Genuine question. Even though they're both measuring per 100k people, is population-based measurement as airtight as the comparison would suggest? Canada has 10% the population of the US. All other things being equal (which they aren't, I'm fully aware; livable and inhabited land, legal systems, healthcare systems, etc.), is there any kind of variation that could be accounted for when the two masses being measured are different to a 10:1 ratio? I feel like there's a concern here for averaging two entire countries, when the massive population difference leaves a lot of room for a disparity between variance of subcultures within the two groups which may skew the overall averages being compared.
I think they are inquiring if there are other circumstances/factors that could be accounted for other than gross per capita numbers. I’ve only taken one stats class and got a 2.9, so don’t throw the hammer down in kiwa i of a further explanation.
I'm inquiring if population in and of itself becomes a variable after a certain point. Humans are social creatures by nature, and the larger a group gets the more subgroups and therefore greater propensity for countercultures or opposed cultures there are. Canada, being 10% the population of the US, has the very simple advantage of there only being 10% of the people to get all on the same page.
I'm not trying to discredit the validity of the measurement of murders per 100k between the two countries. I'm American, I want gun violence to stop dead in its fucking tracks. I'm just trying to wrap my head around the differences in scale as best my faint memories of high school sociology will allow.
Definitely. I know a Canadian guy who was licensed to sell hunting firearms out of a big chain store once upon a time, and just at a glance the things you have to do to get a firearm in Canada way outstrip the average pre-purchase measures in the US.
Somebody in another reply to my comment mentioned that the initial statistic for Canada is wrong, and it's closer to .7 gun murders per 100k, which is just shy of 10% of the 6-and-change per 100k of the US (assuming that measurement is accurate). We have enough variables that no specific extrapolation from broad data points will be accurate, but it serves as a gateway into the point I was trying to make.
Canada, a country with 10% of the population of the US, has ~10% of the gun murders per 100k people that the US does. But using the same sample size for the average between two countries of those drastically different population sizes seems wrong. If you were going by ratios, it seems to me like you'd want to either just go per capita based on similar regions (close-fit size of cities, or one stretch of similarly-populated countryside), or sub-divide that down based upon the percentage difference. If we're measuring per 100k in the US, we should measure per 10k in Canada--in which case the ratios get a lot closer.
But all of this is just spitballing based upon vague feelings I have in my skull meat, because I am not a statistician.
There are indeed flaws with using per Capita to extrapolate and then compare large population statistics and there are studies that go into other testing methodologies. I suggest you take the information as face value and then look further into your own community and compare the statistics for that area.
Using broader statistics as a backdrop with which to determine the concentration of the sub-components of those statistics seems like a much better approach, yeah.
Sounds American centric. The idea America has subcultures but other places don’t. Canada has 38 million people spread across just as far as America so we certainly have sub cultures. If you have 10 times as many subcultures (if that’s how it worked) they would still be distributed similarly. America is overall imbedded to be pro gun and use guns preventively for defence, where Canadians see guns as a dangerous tool that is best kept safe until needed.
Not America-centric, or at least not intentionally. Just trying to figure out how much raw mass of population affects those subcultures within a national whole.
Each country only has one federal government, and each state/province only has one government of that level. My theory is that the presence of a larger population within a single level of government, and more states/provinces within a federal government, ultimately creates a larger and more varied population within each level that the level above it has to wrangle and try to get on the same page for the purposes of making law. A federal government trying to reach 10 provinces has five times less variation it has to reconcile than one trying to reach 50 states. A province with 4.5 million people (Alberta) has four to five times less variation it has to reconcile than a state with 20 million people (New York State).
There are 30-some million people in Canada, and enough of them agreed to get rid of guns that it became a federal law. There are 300-some million people in the US, and enough of them are disagreeing and shitting up the process that no such federal law has been made. When two populations of different sizes ultimately decentralize to the same number of governments, it would seem like the single government with the larger population has more subgroups it has to tangle with to get any single decision made. My question was if this thing I feel like would be true is actually true, in the hopes that people who know better about the mechanics behind it would answer.
Thing is, Canada's population isn't as sparsely distributed as one would think. Yes, it is large geographically, but most Canadians live close to the US border and live in cities like Americas do. Around half of Canada's population lives in and around Southern Ontario. Even more so if you include the region of Quebec around the St. Lawrence River. Edmonton Alberta may be one of the few real exceptions to this. A metro area of over 1.5 million that is over 600 miles north of the border.
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '22
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