There are several Freepers who post it
I'm one of them....
But
This article needs more than just the "BS Meter"
  |
Posted on 12/04/2002 10:58:29 AM PST by ServesURight
US States with More Gun Owners Have More Murders
By Charnicia E. Huggins
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Homicides in the United States are more common in states where more households own guns, according to researchers.
The study findings imply "that guns, on balance, lethally imperil rather than protect Americans," lead study author Dr. Matthew Miller of Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, told Reuters Health.
"This inference is consistent with previous...studies that have found that the presence of a gun in the home is a risk factor for homicide, and starkly at odds with the unsubstantiated, yet often adduced, notion that guns are a public good," he added.
Miller and his team investigated the association between homicide and rates of household firearm ownership using 1988-1997 data collected from the nine US census regions and the 50 states.
They found that household gun ownership was linked to homicide rates throughout the nine census regions. At the state level, the link between rates of gun ownership and murder existed for all homicide victims older than age 5, according to the report in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
In fact, the six states with the highest rates of gun ownership--Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming, West Virginia and Arkansas--had more than 21,000 homicides, nearly three times as many as the four states with the lowest rates of gun ownership--Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey.
Further, people who lived in one of the six "high gun states" were nearly three times as likely to die from any homicide and more than four times as likely to die from gun-related homicide than those who lived in "low gun states," the report indicates. Their risk of dying in a non-gun-related homicide was also nearly double that of those who lived in states with the lowest rates of gun ownership.
On average, about half of households in high gun states had firearms, according to data reported by three of the six states, in comparison to 13% of households in low-gun states.
Although homicide rates were higher in poor areas and in states with higher rates of non-lethal violent crime and urbanization, the association between household firearm ownership and homicide remained true when the researchers took these and other factors into consideration.
Still, Miller's team notes that it is not clear whether the higher rates of household gun ownership caused or resulted from the increased number of homicides.
"It is possible, for example, that locally elevated homicide rates may have led to increased local gun acquisition," they write.
SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health 2002;92:1988-1993.
I added up the populations, and it turns out that the "top six" and "bottom four" states as groups have about the same total populations, roughly 17 million each.
So the per capita comparisons would be about the same.
However, since the tables I was using to find state populations also had population breakdowns by race, I did a few more calculations. What's interesting is that the "top six" states have 3.9 million blacks, while the "bottom four" states have only 1.6 million.
This is not an insignificant observation since on average blacks commit homicides at a rate roughly ten times that of whites.
If the authors haven't already factored out the *known* demographic contributors to homicide rate, then they're dishonestly attributing all the higher rates to gun ownership alone.
Apparently the authors of this "study" are following their PC prejudices instead of the data. They conclude that it "must" be gun ownership which drives the homicide rate differential, since it "can't" be due to differing mixes of cultures/races.
And no, my pointing out the racial breakdown of the states is not a "racist" observation. Quite the contrary. It's the PC authors of the "it's the guns" conclusion who are in fact being racist, since they are implicitly claiming that since guns are the "cause" of the murder rates, then the higher black homicide rate must necessarily be because black people are more apt to go wild when guns are available than white people are (since, the authors assert, socioeconomic factors aren't really a key factor after all).
That's right....anyone coming into my home with bad intent risks getting their head blown off by a 12 gauge. ....And this risk factor is indeed very high.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Homicide does not necessarily equate to murder. Reuters can't even get their definitions correct. I'm not a statistician by any means, but this is the most skewed study I've ever seen.
Translation: we don't have any clue how to interpret our own statistics, but it makes for great axe-grinding material for anti-rights axis house organs like Reuters.
The reason West Virginia is an exception is that it looks like only one person a year is murdered. Everything in the state is named "Robert C. Byrd."
Gun ownership data from the Census? I didn't answer any gun questions.
Complete twaddle. These "researchers" make the exact same mistake the "previous studies" (all by anti-gun nut Arthur Kellermann) made -- and yes, I've read them.
Their error is to presume that if guns "on balance" produce a net protective effect, then states (or in the prior studies, homes) which have more guns would see fewer homicides than states/homes with fewer guns.
But this presumption is *only* true if there are *no* other correlations between guns and homicide.
If homicides themselves can drive up gun ownership rates (or if some other factor ties the two together), then it's easily possible for the presence of a gun to *always* increase safety and yet for guns *still* to be correlated with homicide rates (i.e., more guns, more homicide).
For example, a 100% increase in homicide rate may cause citizens to arm themselves for safety, and even if this actually reduces the homicide rate down to a mere 50% increase (over the original base), that would *still* show a 50% higher homicide rate correlated with increased gun ownership.
And yet, the authors of this study would have us believe that this "proved" that a) guns cause homicide, *and* b) guns don't protect anyone.
These people are idiots. Their very premise is flawed, even *before* they start looking at the data.
Here is another one of Dr. Miller's research interests: "the association of cigarette smoking to suicide."
No, I am NOT making this up!
There are several Freepers who post it
I'm one of them....
But
This article needs more than just the "BS Meter"
| |
Not that we can even trust what little they claim in this article without seeing the entire study.
Stopped reading this article right there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.