Summations Only

You've been duped. It's not only a "study out of Harvard", it's a study completely out of Harvard.The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy is a publication of a conservative Harvard student organization called the Harvard Society for Law & Public Policy. It's the official journal of the Federalist Society.The study itself comes not out of Harvard but out of the imaginations of Don Kates of the Pacific Research Institute and Gary Mauser of Simon Fraser University. Both are longtime activists of the pro-gun lobby. Neither has any Harvard affiliation, and they apparently just make up data.For example, they apparently claim that Norway has a lower murder rate than Holland, and that because Norway has higher gun prevalence than Holland (combined with similar made-up data from other countries) that there is an inverse relationship between gun prevalence and murder.But if you check the Wikipedia article on List of Countries by Intentional Homicide Rate you'll find that the exact opposite is true. Norway has a murder rate of 2.2, while the Netherlands is 0.9, and so the correlation between gun prevalence and murder is positive, precisely as expected.If you make up data you can prove anything you like.--Percy

Actually, what you discover is that some people just make things up, as I pointed out was the case with your supposed Harvard research in Message 3007. All the real statistics show a positive correlation between gun prevalence and gun deaths. We can be pretty certain that guns cause gun deaths and not the other way around.--Percy

So you're against banning the mentally ill from owning guns? Yes, my scenario is just one unsafe gun possibility, among a multitude of unsafe gun possibilities. Can you come up with a single safe gun possibility that doesn't render the gun completely useless for quick-response defense?--Percy

Faith, you've been duped again. Look at the first graph. The country names on the x-axis don't even line up with the vertical bars. Saint Kitts and Nevis, "the smallest sovereign state in the Americas" according to Wikipedia, has three separate bars above it. This graph isn't even a good attempt at fabrication. You see the little hash marks on the x-axis? There's a bar between every pair of hash marks (some bars are for values too close to zero to be visible). Now look at the country names. They do not line up with the bars. There are about 3 country names for every 8 bars.Why are you seeking out statistics anyway? I know I encouraged you to do so, but you replied with some nonsense about the invalidity of statistical comparisons because of differing demographics and the combining of statistics from urban and rural areas into a single number for each country. I have two questions, one new, one old. The new question is whether you've changed your mind about the validity of statistical comparisons. The old one is how, prior to this possible change of mind, you knew the relationship of gun prevalence to gun deaths if you refused to consider statistics.Anyway, if you're going to consider statistics now I think that's great, but the risk off being duped is high if your sole acceptance criteria is whether they agree with you. And valid statistics are not going to agree with you because the relationship you insist upon (the more guns the fewer homicides) is impossible. You wouldn't believe someone who claimed that the more cars we put on the road the fewer accidents, or the more smog we put in the air the lower the rate of emphysema, so why in the world do you believe that the more guns we put in people's hands the fewer gun deaths there will be? I know you talk about deterrence, but no study has ever detected any deterrence effect due to the possibility of other people also being armed. It's the same as the death penalty, which studies have revealed also has no deterrence effect. Murder via firearm is most commonly a crime of passion or insanity - rational contemplation of the risks isn't involved.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

I took the data from the table in the Wikipedia article on Gun Violence in the United States by State and did a scatter plot. There's no apparent relationship between the prevalence of guns and gun murders: Checking to see if there was some other relationship I looked at the top and bottom 10 states for gun murder rates, and I included the largest city in each state. Here are the bottom 10 states and their largest cities:

• Vermont (Burlington)
• New Hampshire (Manchester)
• Hawaii (Honolulu)
• North Dakota (Fargo)
• Iowa (Des Moines)
• Idaho (Boise)
• Maine (Portland)
• Utah (Salt Lake City)
• Wyoming (Cheyenne)
• Oregon (Portland)

And here are the top 10 states and their largest cities:

• Georgia (Atlanta)
• Florida (Jacksonville)
• Mississippi (Jackson)
• Delaware (Wilmington)
• Michigan (Detroit)
• South Carolina (Columbia)
• Maryland (Baltimore)
• Missouri (Kansas City)
• Louisiana (New Orleans)
• District of Columbia (itself)

