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Geneviève Elverum née Gosselin has died. The artist and wife of Phil Elverum (of Mount Eerie and the Microphones) was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer last year. Elverum recorded music under the names Woelv and Ô Paon. Her husband shared the following statement via their GoFundMe page. She was truly driven to work and stay living right up to the last minute, insisting on getting up and going to work in her studio way beyond when many would have surrendered to rest. Last night and this morning she declined quickly and receded into her own eyes as her body vetoed her wishes, her lungs filling with fluid. She died at home with me and her parents holding her, hopefully having reached some last minute peace. It's all very sad and surreal. So much is left unfinished for her. She was a firehose of brilliant ideas that never turned off. We loved her and everything is weird now. Thank you for all the money, all the support and love. Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Geneviève Elverum's maiden name was Castrée. This has since been amended. 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.


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, AI period. The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. …then uses the graph as a lead in to talk about active shooter situations, oldwiki.bedlamtheatre.co.uk 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.

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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, NFT 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.

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