And Then His Pants Burst into Flames

One of the most useless shootings statistics is the homicide rate per 100,000 residents in a US state.

I disagree. Knowing the average risk to a resident of being a homicide victim in two or more different states in the same year, or in one state over a number of years, may be of interest to some people, even if not to you.

Why not make the rate based upon 200,000 residents, or 500,000 residents.

It is because it is easier to divide or multiply by a number that is an integer power of ten than by a number that is not. All you have to do is move the decimal point; you never have to do division or multiplication. 100,000 is an integer power of ten. 200,000 and 500,000 are not.

You get the same answer no matter what denominator you use to express the ratio, so why not use the easiest?

Garfield Park and Englewood really have to work on their marksmanship.

One of my many annoyances with "news" reporting is the frequent failure of the "reporter" to include a denominator in the "reporter's" breathless account of some "horror" on which the "reporter" is "reporting."

For example. a "reported" will "report" that some horrible event has occurred X times. It matters greatly whether X is over the last year, over a decade, over a lifetime, or over all of recored history. It also matters how many of the potential horrible events there are.

One "horrible event" out of a million potential "horrible events" is a different matter than one "horrible event" out of five potential "horrible events."

Two murders in a town of 500 people is a different matter than two murders in a city of five million people.

In my best grew up in DC know it all pose: Of course he was lying, he is a politician whose lips are moving. We return now to our regularly scheduled comment section, already in progress.

Doug Watt (View Post):

One of the most useless shootings statistics is the homicide rate per 100,000 residents in a US state. Why not make the rate based upon 200,000 residents, or 500,000 residents.

Per 100,000 residents is what the UCR has always used. The FBI has used the Universal Crime Reporting program for almost a century. The basic idea is a standardized way to report crime allows statistical comparisons.

The numbers also work out reasonably well. The overall US homicide rate used to be around 5 per 100,000. Now it's a little higher. Dangerous cities would hit 10 times that; Detroit is 37, St. Louis is 54.