More guns equal more murders in U.S. states: study

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http://today.reuters.com/news/artic...1177009_RTRUKOC_0_US-GUNS-MURDERS.xml&src=rss

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American states where more people own guns have higher murder rates, including murders of children, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health reported on Thursday.

The study, certain to provoke arguments in a country where gun ownership is an important political issue, found that about one in three U.S. households reported firearm ownership.

"Our findings suggest that in the United States, household firearms may be an important source of guns used to kill children, women and men, both on the street and in their homes," said Matthew Miller, assistant professor of health policy and injury prevention, who led the study.

His team used data from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of 200,000 people in all 50 states.

After dividing the states into four groups based on how many households had guns, the researchers found the states in the highest quartile of firearm ownership had overall homicide rates 60 percent higher than states in the lowest quartile.

In states with the most guns, firearm homicide rates were 114 percent higher, the researchers reported in the February issue of Social Science and Medicine.

More than 200 million guns are privately owned in the United States, according to the Justice Department.

In September, the FBI released 2005 figures showing violent crime had risen 2.3 percent nationally -- the first increase in four years.

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It's difficult to properly refute without actually seeing the study, but these people need to repeat after me:

"Correlation does not equal causality!"
 
Last I heard, Vermont and Maine lead the nation in guns-per-capita ownership. Oddly enough, those two states also are among the lowest in murder rates.[thinking]
 
This fellow Hemenway had been cranking out the anti-gun papers for a while. One of his academic dishonesties is cherry-picking data from publications for the popular press. In one case, he highlighted in the mass media the increased risk of gun homicide in homes with guns, but failed to note the details in the drab source paper showing that several other factors had higher association with gun homicides than guns in the home, like prior arrests, alcohol/drug abuse, etc. The inference was that if a home had a gun, then famiy members were shooting one another, as opposed to some dirtball shooting a visiting 'friend' over drugs...

The data used by the author (2001 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) is shown below:
2001GunOwnership-Number.jpg


2001GunOwnership-Percent.jpg


The Red bars are states indicated to be major sources of 'crime guns' - not relevant here but part of the images I had on file. Asterisks are states with 'safe storage laws'. It seems MA is one of those "Less Guns, More Crimes" states ...

Data on state CCW shown below as well:

StateCCW.jpg


No public data available for many states, such as NH & VT.
 
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My rant continues:

“Our findings suggest that in the United States, household firearms may be an important source of guns used to kill children, women and men, both on the street and in their homes,” said Miller."

I guess they don't address shootings using guns from police/military and guns shops?

And they address shooting of children, men and women - why so limited and specific?

And shootings on the street and in their homes, but what about under the street (subways) and in other peoples' homes?

-Sarcasm mode off-

These guys manage to write a hyped sentence for the news media without saying anything of consequence. Can you imagine a finding that guns kept in the home were NOT a major source of weapons used in shootings? That would only be in a country where police, military and paramilitary, insurgents, etc., were doing all the shooting/killing.

What BS.

I have the paper on order, but they typically provide little data and refuse to provide data on request, even to other academics.
 
I serriously question the accuracy of those charts. Particularly the gun ownership and gun ownership % population for NH. If I'm reading correctly it says there are around 500,000 guns in NH, and only about 30% gun ownership statewide. Every time I've ever heard a stat on the percentage of the population of NH that owns firearms, it's almost always bewtween 60-80%. Granted, I don't know what facts that number is based on, but I can only think of 1 or 2 friends growing up that didn't have at least 1 gun in the house. Come to think of it, of the people that had guns, I can't think of any house that had just 1 gun.
 
"The factoid fry-cooks at Harvard School of Public Health have pulled a sleight of hand. You’ve probably seen the press reports[1] of their new “study,” in the Journal of Trauma which supposedly shows:

“The higher death rates in high gun states are due to differences in deaths from firearms” and “the strong and robust association between gun ownership and children’s violent death is compelling”[2] (see footnote for link to full-text article).”

They even (ahem) “show” that overall violence in kids is higher in the five most gun-prevalent states than in the five least. They do this by using a gun-prevalence proxy that two of them have recently acknowledged elsewhere is an inferior way to estimate gun prevalence — this comes in a paper for the Duke University Sanford Institute of Public Policy[3]. Not only that, but the creator of the proxy coauthored this Duke paper — even he, apparently, thinks it is inferior (see footnote for link to full-text paper). "

http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?id=3208 ;)
 
I serriously question the accuracy of those charts.

Me too. Look at California. I thought CA was not a gun-friendly state, yet they have 7.5 million+/- guns?
Let's do a little math. 2001 population of CA was about 35,000,000. According to these graphs, 22% of Californians owned guns. 22% of 35 mil is 7,700,000 gun owners for 7,500,000 guns. That doesn't add up. Let's assume the numbers are off just a little and the number of owners and guns is the same; what are the chances that every gun owner in CA only owns one gun??
 
Even if all the numbers were accurate, the study implies that more guns cause more homicides.

Consider that in areas with high rates of homicides people may choose to arm themselves for defense. So the author could have it backwards: more homicides cause more guns.

It's not exactly an earth-shattering notion that when the shtf people choose to arm themselves.
 
The source data can be had at http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/ and http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/2004/12/percentage-of-adults-with-carry.html, the latter being less well documented. The #Guns data is inferred from homes answering Yes/No to questions about guns in the home and populations in 2001.

