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koavf21 karma

If X goes up and Y goes up, then there is a correlation: they don't have to be perfectly 1:1 correlations. Do gun deaths per capita go up as gun ownership goes up? If so, that is a perfect example of a correlation. (Alternately, if the inverse is true as well.)

We know that if you live in a household with a gun, you are more likely to die by homicide. Explanations of causality or what remedies there are are different questions, but it is very easy to establish this correlation.

koavf10 karma

It's correlated, but your claim shows causation: does the gun cause you to die by suicide?

koavf5 karma

For what it's worth, I have an advance copy of the book and I can provide my perspective as a reader.

I was surprised to see how much of the book made it a point to not focus on gun control policy: Mark, to what extent did you have to fight that framing from your publisher and editor and to what extent to you have to dispel that this isn't just an advocacy book for gun control policies?

koavf4 karma

It's best to have sources in the target language but sometimes that is simply impossible, so a back-up source in another language is a huge boon to smaller Wikipedias or Wikipedias which would reach huge communities of users (e.g. Bengali, which has 250 million speakers) but for complex historical reasons will not have the active user base as the English or German editions. So an article could be generated from or draw some statements from Wikidata and also provide a source which would be a big step toward a usable article on many topics in many languages. Complex value-judgement data about someone being corrupt is by definition a lot harder to quantify but something empirical like being convicted of a crime (in a certain jurisdiction on a certain date, etc.) would be easier to translate and insert into an article.