US STATES WITH MORE GUN OWNERS HAVE MORE MURDERS

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

[Joe Brower]

Re: your post #40 -- WELL DONE!

[HIDEK6]

"US States with more gun owners have more murders."

What BS.

damn statistics.

I wonder if the US states with more gun owners also have MORE PEOPLE (Sam Kinison imitation).

[JPJones]

Your totally right about that...this guy is basically saying that it's safer in Massachusetts than Wyoming...what an idiot.

[Timesink]

Oh yeah, two more questions:

1) More than other states? That conveniently leaves out Washington, DC.

2) What about states that contain major cities that ban guns (and where gun violence is through the roof as a result) whereas the rest of the state is pro-gun and homicides are low? The authors of this study are choosing what are more or less random, arbitrary divisions of the population - state borders - as the basis for their studies. And that's useless. What if DC was part of Maryland? What if NYC was part of New Jersey? What if LA and the Southland were its own state? Any of those variables would wildly skew the results of this study, and thus proves that the results of any such study are too skewed to be of any use ... except as probaganda for the rapidly dying gun-grabber crowd.

[Nov3]

Unsubstantiated? John Lott's studies are FAR more rigorous than this nonsense.

I'm glad you brought Lott up. I was going to point out that this notion has indeed been substantiated thanks to his monumental research effort.

[winner3000]

2 points:
I wonder why he did not include California and NY State in the study. They're both huge states with lots of minorities and extremely rigorous gun control laws. I think he did, but didn't like the results, so he took them out.

Also, since the study is really attempting to come to conclusions to "help" set public policy, no gun law research is complete without looking at what ACTUALLY happens when tough gun control laws get enacted. Last time I checked, violent crime using a gun skyrocketed. The latest comes to us from Great Britain (a society as close to us as can be). It appears that states with the greatest number of guns in CRIMINALS' hands have the greatest number of homicide. Disarming non-criminal citizens makes them a sitting duck. They would then be more likely to give up their freedoms for the government's socialist protection. Yuk.

[Joe Brower]

There is additional commentary on this over at The Firing Line.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

I agree: the presence of guns in a home is very dangerous for the life and health of criminal intruders.

[PatrioticAmerican]

“"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,"”

A statement of OPINION because it certainly does not state any facts to the case.

“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.”

Impossible. There are no known census statistics accurate enough to discover firearms ownership in any state. In places where guns have been outlawed, such as New York City, name one person who will admit to firearms ownership.

“In fact, the six states with the highest rates of gun ownership”

Six? Does the seventh make a difference? Why the sixth? I’d like to see the report to discover if they stopped at six. Again, how can they compare firearms ownership when that isn’t a known quantity?

“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”

Again, junk “science” as no known “high gun state” exists.

No, please prove the report correct.

[Shooter 2.5]

Take it county by county from the Red/Blue zones of the last election. The blue zone[dem] has a six times higher murder rate than the red Zone[Republican].

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Hmmm ... don't think he's ever heard of "correlation is not causation." Principle number one in social science investigations.

Perhaps states have more guns because there are more murders, so more people feel a need for lethal defense.

How do "gun-frei-ammunition-verboten" cities like Chicago, DC, LA, and NYC fit into this equation? I guess all those murdered people in those places were killed with pointed sticks or pomegranates?

[PatrioticAmerican]

#88 - Good link.

Two serious points: They gustimate gun ownership based on the homicide rate. More killings, more guns. So any state that has more killings has more guns, and, therefore, according to these commie MEDICAL doctors, there are more killings when there are more guns. The CI index. Pure CRAP!

Second, they included all killings, including stabbings.

[spunkets]

Poverty rates have nothing to do with it. That would mean that folks were not moral agents at all. Look at WV and WY. Both have the same low murder rates, guns and poverty rates that vary by a factor of ~2.

WV - 17.9 percent, 2.2
WY - 11.4 percent, 1.8

" there are many, many factors that better model the murder rate than gun ownership"

That's right. It's quite simple fundamentally, and has been known for a long time. It's the idea that men are moral agents. The idea that men are random variables is an authoritarian idea.

These 2 States have essentially the same murder rate and ~2X diff in the poverty rate. NJ is an authoritarian State with no guns.

Ark - 15.8 percent, 5.5
NJ - 8.5 percent, 4

[lavaroise]

legal or illegal gun ownership? If guns are so bad, should cops have them? Sheesh.

I have a job to do, and it is to own a gun. They can bite me. I don't stop them, so let them not stop me.

And while they are on the issue, crimes and coercive societal oppression from criminals do increase without gun owners around.

