Brady Grades
Update: Sorry Farkers, my host doesn’t like you. Beyond my control. And for you folks criticizing the statistical methods, no one is saying Brady Causes Violence. Just that their gun control pipe dreams aren’t showing an decrease in violence. And, for shit’s sake, it’s not a study.
Now back to your original post:
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It’s that time of year where The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership issues its grades. I like to call it a Freedom Index, only its grading system is backwards. Nemerov spanks their grading system pretty hard:
Brady comes out each year with their report card, which analyzes a set of gun-law criteria and arrives at a grade from “A” through “F.” As noted in a previous paper, there is a strong correlation between lower grades and right-to-carry (RTC) status, with shall-issue states regularly assigned “D” and “F” grades.2 Brady graded South Carolina “D+” in 2005, because guns are too freely available, as per Helmke’s statement above.
Since 2001, RTC states, where more people carry guns in public, consistently average a “D”. Brady continues to be unhappy with the country’s direction regarding gun control: between 2001 and 2005, RTC states increased from 32 to 38 and Brady downgrade the U.S. average from “C-” to a “D+.” Their response is curious, since the national violent crime rate fell 7.0% during this time frame.
Even worse for Brady, violent crime trends are not spread equally across all states. RTC states (average Brady grade “D”) saw an aggregate 7.8% drop in violent crime, while non-RTC states (average Brady grade “B”) saw a 5.2% decrease. Even when Brady grades synchronize with violent crime trends, it fails to give an accurate picture: Brady dropped the national average grade from “C-” to “D+” in 2005, the same year that the violent crime rate increased 1.3%. This would seem to make sense, as a lower grade is supposed to reflect less safety for citizens. Unfortunately for Brady, most of that increase occurred in non-RTC states, which saw an aggregate increase of 2.8%, while RTC states increased 0.6%. Using Brady’s criteria of grading each state as an equivalent entity, non-RTC states averaged a 5.6% increase in violent crime, while RTC states averaged a 0.6% increase. Since 2001, the violent crime differential between RTC and non-RTC states increased from 26.0% to 27.5%, meaning that RTC states are becoming relatively more law-abiding compared to non-RTC states.3
There’s also the fact that two of Brady’s A students (Mass. and Illinois) recently experienced mass shootings. Since Brady cannot offer solutions, they offer condolences. You guys gave them an A.
December 18th, 2006 at 8:27 am
Just remeber one thing about The Brady Organization, they’re goal isn’t to curb or reduce crime nor make the streets safe for the ordinary soccor Mom, its to eliminate guns from society. There is a big difference. With criminals the only ones having guns, aside from the police who arrive to clean up the crime scene, crime will increase as it has elswwhere in the “civilized world”.
December 19th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
Keep these guys under a rock. Living in Canada, we are suffering under the Brady Bunch objectives in restricting access to firearms and believe this, once youve lost it, it is dam difficult to impossible to get it back. Look after your second amendment. Cheers Bob
December 20th, 2006 at 10:35 am
[…] The military uses automatic weapons. Again, the Brady Bunch is trying to obfuscate machine guns and weapons that look like assault weapons. Meanwhile, Brady has issued grades for states. These grades are gun control rankings from A to F, with an A indicating more gun control and more in line with Brady’s goals. Strangely, most of the increase in violent crime occurred in states that earned higher Brady rankings. That’s unpossible! […]
December 28th, 2006 at 4:51 am
LA BRADY CAMPAIGN, el lobby anti-armas fundado por…
January 10th, 2007 at 3:20 am
[…] […]
November 15th, 2007 at 9:42 am
[…] a ranking of F from The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership. And we all know the truth about their grades which is that high Brady grades correlate to increases in violent […]