There's nothing to distinguish the top 10 states from the bottom 10. Each list has some that tend toward the more rural and some that tend toward the more urban. It's only when you look at the largest cities that you notice a difference. States with large cities with histories of urban blight and unrest have the highest gun murder rates. We need to compare like with like, so I need to find statistics by city. Wikipedia has a table that includes murder rates by city in their article List of United States Cities by Crime Rate, but it doesn't include gun prevalence. If anyone knows of such a study let me know.I did find an interesting study (The Relationship Between Gun Ownership and Firearm Homicide Rates in the United States, 1981—2010) that appeared in the American Journal of Public Health. It found that "for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%."It's exactly what you would expect, an approximately one-for-one relationship. Increase gun ownership by 1% and you increase the gun homicide rate by around 1%.One of the reasons for the paucity of good studies is the NRA's stranglehold on Congress. If the NRA were really so certain that statistical studies would confirm that guns make us safer they wouldn't oppose them.--Percy

Really? I explained the problems with the graph, but you're just going to bury your head in the sand and ignore the evidence of fabrication? Tell you what, why don't you explain that graph to us. Here it is for everyone's viewing pleasure (from Guns in Other Countries): Explain the 3 bars above Saint Kitts and Nevis. Explain why there are 3 bars in no-man's land between England/Wales and El Salvador. Explain why so few country names line up with a bar. Explain why there are 62 countries but nearly 200 data bars.I checked a few of the values for the average firearms per 100 people, and that seems accurate since it corresponds to the values in the Wikipedia article on Number of Guns Per Capita by Country, but the homicide by firearm data is completely bogus.AbE: Then what data are you using to support your conclusions?--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE.

The data in that first chart from Guns in Other Countries does appear to be at this link that you provided: World firearms murders and ownership. How did you find it? The reference from the website for that chart in footnote 4 does not contain that data.The data you found *does* appear to be pretty accurate. I found a few differences with the data from the Wikipedia article on List of Countries by Firearm Related Death Rate, but not enough to be worrying about possible fabrication.There is, as you said, no meaningful relationship, but if instead of plotting the data for all countries you plot the data for countries similar to the United States so that their data is meaningfully comparable you get this scatter plot: I think if you put that through your tool you'll get a pretty good correlation. The countries I chose were:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• England and Wales
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Northern Ireland
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Puerto Rico
• Romania
• Scotland
• Slovakia
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Turkey
• United States

--PercyEdited by Percy, : Wordsmithing.

Oh. I went to the footnote where it references the original source ("Firearm ownership, Small Arms Survey 2007; Crime, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime"), searched for that and came up dry.Thanks for the references for statistical packages. Western culture and values, and not third world, which is basically Europe and North America, not because they're superior but because they're similar. They're very likely to classify in similar ways and to gather statistics in similarly thorough and high quality ways, and they have no special circumstances like political unrest, e.g., Honduras, whose firearm murder rate was actually used for comparison with the US in the Guardian article. Similarity is why the comparison between the US and Canada is so much more meaningful than a comparison between the US and Honduras.Cultural differences also have a big influence on statistics. Check out suicide rates (List of Countries by Suicide Rate). Some countries like Haiti even report a zero suicide rate. Is there anyone who believes the suicide rate in Egypt is 1 per million each year or anywhere near that figure? Some countries do not make such statistics available (or, more likely, do not collect such statistics). For example, Saudi Arabia isn't on the list.So to get meaningful comparisons I believe you have to compare figures from similar countries, otherwise other factors will confound the comparison.--Percy