One can and should question the accuracy of the data, but one usually has to do more than say I don't believe the results based on my own experience in my neck of the woods. That said, I am only conveying the data and not attesting to it's validity. [smile]

The pro-gun statisticians (or even neutral statisticians who are comentant and honest) might have had something to say about the methodology used by the CDC. I haven't run across any serious criticism, but I'm a dilettante in such matters.

The problem is, that which changes laws are legislatures. What makes legistators feel justified, and politically safe, in making decisions, are studies and voters. The anti-gun studies continue to pump out and the voters have put less pro-gun legistalors in office.

I could certainly see that different populations might answer with different degrees of 'honesty'. I would tell any strangers asking me about my guns to f*** off.[angry]

... and remember, the significant influx of new residents in SoNH is slowly converting that region to NoMA in politics and attitude. With most of the NH population residing in the bottom 5th of the state, things have changed in the last decades, the 5 years since the data were gathered, and continue to change rapidly.
 
As for the numbers seeming low, you need to realize that this isn't the number of households that own guns, but the number of households that will admit to a caller on a survey for an agency of the federal government that will admit to (or claim to) own a firearm.

California has always had a lot of guns around. It's only in the past 20 years or so that the changing demographics have resulted in an absurdly anti-gun political class. Despite everything bad that they have there (e.g., registration, waiting periods, acceptable gun lists), you still don't need to get permission from the massa' to purchase and keep a firearm in your home or take it to the range.

Ken
 
So states that have more guns have higher murder rates? Okay...tell me how that explains Washington DC?? Hey, it came from Harvard. 'Nuff said. [rolleyes]
 
i find it interesting that the funder of the study is the Joyce Foundation, which has an entire department dedicated to advocacy of gun control. If the NRA funded a study, would HSPH have found the opposite correlation?

As a trained scientist, correlation does not mean causality. Seeing the actual data, and the 20 questions asked, would help to validate the results.
 
Just picking through the paper. The first thing that strikes me is the basis of the paper on states with more guns - "States with firearm prevalence more than one standard deviation above the mean: Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi, South Dakota, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming" - comprised:

~5.6% of the US population at the time of the data surveys.

That's some WEAK-ASS statistics!
 
Lies and propaganda with an underlying agenda.

It would be interesting to further break that data down to include some racial data of the offenders.
It corresponds very close to the percentages of black populations of the states, particularly the first 12-15 listed. Coincidence?....I don't think so.
 
The validity of the "study" is irrelavant now.

The damage has been done.

The misleading press releases got out and have been eaten up by the ignorant masses. This was done for no reson other than softening up the electorate to get them ready for the next round of gun control bills that will be working their way through Congress this year.
 
The data in this paper are overlaid on US Census state population data from the survey period.

2001Pop-GunsMiller2007.jpg


The GREEN states, with statistically lower per capita gun ownership, are supposed to be the states with lower homicide by firearms and RED, with statistically higher per capita gun ownership, the higher homicide by gun states.

It looks to me like the flock of sheep effect - the bigger the flock, the less likely the wolf will get you, although they cull more from the flock in general.
 
Interestingly, some of the states where they claim more guns equals more murders, the murder rate went down.

In many of these states, we're dealing with under 20 murders for the year - most years. So, one or two murders makes a large statistical jump.

In places like Alabama, and Arkansas, murders rose sharply as murders fell in Louisiana - I think this is due more to hurrican Katrina and the NOLA folks getting shipped elsewhere to commit crimes.

Places like Florida, where they have pro-gun laws, and decent ownership rates, murders went down.

In the tough gun law states - DC murders were down, but violent crime was way up. In Massachusetts, California, Maryland, Wisconsin, and New Jersey murders were up. In New york, murder was down, but violent crime was up.

By the way, the murder rate did rise from 2004 - 2005. By one tenth of one percent over 2004, which put us back to 2002 numbers. We're at the lowest murder rate since 1966.

All from the FBI's Bureau of Justice Stats.
 
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"Although causal inference is not warranted on the basis of the present study alone.."

Just look at San Francisco, Handguns outlawed for everyone, has the highest murder rate for any US city.
 
If anyone would like a .pdf of the original Miller et al. article PM me with your email address and I'll send it along. I'll also send a .pdf of an article from the Journal of Trauma by the same authors (with a different senior author by the name of Lisa Hepburn) that looked into the effect of "shall-issue" laws on homicide rates and found there was no effect.
 
John Lott just posted his review of this paper on his blog at http://johnrlott.tripod.com/2007/01/problems-with-latest-miller-hemenway.html.

In short, Lott says that cherry-picking crime-rate correlations and excluding DC from the analysis gave "more guns, more crime". Adding DC back and using arrest rates gives "more guns, less crime".

DC's Mayor Fenty argued at the Mayors Against Illegal Guns event that variable state gun laws don't stop gun crime and uniformly restrictive federal laws are needed. I guess he hasn't heard that the guys at Harvard aren't counting the bodies in DC in the tally as it's not really a state ...
 
I know this is an old thread, but it reminds me of this picture from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

piratesarecool4.jpg


The whole point being that just because two things happen over the same period of time does not imply a causal relationship. Of course, to become a member of the press, one apparently has to sign a statement promising to ignore such "facts."

May you be touched by his noodly appendage...
 
I think Maybe he might be, could be onfused?

I think Maybe he might be, could be onfused? Maybe just disorientated a wee bit

Here is some statistices from some guys that work for us.

Im too lasy to post it all ya just got to read it yerself and make up your own pinuns

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm


There are Lies, Dam Lies and then there are Statistics!

I lert that in Collage [laugh2] [rolleyes]
 
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