True
There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesnt make us safer. It doesnt make us less safe. The correlation simply isnt there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the not-there-ness of it alone should be a huge news story.
March 21st, 2018 at 4:56 pm
Is that so? John Lott showed a clear inverse correlation, expressed so memorably in the title of his book: More guns, less crime.
March 21st, 2018 at 4:59 pm
There is no clear correlation between reality and what leftists claim reality is.
March 21st, 2018 at 5:20 pm
What should be in the news is that guns are tools. Not autonomous killing machines. Just tools.
March 21st, 2018 at 5:58 pm
Paul,
My .02 on a few things. First off, it’s a Right and the default is liberty. We are under no legal nor moral obligation to show a positive benefit, it is sufficient there be no overwhelmingly negative impact. In the case of debating Rights with anti’s you win by making the most limited yet sufficient, argument against negative outcomes you can unquestionably prove.
Further, the burden of proof is on those making the affirmative claim. If the anti’s make the claim there _is_ correlation, but can’t produce evidence supporting it, we win. If they do produce some evidence, we show this kind off thing in response and they have to account for it. Again, we win. There is no need for us to voluntarily take the burden of proof by making affirmative claims of positive effect in response.
Finally, on a tactical level, unfortunately, citing Lott to an actual anti-gun activist will inevitably take the argument from the facts to Lott’s supposed character and professional flaws. There’s no reason to intentionally give your opponent a way to distract and divert from their burden of proof and lack of good evidence when you can win without it.
So, IMO and experience, in general make no affirmative positive claims about “the good guns do,” and, unless absolutely necessary, do not reference Lott. His research is solid, valid, and useful, and can be used to help inform undecided folks in the middle who are unaware of the claimed “controversies,” but it comes with unnecessary baggage for a clean win on the facts against a reasonably informed opponent.
March 21st, 2018 at 11:25 pm
Well, that’s not entirely true.
All correlations point to “negative”, which is, in fact, a correlation.
March 22nd, 2018 at 11:01 am
Joe Huffman has made this point in a slightly different way. He has confounded Brady board member Joan Peterson (an easy thing to do) and many others by asking, “If all gun violence ceased, but overall violent crime rates increased, would that be a good thing?” He gets no response, or incoherent ones, from anti-gunners.
In a parallel manner, I make the point that homicide rates by gunshot are not a good metric for any argument about guns. Death rates from gunshot wounds depend on quite a few important factors, including things like distance from a trauma center, EMT response times, number of times shot, intention of the shooter, shot placement, caliber used, and so on. Only some of these are firearm dependent; some are quite separate from the availability of firearms ina given locale.
I think the only correct metric to use in discussing criminal violence where firearms are used is – oddly enough – total criminal violence where firearms are used. The outcomes of such violence are so varied and affected by so many other factors beyond the tool used – a gun, a knife, a brick, hands – that only the acts themselves are a proper metric for analysis of criminal violence with guns or any other tool.
When one does analyze that, the causes of the violence become the thing analyzed, not the tool used, and “common sense” solutions actually can be imagined, proposed, implemented, and analyzed for their success or failure.
Shorter version: Look at the criminal violence, not the deaths, to analyze criminal violence.
March 22nd, 2018 at 2:20 pm
One he missed (or at least didn’t mention) – actually 2. First, self-defense and justified police shootings ARE homicides, but they aren’t murders. Most of these stat twisting articles use crime reporting data, which lists a self-defense shooting (home invader shot by homeowner, say) without taking into account that the homeowner ends up not being charged with a crime, or being acquitted. Second, murderers are trying to murder. Gangs and drug runners are trying to eliminate witnesses (and thus murder witnesses). In self-defense uses, we don’t care if they perp dies, only that he stops or goes away.
And that leads to the cost/benefit side. Granted, it’s a right, and can (at least should) only be infringed in cases of gross negative costs of a given policy, but these same groups that twist the stats tend to argue “if it saves one life…” and totally ignore the ratio of violent crime with a gun vs violent crime STOPPED because of a gun. Which is why they hate John Lott so bad – he keeps pointing out the 30:1 ratio in favor of self defense.
March 22nd, 2018 at 5:57 pm
One factor that is ignored in most/all of these studies is that crime and violence statistics in nations around the world often have little basis in reality. None of these countries gather or label this sort of data in a consistent fashion.
A LOT of it is deliberately hidden to avoid discouraging travelers/tourists from visiting their nation, as that is an important source of income for many. The other factor is they don’t want the embarrassment of bad numbers. Don’t trust public numbers, especially Britain’s.
March 26th, 2018 at 6:40 pm
Another item that I recently learned was that in many jurisdictions is that if two or more participate in a crime that one could reasonably conclude that someone might die, say, a home invasion, and the innocent party defends themselves and kills a bad guy then the other bad guys can be charged with murder. Hence, a legitimate self-defense shooting gets put on the books as a “gun murder”.
I can see it being a valid view for prosecution of criminals but terrible for the statistics of understanding reality.