This is an article that I’m, frankly, uncomfortable writing. Primarily because the subject matter gets so much heat over it, so much controversy, that the point of writing the article in the first place gets easily lost as people get upset and start yelling at each other.
I’m not looking for controversy for controversy’s sake here. What I am looking to do here is to bring to your attention very unsettling and even alarming statistics that people deserve to know about if they want to protect themselves and their family.
The source of the data that we’re going to talk about is a recent report from the Crime Prevention Research Center. Their report notes:
Unfortunately, these and similar claims [that people claiming to be transgender don’t have higher rates of violence or make up a higher proportion of active shooters than the rest of the population] make a basic error: they look only at the share of attacks committed by transgender individuals and make no attempt to adjust for transgender individuals’ share of the population. That is an obvious statistical mistake. If a group makes up just 1 percent of the population but commits 10 percent of the attacks, no one would dismiss that disparity simply because the group accounts for “only” 10 percent of active shooting attacks.
Frustratingly, this error in analyzing data is a common one, and to be fair, if you don’t know how to analyze data to come to valid and accurate conclusions, then you may not know that you must augment the conclusions from the data to account for the portion of the population that is the small group that you’re studying.
Because if you don’t, then you actually don’t have any idea of how that subset of the population actually compares to the rest of the population. And without knowing that, you can’t actually tell if there is a real problem or not.
Unfortunately, the group that the CPRC report evaluated [allegedly] show that they have much higher rates of being active shooters than the general population.
What’s the solution? I’m not really sure. What I do know, though, is that it’s smart to always be carrying in case something awful happens towards you or your family so that you can defend yourself.
