One man is dead following collision near Kanosh. Police are looking for a missing dog. A man who recently moved to Utah is facing an auto homicide charge, after he reportedly collided with another vehicle while driving drunk, killing the other driver. Joseph Richard Gomez, 31, has been charged in 4th District Court with automobile homicide, a second-degree felony; driving under the influence, a third-degree felony; having an open container of alcohol in a vehicle and driving on a suspended license, Class C misdemeanors; and driving with an expired registration and failure to stay in a lane, traffic infractions. The deadly collision happened Saturday near milepost 145 on Interstate 15, near Kanosh in Millard County. According to the Utah Highway Patrol, multiple witnesses said the driver of a white Nissan Maxima, identified as Gomez, had been driving erratically - changing speeds from 30-40 mph to an estimated 100 mph, Artifical Intelligence and AI Art weaving through traffic, almost hitting several other vehicles. This AI Art icle was creat ed wi th t he help of GSA Conte nt Generat or DEMO.
According to witnesses, the Nissan moved to pass a blue pickup truck when it suddenly veered and struck the truck’s right, rear corner, causing it to crash and roll. The driver of the pickup, whose name has not been released, had to be extracted from the wreckage and revived. He was taken to a hospital, where he died on Tuesday. A passenger in the pickup suffered minor injuries. According to a UHP officer, he smelled alcohol on Gomez’s breath, and Gomez "seemed lethargic and slow to respond to questions." The officer wrote in a probable cause statement that Gomez told him the pickup "suddenly spun out in front of him," and he denied he collided with it. Gomez, who recently moved to Enoch from Arizona, failed a field sobriety test, according to police. An open, half-empty can of alcohol was found in his car, along with at least one empty can and several full cans. A Breathalyzer test showed a blood alcohol level or .223, almost four-and-a-half times Utah’s legal limit of .05. The results of a blood test are pending. Gomez was booked into the Millard County Jail, where he is being held without bail. UPDATE: We are saddened to share that Pfieffer has been found by family/ friends search efforts having perished. The search for a border collie who was in the pickup truck and ran away after it crashed ended sadly, according to the Millar County Sheriff’s Office. The pet was found dead. Donate to the newsroom now. Customer reportedly fired six shots at Millcreek store clerk. 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune.
Epistemic status: I think I probably wrung the right conclusions out of this evidence, but this isn’t the only line of evidence bearing on the broader gun control issue and all I can say is what it’s consistent with. From a Vox article on America’s Gun Problem, Explained: "On Wednesday, it happened again: There was a mass shooting - this time, in San Bernardino, California. Then it goes on to say that "more guns mean more gun deaths, period. The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. …then uses the graph as a lead in to talk about active shooter situations, gun-homicide relationships, and outrage over gun massacres. Did you notice that the axis of this graph says "gun deaths", and that this is a totally different thing from gun murders? Gun deaths are a combined measure of gun homicides and gun suicides. Here is a graph of guns vs. And here is a graph of guns vs. The relationship between gun ownership and homicide is weak (and appears negative), the relationship between gun ownership and suicide is strong and positive.
The entire effect Vox highlights in their graph is due to gun suicides, but they are using it to imply conclusions about gun homicides. This is why you shouldn’t make a category combining two unlike things. I am not the first person to notice this. The Washington Examiner makes the same criticism of Vox’s statistics that I do. And Robert VerBruggen of National Review does the same analysis decomposing gun deaths into suicides and homicides, and like me finds no correlation with homicides. German Lopez of Vox responds here. He argues that VerBruggen can’t just do a raw uncontrolled correlation of state gun ownership with state murder rates without adjusting for confounders. This is true, although given that Vox has done this time and time again for months on end and all VerBruggen is doing is correctly pointing out a flaw in their methods, it feels kind of like an isolated demand for rigor. So let’s look at the more-carefully-controlled studies.
Lopez suggests the ones at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which has done several statistical analyses of gun violence. We start with MA&H 2002. This study does indeed conclude that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates after adjusting for confounders. But suspiciously, it in fact finds that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates even before adjusting for confounders, something that we already found wasn’t true! Furthermore, even after adjusting for confounders it finds in several age categories that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher non-gun homicide rates (eg the rates at which people are murdered by knives or crowbars or whatever) at p less than 0.001. This is really suspicious! Unless guns are exerting some kind of malign pro-murder influence that makes people commit more knife murders, some sort of confounding influence has remained. The study gets its murder rate numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, which seems like a trustworthy source.
