Comic Strips

think one paragraph voids decades of data they’ve carefully collected

Uhm... ackshually 🤓 it's two paragraphs.

But in all seriousness, "carefully collected" is a pretty severe misrepresentation of the way the majority of these stats are collected. One source you link says 66%*, but wikipedia says 28%. This is an very large increase.

This discrepancy is caused, in large part, because the police aren't very good at reporting on this kind of data. The article you linked, which I quoted goes mentions this, but it doesn't really go into detail just how bad it is. The police system, particularly in the US has a lot of inherent biases that lead to problematic behaviors and assumptions. Some of them are about race, and some of them are about... dog breeds.

Long story short, I only really trust hospitals for this sort of data. Insurance companies get their info from the police, who aren't reliable. Hospitals can have problems, but aren't going to be problematic as our police system. Interestingly, hospitals also seem to report much lower numbers, like the numbers mentioned in the study mentioned by wikipedia versus the other numbers present. I wonder why that is?

And one of the articles you linked was AI generated slop that claimed 66% but that was actually a hyperlink to wikipedia's claim of 28%. And most of the articles you linked were similar, clearly getting the data from the same place, but not actually linking it and/or having broken links.

Even the best source, the study you linked has issues when it comes to supporting your claims. It acknowledges that which breed has been top of the list for dog fatalities has shifted over time and only now settled on pitbulls. That source also acknowledges how dog breed identification is difficult.

And then of course, I won't deny that pitbulls do bite and kill at higher rates. But you are arguing that that somehow makes them inherently more dangerous, when there is simply no evidence for such a thing.

And yeah, if my dog was a Pittie, I would be defensive too, but I would also be honest that people need to take extra precautions…

The problem with this argument is that is is very, very similar to arguing that it's acceptable to be cautious around black people specifically because they are accused of crimes at higher rates. In fact it's so similar that I've seen "pitbull bad" be used as a white supremacist talking point. (which is part of why this argument gets so heated. Usually I just enjoy the popcorn but I finally decided to stop lurking).

But I'm gonna be real, I don't really want to argue with someone who just throws a bunch of slop sources they clearly didn't read at me. Read your damn sources. Use google scholar or similar instead of just a normal search engine, so you don't get AI slop.

And I'll give you some advice: If you want this argument to be well accepted in the future, you should throw in some points that make it clearly, distinctly separate from the white supremacist version of it. Some acknowledgement of the police being bad, or some acknowledgement of pitbull owners or some acknowledgement of how pitbulls don't rank top in bite strength (at least, according to two of the sources you linked). You complained about getting downvoted when you just posted stats but that's because people don't see those stats are an argument about pitbulls, they see someone preparing a setup for "What if I told you some races of people were inherently more dangerous?".

As an endnote, human race isn't real. Perhaps this applies to dog breeds as well, which one commenter noted but you just dismissed it and threw a bunch of slop articles at them instead.