Tim Lambert wrote: >>And the ridiculous claim that Japan counts murder-suicides of >>families as suicides is easily falsified by looking at the age >>breakdown of suicides -- they are no (that is zero) suicides of >>small children.
Ron Moore wrote: > Perhaps you could supply some information that makes that relevant > because in my entire life I've never heard of a small child > committing suicide. I don't think this contradicts Tim's point. The point is, if murder-suicides are listed as suicides, then we'd expect to see some 'suicides' of small children in the statistics. We don't. Therefore, since it is reasonable to suppose that even in Japan there are some _murders_ of small children, presumably those are being listed as murders. My objection to Tim's methodology here is different. Rather than looking at the results and reasoning backwards to what the criteria for coding must have been, wouldn't it be much more accurate to simply _find out_ directly? The language barrier is an issue, sure, but this is the Internet era, surely we can find someone willing to look this up for us. --Jimbo
