An Exhibit for a Post Still in Progress

The post referenced in the title is about an IPR National Insurrection analysis that is presently underway. Putting it together is a real slog, and I don’t like slogs, which is why I’m putting pressure on myself by publishing this in advance. It’s really just data, but it’s data that show you just how deceptive the presentation and supposed analysis of data can be.

Part of the Insurrection post is examining differentials between various troubled regions of the United States. For many kinds of behavioral variables, there are nicely produced maps compiled by this and that federal or public interest organization. Examples I’ve collected so far in researching my post. [Note: Per 100,000 numbers are less messy for the social scientists to soil their hands with than collectively shocking totals.]

Of course, it’s very difficult to amass data that won’t be disputed about deaths per 100,000 sexually active females of fertile age. None of the data collectors really like using total deaths as a statistic unless it’s firearm related. This goes double, triple, more, for abortions. The only chart of total abortions I could find was a misguided effort to undermine the SCOTUS overturning of Roe v. Wade by showing that abortions had actually increased after the 2023 decision following a period of declining numbers.

If you get the feeling that abortions had practically stopped until SCOTUS goosed the incentives for anxious women, the Guttmacher Institute is doing high fives in the office. Probkem is, they have committed a very common blunder in terms of data presentation ethics. It’s called the convenient slice. Here’s a more honest version of the same information.

All that blank space under the plotted line is filled with aborted fetuses, 

i.e., dead bodies. Note, too, that the recent declines aren’t as steep here.

Why we don’t talk about abortion totals much, and why —as a matter of fact — it got progressively harder over the years to find a computed, published number of abortions per year since Roe.

What we’re talking about instead? Two significant issues the parties have run against one another on that they much prefer to the unpleasant images evoked by abortion totals. It’s relatively safe politically to preach to the public and publish charts and graphs about drug-related deaths. Much more important to the citizenry than the right-to-choose debate. Here’s what the drug death numbers would look like if you inserted them into the death chart shown above.

This number doesn’t seem to have been tracked consistently before 1997.

Consider this a detail of the graphic above, just a necessary blow-up of the bottom layer to show you the drag numbers in the same context with over a million deaths per year. Not long ago I did a search for another post of statistics on deaths related to illegal weed transactions, which aren’t going anywhere soon in spite of marijuana legalization. No one is tracking them, no one has a count, and no one is askinf for the numbers, although law enforcement organizations identify the numbers as significant.

What is it we spend the most time talking about as a public safety problem? Guns? Much more interested in guns than murders, for example. But here’s what that looks like in the same context as the graphic above.

Firearm-related homicides are the red line at the bottom. 

No graphs turned up covering the period before 199.

The liberals in our society would have us believe that we can achieve urban utopia by repealing the Second Amendment to the Constitution. 10,000 homicides deaths a year prevented. What percentage of 1,000,000 is 10,000? Um, for those of you who don’t have your calculators handy, it’s One Percent.

What we believe about the state of our union Issa function of what we track and measure and also what we don’t track or talk about. But ignorance is not bliss. It is ignorance.

All I’ll say here. This is just an Exhibit for a post to come, after all. I’ll link this from there and discuss it in even larger contexts.

Be there. Aloha.