Liars, damn liars, and gun nuts.
...or how figures lie, but liars sometimes don't figure too well. Someone yesterday tried to prove to me that gun bans don't reduce murder rates. They sent this link ... ...and something didn't look right. I've been looking at noisy data for nigh on 40 years, trying to see signal in the murk, and that spike in 2002 seemed really odd. Now I have family in the UK; I had more in 2002. I subscribe to the London Times. I go back and forward, though not as often as I'd like. And I was aware of nothing that might have caused a large number of homicides in 2002. So I did a little digging. And, remarkably, the spike in 2002 is the work of one man, a man you've probably never heard of, named Dr. Harold Shipman. Shipman was a general practitioner in the UK. He became a GP near Manchester (where I was born and lived the first eight years of my life). And then he started murdering people. He killed mostly older women, in order to steal their jewelry, or after having th...