US STATES WITH MORE GUN OWNERS HAVE MORE MURDERS

Reuters ^ | 12/04/02 | Reuters - Charnicia E Huggins

[JMP]

"A correlation but not a causation."

You are right-on with that statement. "Correlation does not infer causation" was drilled into my head long ago in college. Statistics can be manipulated to say anything you want them to. I could take the same data and present findings that indicate that the fear of murder and run-away violence in these states lead to the increased desire to own firearms for self protection. I salute you ServesURight.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Didn't see Texas on the list.

[FourtySeven]

LOL.......I think this says it all........well done.

[Atlas Sneezed]

Compare:

Statement 1: "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."

Statement 2: "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."

(He rings the bell loudly for political effect, then quietly tries to un-ring it to preserve his credibility within his small fraternity.)

[JMP]

"A correlation but not a causation."

Actually One More Time said that, so I salute him instead and thank ServesURight for the post.

[dirtboy]

Poverty rates have nothing to do with it.

Agreed. I was just pulling another statistic out that, although not relevant, still fit the expected results better than the rate of gun ownership. Shows just how sorry this study is.

[spunkets]

I know.

They want ~$190 bucks to look at it from the web, else I'd grab it. It would be more enlightening to expose their BS.

Lott's thorough work explains the situation well. If these docs were honest they'd acknowledge that, instead of publishing garbage propaganda and feeding it to the presstitutes.

[Flying Circus]

I took your numbers as data for a statistical model in a program called JMP. I had a very interesting result: There was no statistically significant relationship between the ownership of guns (not having the ownership rate, I entered the states as catagorical, yes or no on gun ownership), but there was a very high corrolation between murder rate and the minority population. I wish I could show the model profiler and leverage plots here.

Can anyone get me more complete data on this including the actual ownership rates and other demographic factors? I would love to stick it into the program to see how this result holds up.

[expatpat]

A reverse causation.

[jackbill]

How do they know how many households contain guns?

They can't. No way, no how.

[Ronaldus Magnus]

Umm...if they're serious about this, and not just trying to fabricate headlines, how about the county-level numbers?

I think you just nailed it. It looks like this was done solely on a state level.

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.

If so, and if the county or track level data do not substantiate the claim (and they won't), then this is academic fraud on the level of humiliated antigun scholar Michael Bellesiles.

[jaw1964a]

My guns have killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy's Car.

[Plutarch]

The results are all because of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Wyoming and West Virginia are among the lowest murder rates, lower than MA!

[challenger]

Serial Truth-Murderers

Some researchers can't even lie imaginatively or competently. Thank God for small favors!

The current bogus "study" by the same authors appears to be a cookie-cutter replay, with just a slight change in subject matter, substituting "people" for "children". The same team of authors published "Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths,Suicide, and Homicide among 5–14 Year Olds" that appeared in the Feb., 2002 issue of "The Journal of Trauma", Vol. 52, number 2, pp. 267-276. I am assuming that they used the same methods in both studies since the general concept is the same, although I admit that I did not feel like spending any money to buy the complete current "study". If the methodology is substantially different, I may retract my analysis. However, the states with lowest firearms ownership and most of the high ownership states are the same in both studies.

The important point to notice is the way that they determine the level of firearms ownership in each state. They use various forms of "proxies", or supposed factors that tell how many firearms there are. Since it is not a direct measurement, it is usually going to be inexact. How inexact?

Well, you probably are going to fall off your chair laughing when you find out that the Feb. "study" found that some of the states with the lowest firearms ownership were: #6 South Dakota, #7 Minnesota, #9 Iowa, and #10 New Hampshire. This just illustrates how little the researchers understand about the real world. South Dakota? I am sure that SoDak will confirm that almost everyone in South Dakota has one or more firearms, and many people carry them in their vehicles, even if they don't have CCW's. Incidentally, South Dakota always has one of the 3 lowest murder rates in America, and in 2001, it was the lowest, with a rate of 0.9 per 100,000 residents, compared to the National Average of 5.6 or the "lowest gun ownership" Hawaii with 2.6 or tiny, liberal Rhode Island with 3.7. It is also interesting to note that South Dakota's murder rate (with all those guns!) is far lower than Britain's or France's, and it is the same as "gun free since 1588" Japan's rate.

As others have noted on this thread, there are many other factors that correlate well with the murder rates. One of the most consistent is the observation that the murder rates generally decline as you move Northward. In fact, our Northern states have murder rates not much different than Canada's, which has far more restrictive firearms laws.
______________________________

Randall N. Herrst, J.D.
President
The Center For The Study Of Crime
JOIN NOW! The Premier Resource for Innovative Activists!
http://www.studycrime.org

[IMHO]

I'm not clear what your point is, but it seems that if drug users can get their drugs legally, then drive bys, muggings, and liquor store robberies will decline. And clearly, if rapist patronize prostitutes in lieu of raping, that is a societal benefit.

Let's be clear on the difference between vices and crimes.

[go star go]

Being a resident in one of these "high gun" states I can attest to the fact that we will homocide any jackass that breaks into our home...

[hollywood]

If these Harvard 'research' projects are using public (tax) dollars, then the proposals must be (by law?) listed somewhere in the public domain. If that's the case, it may be time for some statistically-savvy Freepers to find, and then attempt to join, the research teams, and point out their data collection and reporting flaws along the way, as has been done in this thread.

[go star go]

http://consumerlawpage.com/article/breast.shtml

there's some more havard study info

[go star go]

http://www.junkscience.com/news/secret.html

not again...