John,
  While you're considering Wirt's bridge offer, let me comment a moment on the
numbers:

> Population of counties won by Bush: 143 million
> Population of counties won by Gore: 127 million
> Square miles of country won by Bush: 2,427,000
> Square miles of country won by Gore: 580,000

Let's do one more set here:
Population density in counties won by Bush:  59 folks/square mile
Population density in counties won by Gore: 219 folks/square mile

What the numbers tell us, assuming for the moment that they are true, is that
Gore voters then to live in much more densely populated areas and with the
murder rates, they suggest the thesis that overcrowding increases violent
crime.  Further, they suggest the thesis that wealthy landowners voted for
Bush and not-so-wealthy inner-city folk voted for Gore.  Pretty amazing stuff,
huh?  Beyond those wild guesses, though, I'd be cautious about drawing
conclusions.

> The Federalist's crack staff of researchers found one more interesting fact
> that might help explain these disparate murder rates.  Gun ownership in the
> counties won by Mr. Bush is much higher than in the counties won by Mr.
> Gore!

To that, I'd like to reply with a quote (or as close to it as I can get :-)
from the season-opener of West Wing.  The President is undergoing surgery
following what appears to have been an assassination attempt and the Press
Secretary is briefing the Press on the situation.  She says, "The President was
not the only one shot tonight" and then proceeds to list of a number of murders
which occurred elsewhere.  And then she says, "to those who say that those
murders would not have happened if everyone owned handguns, let me say this:
The President was shot tonight while surrounded by the best gunman with the
best weapons the country has."

Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University
          ==========================================================
In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all
the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same
kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the world "simplest." It is really
an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or
painting. The layman finds such a law as dx/dt = K(d^2x/dy^2) much less
simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The
physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more
fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned.
                        -- Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson (1892-1964)
          ==========================================================
         Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted