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I appreciate your detailed response, but can you explain why per capita is hiding rather than revealing? To me it only makes sense to look at per capita. If you didn't, and said the US had way more shootings than Norway, I'd say, "yeah, duh, the US has a lot more people so of course it will have more." You have to compare to the population or else it's all meaningless. Maybe you mean something else and I'm misunderstanding.
I was familiar with the one Norway shooting and how that's an outlier, but I don't think the article's argument rests that strongly on that one data point.
It does strongly rest on that one data point. Norway has only one data point for that time range.
Just like Albania, with one data point.
Just like Finland, Italy, England, Germany, Belgium.... with one data point. The spreadsheets are images and I'm tired of looking at them (I would prefer the actual spreadsheets obviously). France appears 3 or 4 times I think, it appears the most.
It's a 6 year average, so the list becomes a list of small countries with exactly 1 shooting in 6 years, vs the 25 mass shootings the USA had in the same time period. It takes only 1 event to make it to the top of the list due to population size.
Notice, Spain isn't on this list, nor is Poland, etc. Are they truly different than the rest of the countries on this list? Or did they just happen to not have one single shooting in this 6 years?
If the statistician truly wanted to compare US vs Europe per capita, they needed to not split the data up by country (but of course this wouldn't produce the message they wanted). Basically, using a measure of 6 years is far too small for events this rare. Doing it for a longer period of time might cause problems, too. However, if this was done per year and not over an average of 6 years, the USA would consistently be on the top, except for 2011. Making it per capita and over 6 years is doing a lot of work!