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Comment by pupppet | Hacker News Reader

Stats that reveal breeds like pitbulls causing the majority of attacks seem to contradict this, no?

There's a subreddit that campaigns on the issue. The research page has a link to lots of studies, most from respectable publications, which are really damning: https://old.reddit.com/r/BanPitBulls/wiki/research

It does. Once your pitbull mauls the neighbor kids you're not going to send it's DNA into their website. There's a huge sampling problem here.

It would contradict the headline as written, but headline is not actually an accurate statement of the article itself.

This headline, to a superficial reading, says "breed has NO predictive power with regards to behavior". What the study found was that breed is a weak predictor of behavior, not that it has no impact at all.

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/DOHMH-Dog-Bite-Data/rsg...

Followed (not too closely) by Shih Tzu and Chihuahua which are...a little less life threatening. This is just raw data and obviously not controlling for population.

No? It just means people teach pitbulls to attack other people.

Ban pitbulls and those people will teach some other breed to attack.

Pitbulls have been banned in various places. Any data to suggest this phenomenon has happened anywhere that pitbulls are banned?

Pitbulls are not banned in areas where pitbulls are a problem, so no.

Pitbulls were banned in the UK in 1991. We still have fatalities from pitbull attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...

I hope you see how that further demonstrates my point; the death volume would have remained at this value (approximately) regardless of the breed ban in the UK.

Bad owners are the problem, not bad dogs.

No, it just means the breed ban isn't being enforced.

How does a dog that isn't a banned breed killing someone mean a breed ban isn't getting enforced?

The dogs are banned but the bans are flagrantly flaunted and because of that, the dogs are still killing people.

not finding something is a lot different than finding something

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