No, I asked how, without statistics, you could support your contention that more guns mean fewer gun deaths. Here's a bigger version of the graph, which you could have also viewed by going back to the original article that you yourself referenced (Guns in Other Countries): Moving on: Your competence at analyzing data seems to vary according to whether the data agrees with you. As soon as the data goes against you you throw up your hands and cry, "This is all too complicated, the relationship could be anything." Lack of comprehension is not a grounds for reaching conclusions. For that particular fact your referenced article in turn references the article Fear in Britain by Dave Kopel of the Independence Institute, a gun rights advocacy organization. Mr Kopel simply states this baldly with no supporting documentation, I can find no support for it, and it makes no sense. I'm sure there's some kernel of truth buried in there somewhere, but who knows what it is.What we do know is the UK's firearm homicide rate is very similar to other western countries with similarly low gun possession rates. Their firearm homicide rates are much lower than ours.Your referenced article frequently argues that countries with low gun prevalence have higher violent crime rates, and we could argue that point if you want to bring some (gasp) statistics forward, but the recent point being made in this thread is a different and more direct one, that more guns means more gun deaths. How anyone could believe anything else is possible is difficult to fathom. If you believe you do not have the ability to judge then why do you keep rendering judgments?--Percy

I went through the list, turns out I've been to only eight of them. I agree that the problems are deep-rooted, but it must still hold true that fewer guns will translate into fewer gun deaths. Whether gun prevalence reductions can be accomplished with gun laws is a separate question. There's a huge reservoir of guns out there.--Percy

Taking Israel off the list because it is insufficiently like the other countries sounds fine. I wasn't sure about Turkey, either. My goal wasn't scientific rigor but merely to show that a clear correlation emerges if you compare like with like instead of lumping western democracies with third world dictatorships and every other kind of country. I disagree that "it is not much use as a statistic." It lacks scientific rigor, but everything we do here lacks scientific rigor. We're not conducting scientific studies and typing our results into discussion threads here, but nonetheless we make every effort to say things that are accurate and true. A comparison of guns versus gun deaths for western style democracies tells us something true about the world, certainly much more true then that graph at the Guns in Other Countries webpage.--Percy

It's actually pretty simple, but before I get to that let me comment on this: I'm sorry you have an eye problem, but doesn't your monitor have a brightness control? Anyway, a disability doesn't excuse you from providing evidence for your positions, nor is it an excuse for ignoring the evidence provided by others. You must figure out a way to read and understand the evidence people are providing to you before replying. You can't keep begging off every time evidence rears its ugly head.Okay, now about how simple this is. We're not analyzing statistics, we're just looking at a simple graph. This graph from Guns in Other Countries is useless for a couple simple reasons that can be easily explained. Click on it to enlarge. You can make it even larger by clicking on -+, which increases the size of any browser page, including the images. Click on -0 to return the browser page to it's original size. And turn down your monitor brightness. Here's the graph: The problems:

• Two thirds of the country names labels are missing from the x-axis. For example, try to find France and Germany. Don't try too hard, because they're not there, though they should be very near Canada. Each space between hash marks has a vertical bar representing the gun deaths per 100,000 population (many of the vertical bars aren't visible because their value is too close to 0 or because there was no data). The correct country name, those that are present, appears immediately below the vertical bar, though displaced slightly to the right.
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• These countries are too dissimilar for valid comparisons. As I've been discussing with HBD, it's much more meaningful to compare western democracies. We want to compare the United States with Canada, England, France, Germany and Italy, not with Honduras, El Salvador, Morocco, Laos and Zimbabwe. We don't even want to compare ourselves with Mexico, where their drug cartel problems (e.g., a gang of 5 or 10 men will line up 150 students and gun them down) give them a very high firearm homicide rate with but a moderate firearm possession rate.

So using the exact same data provided by the above chart for just western style democracies I obtained this scatterplot: I provided HBD my list of countries (see Message 3023), he plugged it into his statistical analysis tools, and in Message 3027 he described that he had found a positive correlation. More guns mean more gun deaths.Further confirmation that more guns mean more gun deaths was provided in some studies that Tangle described in Message 3041:

• International correlations between gun ownership and rates of homicide and suicide
  
• Firearm Availability and Homicide Rates across 26 High-Income Countries

These studies reached independently consistent results: A gun in the home increases the probability of gun death, and there are more homicides where guns are more available.The second study I listed was of "26 high-income countries," and I was curious how well that list corresponds to my own list, so putting them together: Maybe HBD would be kind enough to redo his correlation study with just the 26 countries from the paper to see if he obtains similar results.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.Edited by Percy, : Fix .