I do not fight for my privileges but for rights. So if they are willing to fight and kill people out of the privilege of being a gunfree equalitarian sheeple society, these people are clearly on the side of crime and murder. Crimes and liberals threatening people around exist, we have a job to do and it is to own guns. Sorry, they are the ones making an issue of it and they are the very reason owning guns is so important. Glad they made that point clear.

[Bonaparte]

Still unwilling to debate John Lott on the facts, the gun grabbers instead put out another phony "study."

Pathetic.

[Atlas Sneezed]

(Revised for distribution)

US Facilities with More Doctors Have More Deaths

By Pressrelease Regurgitator

NEW YORK (Frauders Health) - Deaths in the United States are more common in facilities (such as hospitals) where more occupants are doctors, according to researchers.

The study findings imply "that doctors, on balance, lethally imperil rather than protect Americans," lead study author Dr. Math Misuser of Haphavard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, told Frauders Health.

"This inference is consistent with previous...studies that have found that the presence of a doctor in the building is a risk factor for death, and starkly at odds with the unsubstantiated, yet often adduced, notion that doctors are a public good," he added.

Miisuser and his team investigated the association between death and rates of medical professional presence, using 1988-1997 data collected from the nine US census regions and the 50 states.

They found that physician prevalence was linked to death rates throughout the nine census regions. At the state level, the link between rates of physician prevalence in a given facility and death existed for all fatalities older than age 5, according to the report in the December issue of the American Journal of Political Whores.

In fact, the six types of facilities with the highest rates of physician presence--hospitals, medical office buildings, senior care facilities, trauma centers, cancer treatment centers, and golf clubhouses --had more than 2,000,000 deaths, nearly three times as many as the four types of facilities with the lowest physician presence--homes, non-medical offices, schools, and retail stores.

Further, people who visited one of the six "high doctor facilities" were nearly three times as likely to die from any disease and more than four times as likely to die from doctor-related surgery than those who visited only "low doctor facilities," the report indicates. Their risk of dying of a non-surgery-related disease was also nearly double that of those who remained in facilities with the lowest rates of physician presence.

On average, about half of people in high-doctor facilities were physicians, according to data reported by three of the six states, in comparison to 1.3% of occupants of low-doctor facilities being doctors.

Although death rates were higher in poor-health areas and in facilities with higher rates of non-lethal diseases and injuries, the association between physician prevalence and death remained true when the researchers took these and other factors into consideration.

Still, Misuser's team notes that it is not clear whether the higher rates of physician prevalence caused or resulted from the increased number of deaths.

"It is possible, for example, that locally elevated death rates may have led to increased numbers of physicians going to where people were dying," they write.

SOURCE: American Journal of Political Whores 2002;92:1988-1993.

[lavaroise]

Eliminate the big cities and the murders go WAY down

Indeed, the rural areas are generaly OK, while the cities that forbid gun ownership have huge homicide rates.

Note however that as someone pointed out, homicide means not murder. Justifiable homicides were rated in that account. This is ridiculous and yet another attempt at privileging criminals' privileges to comit crimes safely over victims's rights to defend themselves. The whole thing is not so much hoguewash, but vicious stripping of victims' rights for the privileges of criminals to stay alive. They call that healh!? These people are sick!

But in the end, this issue will hinge in people's hearts, and while they make a good vicious attempt at changing people's hearts, it wont work this time around.

These liberal thesis have one objective and one objective only: privileges over rights, war starting over privileges instead of war ending for sake of protecting rights.

1. They want to initiate war and to allow the initiation of conflict, while to disallow the resolution and end of the war at the hands of victims fighting back. What are they initiating war on? They are initiating it on biggoted views of the average American and lies about the humaneness of even hardened criminals. They are attacking the wrong people for a societal ill. So they attack the good and defend the bad.

2. Secondly their original intent is immoral at the base, because they attack a right (virtualy starting a war) to favor a statiscal privilege, a privileged criminal class, a privileged bigoted redefinition of our jobs as Americans and a privileged class of neighbors who want psychological, social, power and asset protection privileges over other neighbors, making other neighbors easier targets for crimes and ruling over other neighbors very private jurisdictions and self-defense realm. They want to privilege a class of people who want the power to legislate over people's defenseless lives, a class that wants to be privileged by the lack of power/vulnerability of a neighbor.

[captnorb]

Question? What percentage minorities used the gun...Bet know will tell. RI is probably 60% black

[lavaroise]

That sums it up. Rights over distorted statistical privileges. It's like in Holland, where there is so called less crime, but drugs are legal and rapists visit prostitutes to gratify themselves. A society that allows privileges to go above rights will see a right as a crime and a self-privileging criminal act as an act of freedom.