New study shows link between rates of gun ownership and homicides

I think the first comment from the "Study" in your link says it all.

Maybe you should have read a little further?

Or maybe some treatment of your "selective amnesia" is in order?

Quote:

"The fallacy here is concentrating on "gun crime" statistics as if it were some sort of meaningful category.

To give a simple example, we could reduce "police brutality" by reducing the size of police forces. However, this entirely ignores the greater question of whether society would be net better off.

England and Australia have already proven for the rest of the world that when legal guns go away, violent crime skyrockets:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/T...

ironically, gun crime often goes up too:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/C...

There's no justification for repeating the same failed experiment in the US.

This "new study" is just another in a long series of biased presentations that concentrates solely on the costs of gun availability while carefully avoiding any discussion of the contrasting benefits. All human rights have costs. As Sanford Levinson observed, "What it means to take rights seriously is that one will honor them even when there is significant social cost in doing so."

LOL - I bet they didn't include places like Chicago and DC in that study.  Law abiding citizens have been prevented from owning guns and the gun crime rate skyrockets. 

Some people just need to be shot, espcially if they are in the process of attacking a law abiding citizen.  Criminals ain't victims.

I would think that a study from a lefty elitist school would carry more weight with folks.

From: http://www.smallgovtimes.com/a...l-counterproductive/

"Once again, a study from an organization that you would never accuse of being “gun-loving” or “right-wing” seems to disprove the myth that the availability of handguns increases murder rates.  In fact, it doesn’t.

The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides.  Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates.

Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high.  In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the “gun-ridden” United States, cites the study.  ”Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.”  In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high.

The study revealed several European countries with significant gun ownership, like Norway, Finland, Germany and France – had remarkably low murder rates.  Contrast that with Luxembourg, “where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.”

The study found no evidence to suggest that the availability of guns contributes to higher murder rates anywhere in the world.  ”Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this.”

Further, the report cited, “the determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism.”  Meaning, it’s not guns that kill people."

I suspect that in our over controlled and over medicated lives, some of us choose to checkout earlier via a bullet. Likewise there are some attracted to the violence of the underground economy of drug running because it's promoted by some bad poetry(?) to music(?) and is seen as a lifestyle by some people.  

stanky you didn't understand the study.

Oh, I understand how some researchers create studies. In a former life I got to hang out with researchers and generated some numbers myself. I think some researchers throw out the scientific method, write the conclusion, and then set out to find the numbers they need to support their biased opinion. In most cases people will look for correlation, but don't do a little more work to determine causation. Lets say a state with a border on Mexico has a higher gun related death rate than a new England state. Don't you think that we're comparing apples to oranges?

The study, covering thirty years (1981-2010) in all fifty states, found a “robust correlation” between estimated levels of gun ownership and actual gun homicides at the state level, even when controlling for factors typically associated with homicides. For each 1 percentage point increase in the prevalence of gun ownership, the state firearm homicide rate increases by 0.9 percent, the authors found. http://www.homelandsecuritynew...ership-and-homicides

Does the maxim "correlation does not imply causation" not mean anything to you?

The study itself only found as they say, a "robust correlation". Also the study used an estimate of gun ownership. The study says it controls for factors "typically associated with homicides". Explain what that means! Do you weigh certain murders as more murderous than others? What percentage of those "estimated" gun owners are felons and how many are not. How many "estimated" gun owners are substance abusers and how many are not.

In other words, show me the methodology of the study. "Trust me" ain't cutting it!

stanky "robust correlation" is a common scientific study term. "Link" means data exists that lends credibility to a proposition of which a conclusion is falsifiable.

 It's a scientific paper. If you want to be seen as a reliable source to refute the abstract and presentation, by all means produce one with your credentials attached  or produce a rebuttal backed up with scientific papers by others.

I don't want to buy a reprint of something that would be poor toilet paper, so I'll just quote John Lott's observations:

1) Using state level data the study claims a positive relationship between the percentage of suicides committed with guns (they call this the gun ownership rate rather than what it actually is) and the firearm homicide rate. The big problem with their measure of gun ownership is that it picks up a lot of demographic information that may itself be related to homicide and to crime.

2) Do we care about total murders or murders involving guns?

