Comment on One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting – study
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 3 months agoNo, the title is completely accurate.
7% of living American adults have witnessed a mass shooting at least once in their lifetimes.
Mass shootings are increasingly common, all over the US.
The paper the article is based on defines a mass shooting as 4 or more struck by a bullet, which is roughly a compromise, average of widely used but not perfectly standardized definitions of a mass shooting.
This study was concerned with direct exposure to mass shootings, which were defined as “gun-related crimes where 4 or more people are shot in a public space, such as a school, shopping mall, workplace, or place of worship.” This definition was a compromise between the Congressional Research Service’s definition of a mass public shooting17 and the Gun Violence Archive’s mass shooting definition,2 designed to be inclusive of individuals who were injured and accessible to the public.
Here’s the paper, two links deep from the article.
Today@lemmy.world 3 months ago
“1 in 15” implies that you can ask 15 people and find one. Most Americans know more than 15 people and don’t know anyone who has witnessed a mass shooting. A small percentage know a lot of people who have.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
No, that is not how statistics nor language work.
1 in 15 means that out of all American adults, 1 in 15 have been on the scene of mass shootings.
Its a broad overview, and says nothing about your or any particular person’s chance of then knowing someone who’s been at a mass shooting within a tiny sample size of 15 people.
You are inserting more complex kind of analysis about demographic specificity into a statement that does not actually imply that, at all, and you seemingly don’t understand the concept of sample sizes and statistical significance: You need a very large, unbiased sample set to be able to draw broader conclusions… a sample size of 15 people is not sufficient.
The chance that any random person in a large and varied population knows someone with green eyes is not the same calculation or chance a random person in that same large and varied population will have green eyes.
Go look at the paper and you can find Table 3, which actually looks at the likelihoods, broken down by varying demographic factors.
There was no investigation into ‘how many people do you know who’ve witnessed a mass shooting’.
That was not a question that was asked, the study did not investigate that.
It is 1:30 AM and I am too tired to give your a crash course on statistics, maybe try SkillShare or find a textbook or wiki page or community college course or something.
Further:
A few years ago, I was walking along a side walk near a gaggle of 10+ people, late at night, maybe 100 ish feet from them.
Car screeched in, did a drive by with a krink, an AK pistol, shot a bunch of them.
That was a mass shooting.
Congrats, you presumably know 15 or more people, one of them is now me, I was present at a mass shooting, you now know someone present at a mass shooting, as does everyone reading this comment.