![]() The study gets its murder rate numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, which seems like a trustworthy source. This is really suspicious! Unless guns are exerting some kind of malign pro-murder influence that makes people commit more knife murders, some sort of confounding influence has remained. But suspiciously, it in fact finds that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates even before adjusting for confounders, something that we already found wasn’t true! Furthermore, even after adjusting for confounders it finds in several age categories that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher non-gun homicide rates (eg the rates at which people are murdered by knives or crowbars or whatever) at p less than 0.001. This study does indeed conclude that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates after adjusting for confounders. (does it count as nominative determinism when someone named Azrael goes into homicide research?) They list two such analyses comparing gun ownership versus homicide rates across US states: Miller Azrael & Hemenway (2002), and Miller Azrael & Hemenway (2007). Lopez suggests the ones at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which has done several statistical analyses of gun violence. So let’s look at the more-carefully-controlled studies. This is true, although given that Vox has done this time and time again for months on end and all VerBruggen is doing is correctly pointing out a flaw in their methods, it feels kind of like an isolated demand for rigor. He argues that VerBruggen can’t just do a raw uncontrolled correlation of state gun ownership with state murder rates without adjusting for confounders. And Robert VerBruggen of National Review does the same analysis decomposing gun deaths into suicides and homicides, and like me finds no correlation with homicides. The Washington Examiner makes the same criticism of Vox’s statistics that I do. I am not the first person to notice this. This is why you shouldn’t make a category combining two unlike things. The entire effect Vox highlights in their graph is due to gun suicides, but they are using it to imply conclusions about gun homicides. The relationship between gun ownership and homicide is weak (and appears negative), the relationship between gun ownership and suicide is strong and positive. gun homicides:Īnd here is a graph of guns vs. ![]() ![]() Gun deaths are a combined measure of gun homicides and gun suicides. (this isn’t an isolated incident: Vox does the same thing here and here) …then uses the graph as a lead in to talk about active shooter situations, gun-homicide relationships, and outrage over gun massacres.ĭid you notice that the axis of this graph says “gun deaths”, and that this is a totally different thing from gun murders? No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.” It cites the following chart: The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. Then it goes on to say that “more guns mean more gun deaths, period. And once again on Sunday, President Barack Obama called for measures that make it harder for would-be shooters to buy deadly firearms.” ![]() ![]() From a Vox article on America’s Gun Problem, Explained: “On Wednesday, it happened again: There was a mass shooting - this time, in San Bernardino, California. ![]()
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