3) “None of the existing panel studies examined data more recent than 1999.” Presumably this is what is causing some left wing outlets to claim “Largest Gun Study Ever.” The authors seem completely unaware of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime that looked at data up through 2005 — six years longer than they claim. Of course, my research also started with 1977, not 1981 as they did. Of course, I have also used county and city level data and have many more observations than they have. My research has run regressions with up to 96 times more observations that the 1,000 that they point to in this paper. While I account for hundreds of factors, these guys account for almost none (6 in their final reported model (23 unreported in bivariate estimates — meaning just running one of these variables at a time in explaining firearm murder rates). It would be nice if Mr. Zack Beauchamp was notified that these authors are apparently unaware of any of my research since “1988″ [sic] (they couldn’t even get the year right for my first edition of MGLC).

4) No explanation is offered for why they leave Washington, DC out of their regressions. I can offer one: it weakens their results.

5) Only a very small percentage of the prison population are there for murder. Possibly a percent or two in any given year. Do changes in the share of the prison population for larceny or burglary really help explain a lot of the variation in murder rates? A more direct measure would be the arrest rate for murder and/or the number of people in prison for murder and/or the death penalty execution rate.

6) “To develop a final, more parsimonious model, we first entered all variables found to be significant in bivariate analyses (we used a Wald test at a significance level of .10) into 1 model. We then deleted variables found not to be significant in the presence of the other variables, assessing the significance of each variable with a Wald test at a significance level of .05.” — The problem here is that the resulting statistical significance levels don’t mean what these authors seem to think that that do. The levels of significance for a regression assume a random draw. If you 23 specifications and then pick the variables that are significant, the variables that you are picking were picked in a biased manner.

7) Six variables is what they finally include in their “Final Model.” Leaving out variables that affect the murder rate will cause the other variables to act as a proxy for these left out variables. This gets back to my point (1).

8) Even if all these issues were dealt with, they have completely ignored the issue of causation. Is it increased crime that results in more guns or the reverse?

Source: John Lott

As to 'robust correlation", remember the old saying in existence since the first computer:

" Garbage in; Garbage out!"

So  much for Lott's input.

Disputed survey

In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000,^[56][57] Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.^[58] However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data, or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,^[59] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics alleged that the survey had never taken place,^[60] but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy, quoting on his website colleagues who lost data in the hard drive crash

• ^ Jump up to: ^{a b} Otis Dudley Duncan, "Gun Use Surveys: In Numbers We Trust?", The Criminologist, Vol. 25, No. 1, Jan/Feb 2000, p. 1, 3–7.
• Jump up ^ "John R. Lott, Jr.'s Reply to Otis Dudley Duncan's Recent Article in The Criminologist", The Criminologist, Vol. 25, No. 5, Sep/Oct 2000, page 1, 6.
• Jump up ^ John R. Lott. Jr.'s Reply to Otis Dudley Duncan's Recent Article in The Criminologist, The Criminologist, Vol. 25, No. 5, Sept/Oct 2000, p. 1, 6.
• Jump up ^ Julian Sanchez noted that the 1997 harddrive crash is widely accepted as a fact; the dispute is over the lack of solid evidence that Lott lost a survey data set in that crash.
• ^ Jump up to: ^{a b} Sanchez, Julian. "The Mystery of Mary Rosh". Retrieved 2007-06-15.

You might want to check out the emails of people who verified that John Lott did have a computer crash and who also verified that he did the study. Some of them even disliked the outcome of the study.

From: Dan Kahan
Date: Thu Feb 13, 2003 12:49:32 AM US/Eastern
To: letters@washpost.com
Cc: John Lott
Subject: Feb. 11, "A Fabricated Fan and Many Doubts"

Dear Editor:
A column appearing in the Post yesterday (Feb. 11, "A Fabricated Fan and Many Doubts") implies that economist John Lott made up the claim that a computer malfunction destroyed data from his research on gun control. At the time Lott was engaged in this research, we were colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School. I clearly recall John relating the computer data-loss incident to me then -- many years before the current controversy about his work arose.
Just so you know, I'm not relating this information to you because I support Lott's position on guns (I don't). I'm relating it to you because I think journalists -- even the ones you employ to write political gossip columns like this one -- should live up to their professional obligation to check out the facts before they make claims harmful to an individual's reputation.
Yours,
Dan M. Kahan

*****************************************************************
Dan M. Kahan
Professor of Law
Yale Law School
PO Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520 (regular mail)
127 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511 (courier)
(203) 432-8832
(815) 366-1458 (fax)

And there are a sea of other emails here: http://johnrlott.tripod.com/surveysupport.html

I suppose we still kill the messenger if we don't like the message!

 uhh huh