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Posting this at top level since its burried in replies:
Fact time. You don't always die when shot, and the US is a baby factory. I can't find good stats on non-lethal gunshot, so I'll do the rest.
Verdict: Pretty accurate.
- 8.4% without health insurance (33 in 400)
- 11.5% poverty rate (46 in 400)
- 20% adults at or below literacy level 1 (80 in 400)
- 57% mental illness untreated (228 in 400) (requires math from NIH source)
References:
Btw your 20% figure includes those at Level 1 literacy, only 8% are below level 1 (from your source)
What is level 1 defined as?
People with Level 1 Literacy can:
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Locate one piece of information in a sports article
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Locate the expiration date on a driver’s license
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Total a bank deposit entry
People with Level 2 Literacy can:
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Interpret appliance warranty instructions
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Locate an intersection on a street map
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Calculate postage and fees when using certified mail
People with Level 3 Literacy can:
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Write a brief letter to explain a credit card billing error
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Use a bus schedule to choose the correct bus to take to get to work on time
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Determine the discount on a car insurance bill if paid in full within 15 days
People with Level 4 Literacy can:
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Explain the difference between two types of benefits at work
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Calculate the correct change when given prices on a menu
People with Level 5 Literacy can:
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Compare and summarize different approaches lawyers use during a trial
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Use information in a table to compare two credit cards and explain the differences
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Compute the cost to carpet a room in a house
A lot of them seem to be mathematical questions
Damn, I’m fairly dumb but I think I could put this on my resume, I’m a lot higher in literacy than I expected.
i can't interpret warranty instructions, but I've done the credit card thing. I also found the phones from the manufacturer that were compatable with my non-international telecommunications service. (I got the first Sony waterproof release in the age of ricepacks)
So I'm... esoteric.
I saw that warranty one and was like, welp, I'm already in trouble.
Then I got down to the lawyer one, and was like hey only lawyers can understand lawyers in court. A lawyer I am not.
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Oh good catch. Will edit.
I wanted to test myself to get a sense of what "level one literacy" actually meant but you have to pay to take the test and the OECD already gets enough of my money as is.
Here's a good study on gunshoot statistics thay include nonletal gunshot wounds:
Which comes out to about 1/7 of a person in that room being shot per year.
But its not as shocking if I say that there are a million people in the room and one gets shot per day! (But I mean, that still seems significant to me.)
In their example, almost everybody is getting shot every year. Happy birthday, BLAM!
Quick Google results showed me between 15 and 20% lethality for single GSWs
That needs an addendum, otherwise it sounds like any GSW is about as lethal as covid19:
Not accounting for suicides and precision shooting, a single GSW is likely an accident, which drives the lethality down considerably. Filter out unintentional single GSWs and I bet the lethality is rather different.
This article indicates there's no difference, in fact, and is lower than the conservative percentage I was getting earlier.
Maybe I'm reading the abstract wrong, but it appears that the article specifically compares single headshots with multiple GSW including a single head GSW. In which case there's no significant difference.
But maybe I'm reading it wrong. I may be biased, because I really want to believe that JimBob shooting himself in the foot cleaning his gun, occurs with a higher frequency and with less mortality, than people shooting to kill.
I admit I didn't look deep into that particular article. There are a lot of sources easy to find that show that multiple GSWs are surprisingly not that much more lethal, but they're harder to repair. This one for example which lists 13% for single, and 18% for multiple.
That's good to see a lot of the statistics are close, and I appreciate the sources.
That said, for a full picture, I think you should mention that the average 20 year old doesn't have 18 gunshot wounds (365 wounds per 400 per year, is about 9.1 wounds per person per decade, or 18.2 wounds per 20 years per person)
So I'd appreciate if you include a bullet point about that.
How convenient, you left out the shooting statistic. It's fucking insanely wrong.
You didn't fact-check how many trans people there are in the U.S.1
It looks to be between 0.5% and 1.6% of the total U.S. population (2 - 6 in 400).
References:
- https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf
- https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/
Semi-related, the number of intersex people (in the literature they talk about people with "disorders of sexual development") have also been estimated to be around 1% of the population (4 in 400), source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
1 yes, the U.S. isn't mentioned in the OP, but your sources are looking at U.S. demographics and so I will continue with the U.S.-centrism already present.
Some Thoughts (oh boy):
There is a weird logic to pointing out how few trans people there are actually are in the OP. Even if there were many more trans people, (like if there really were 1 in 5 trans people as is commonly mis-perceived), would that make the GOP's campaign of fear-mongering and animus any more justified? I don't think this is what Shon (
@gayblackvet) was going for, but it almost seems like a consequence of how the message was written.Maybe I'm wrong here, but does it seem like way it is written implies that the problem is not that the trans panic is unjustified in its fear of trans people, but that it is merely blown out of proportion? Maybe the angle was that even if we assume trans people are a problem, it's still so few people it's not worth all this panic and legislation (there are >500 anti-trans bills in the U.S. right now, over 40 of them have already passed).
Rhetorically this perspective-taking might be effective in appealing to mildly transphobic centrists or moderate conservatives who are not entirely comfortable with trans people but who might not want to be perceived as transphobic and don't want to be associated with the rabid and vocal transphobia of the GOP.
That wedge between a more moderate closeted transphobe and a more openly transphobic right-wing one is politically useful, so I am not necessarily complaining, but there is a concern here about whether tackling transphobia is really the goal here, and if so how we should best go about that.