You keep railing on in message after message about good guys and bad guys, but as Asgara points out later on, in most cases it's not possible to know who the good guys and bad guys are. Most bad guys were good guys right up until they murdered someone. Here are some recent and/or famous examples:

• Bradley William Stone, December, 2014, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Murdered six family members by stabbing and shooting. Before the murders he was a good guy.
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• Andres Avalos, December, 2014, Bradenton, Florida . Murdered his wife, a friend and a pastor. Before the murders he was a good guy.
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• Ronald Haskell, July, 2014, Spring, Texas. Murdered his ex-wife and her family. There had been problems in his marriage, but before the murders he was a good guy.
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• Elliot Rodger, May, 2014, Santa Barbara, California. Murdered three men by stabbing and two women with firearms. Before the murders he was a good guy.
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• Eric Frein, September, 2014, Pennsylvania (this was all over the news in September and October). Murdered a Pennsylvania state trooper, shot another. The only negative in his background was a minor brush with the law over a decade ago. Before the murder he was a good guy.
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• Adam Lanza, December, 2012, Newtown, Connecticut. Murdered his mother at home, then murdered twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Though exhibiting some psychological problems, before the murders he was a good guy.
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• James Eagan Holmes, July, 2012, Aurora, Colorado. Murdered 12 in a movie theatre. Though exhibiting soem psychological problems, before the murders he was a good guy.
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• Nidal Malik Hasan, November, 2009. Murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. Before the murders he was a good guy.

So could you please stop dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys? The reality is that you cannot know who the good guys and the bad guys are, or when a good guy will become a bad guy. Why are you arguing anything about statistics after having just earlier stating that you're ignoring statistics. Why are you mentioning crime-infested areas, anyway? The concern is that more guns mean more gun deaths, that the presence of a gun in the home means greater danger for the residents. No one's talking about crime or bad guys. The dangers of bad guys having guns are obvious. We're talking about the dangers of good guys having guns. You've been duped again. Harvard is part of the Ivy League and does not give out athletic scholarships.--Percy

You're insisting on ignoring the statistics so you can continue to ignore that more guns mean more gun deaths. Any decent person would put a higher value on human life than gun rights.--Percy

Hi Faith,I'm replying to this message again because I forgot a point. I originally said that any decent person would put a higher value on human life than gun rights, but I should have added that I understand that you believe you are acting decently because you believe more guns means fewer gun deaths, not more.But all the evidence says that more guns mean more gun deaths. And it isn't like this is a surprising counter-intuitive result. On the contrary, it is precisely what one would expect. More guns mean more opportunities for gun accidents, more occasions when a gun is available when tempers flare, more times when children find guns, more occurrences of guns turning up in the hands of the mentally ill, more incidents of anger and frustration turning to firearm violence, more opportunities for a fragile situation to turn deadly.To defend your position you've chosen a course that involves claiming you don't understand statistics, and that statistics can't be trusted anyway. But without statistics you can't know whether your claim that guns prevent gun deaths is true. Simple decency demands that you advocate a position on so important an issue out of knowledge rather than ignorance.So how are you going to get statistics you can understand and trust? Well, one thing we know for certain is that the NRA is not going to help you obtain this valuable information, because as this New York Times article relates, the NRA works hard at discouraging firearms research. The landmark event occurred in 1996 when the $2.6 million allocated for CDC firearms research was taken away and only returned when it was reallocated to traumatic brain research. After this experience the CDC has shied strongly away from firearms research, and other research organizations within government took note.But studies still take place despite this handicap, and a few have been cited here. There can be no doubt that more guns means more gun deaths. Anyone who values human life above all else understands that we have to find means to reduce the number of guns in our midst.Of course, if you still think more guns don't cause more gun deaths then your welcome to debate the issue, but that will require statistics. Your argument that statistics are political and can't be trusted is just a position your forced into because the data is against you, not to mention the incredible irony that the source of your distrust is the incredibly screwed up data presented by a website that you cited yourself.--Percy