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Facts vs Feelings

Claim: If we allow guns where alcohol is served, tourism will suffer

Reality: CMA Festival attendance up 17%, tourists spend $24 million, and 95% of hotel rooms were booked that week.

I really have to wonder about the people that make these easily-disprovable claims and the reporters who never follow up on them.

8 comments to Facts vs Feelings

  • Try not to confuse bigots with facts. It hurts their heads ;) .

  • Josh

    Surely you’re not implying that an increase in attendance at the CMA Festival disproves claims that laws allowing firearms in places that serve alcohol has a negative impact on tourism. That seems like it would be a pretty irresponsible conclusion.

  • No more irresponsible than the opposite.

  • Josh

    @wizardpc

    That’s 100% correct, but that doesn’t make the conclusion any less wrong. In fact, I almost said something in the initial post about how I expect the anti-gun crowd to be making improperly drawn conclusions, and this one is just as bad.

  • They claimed tourism would suffer. It didn’t. Case closed.

  • Josh

    @wizardpc

    LMAO. That’s all there is to an analysis of data – picking out one discrete point and judging everything by that huh? And then case closed? You crack me up, sir.

    What then if the anti-gun crowd has statistics from another single tourist event that had a lower turnout than a previous year? Shouldn’t that mean that tourism suffered, so the claim was correct?

    Do you see how absurd that would be?

  • All it takes is a single point of data to disprove a hypothesis like that. But luckily we have more, just not in Tennessee. Disneyland comes to mind.

  • Josh

    I’m not going to get into a drawn out thing about it, because I’m not trying to prove or disprove the underlying issue, but one lone example does not disprove the claim that was made. It’s irresponsible and incorrect to suggest so. Stooping to such a level of tactics probably leads to a loss of credibility with objective observers.

    The claim was that “guns in bars” would lure visitors away from Tennessee. It was not that it would lure every visitor away from Tennessee, or that every single event in Tennessee would suffer from lower attendance. The fact that attendance for the CMA Festival was up does not disprove the claim that potential tourists to Tennessee did not go to Tennessee because of the law. The CMA event might be a particularly bad example to cite anyway, since it is such a unique event with no alternative destination. There is only one CMA Festival in one location. It’s not a generic vacation destination with multiple alternatives, which are the type (if any) that would most likely be affected by such a law.

    The point is that this does not disprove the claim. When such fundamental errors in logic are made, it becomes very easy to dismiss the rest of what someone has to say without giving it much consideration.




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