Harvard’s assault on gun rights continues:

States with the greatest number of guns in the home also have the highest rates of homicide, a new study finds.

The study, in the February issue of Social Science and Medicine, looked at gun ownership in all 50 states and then compared the results with the number of people killed over a three-year period.

The research, the authors said, “suggests that household firearms are a direct and an indirect source of firearms used to kill Americans both in their homes and on the streets.”

[…]

In states in the highest quarter of gun ownership, the study found, the overall homicide rate was 60 percent higher than in states in the lowest quarter. The rate of homicides involving guns was more than twice as high.

Among the possible explanations for the higher homicide rates, the study said, is that states with high gun ownership tend to make it easier to buy guns. There are also more guns that can be stolen. And the presence of a gun may allow arguments and fights to turn fatal.

This nothing new to readers of this site who know the researchers are full of it. But it is significant that the NYT is pushing this blatant hackery. The reason it’s quite suspect is that overall gun ownership has increased yet overall homicides have declined:

During the past decade we’ve added a minimum of 30 million new firearms in public hands – at least 10 million of which were handguns. Since 1993 we’ve gone from 21 states with “shall-issue” or unrestricted concealed-carry legislation to 39. We’ve had an influx of “assault weapons” and “pocket rockets” – supposed engines of death and destruction far more lethal than the weapons available in the 60’s.

Yet homicides declined. Non-fatal firearm related crime declined.

John Lott has a more detailed look at the numbers. He notes:

I have just spent a short time looking at the study, but there are some of things that are pretty obvious: 1) They excluded the District of Columbia without any explanation, 2) they use other crime rates to explain the homicide rate (by the way, they don’t use anything like an arrest or conviction rate, nothing to do with law enforcement), 3) they use purely cross-sectional data that never allows one to properly control for what may cause differences in crime rates, and 4) data from different years is used without any explanation (for the sake of argument I will use what they did, but it is weird to have the unemployment rate from 2000 to explain the homicide rate from 2001 to 2003, etc.).

They excluded the murder capitol of the world? Why is that?

The reason for that is quite simple: They draw the conclusion they want first then work back from there to get it. It’s like creation science.

Posted in uncategorized on January 24th, 2007 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |