that’s a relevant concern.