Just sayin'

Read this:

Math Is Hard  

"Most people killed or wounded in stray-bullet shootings were unaware of events leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries, and nearly one-third of the victims were children and nearly half were female, according to a new nationwide study examining an often-overlooked form of gun violence," according to a report from the University of California, Davis:


Unlike the risk pattern for violence in general, which typically affects young males, most victims of stray bullets were outside the 15-34 age range, and nearly half (44.8 percent) were females, the study found. 

Since these are random shootings, you would expect women and girls to be victims at roughly their proportion of the population, which is slightly over 50%--or maybe higher, if it turns out that the shootings are concentrated in urban areas with low sex ratios. The question, then, is not why so many victims of this type of shooting are female but why a disproportion of them (55.2%) are male.

From James Taranto's "Best of the Web" column at the Wall Street Journal today.

Was I not sayin' just the other day that we should think for ourselves, especially when it comes to numbers?