NH Goes National (again, to our shame)

Once again, NH's shame goes national. Time Magazine has picked up the story of Rep. Robert Kingsbury's claim that kindergarten leads to crime:

Kingsbury (R-Laconia), 86, recently claimed that analyses he’s been carrying out since 1996 show that communities in his state that have kindergarten programs have up to 400% more crime than localities whose classrooms are free of finger-painting 5-year-olds. Pointing to his hometown of Laconia, the largest of 10 communities in Belknap County, the legislator noted that it has the only kindergarten program in the county and the most crime, including most or all of the county’s rapes, robberies, assaults and murders.

Time's conclusion?

The fact that correlation does not equal cause — and that powerful correlations may be linked with unmeasured factors that are truly causal — is the reason that genuine scientific research often involves complex statistical analysis. Determining causality is extremely difficult in science, and it typically requires experiments that are designed to allow investigators to manipulate the conditions carefully and to rule out any other factors that might be at play.

I'm going to go ahead and unscientifically state that Robert Kingsbury's election to the NH House proves that most voters in 2010 didn't have a clue about who they were voting for.