Best way to lie? Statistics, no question about it, and if you don’t believe me I can show you some statistics that support this point… or any other point for that matter. But statistics are even better to lie to yourself; the same way different people see different things when they look at clouds, people also see different things when they look at data, and if there is one endless debate where people reinforce their beliefs with cherry picked data that debate is gun control.

Talking about cherry picking, let’s check at the The Young Turks‘ argument to support stricter gun control in the USA: “ban guns like Japan and you have 2 gun related homicides, don’t ban guns and you have 10,225 gun related homicides”. And they explain their point in a way that you’d better not to dare to disagree. Sure they could have compared data from 2007 where the USA had 9,146 gun related homicides and Brazil 34,678 mentioning that Brazil has much tighter gun control laws than the USA but, unfortunately, this is the way politics and media works; it does not matter if you are right or wrong, only if you look right or wrong. But let’s analyze some data and a few more examples of how information is presented to us. Continue reading →