Thursday, October 15, 2015

Ryan McMaken: No Correlation Between Gun Ownership, Mass Shootings, & Murder Rates

While I was fact checking my previous article, I checked some correlation coefficients of my own so I didn't have to rely on Volokh's numbers as my only source.
I approached the data a little differently than Volokh did and instead of using a subjective ranking by an organization like the Brady organization, I just looked at the rate of gun ownership in the state. After all, the argument is often that more guns and more gun owners leads to more violence.
So, I looked at the correlation between the gun ownership rate (a percentage on the x axis) and the murder rate (n per 100,000 on the y axis) in each state. The visual result is this:
As you can see, there is no correlation. In fact, if you run the numbers, the correlations coefficient is 0.1, which suggests a negligible correlation, or none at all. The murder data is 2012 data from the Justice Department. The gun ownership rate data is from a 2015 report called "Gun ownership and social gun culture."

 More Here

5 comments:

  1. Gee, it took college professors to write an article on what anyone with half a brain could figure out. murder by government has always followed gun confiscations. I hope they will at least get a back strain when trying to carry off my supply of weapons and ammo. I should say empty brass rather than ammo. Anyone have some 30-30 ammo to donate to a good cause, I only have 65 rounds and my loading system is not set up to use at present. I could put together about 200 rounds if I was set up. I would like to get 500 or 1,000 rounds ready. I have about 400 rounds of 16 gauge to trade.

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  2. Don't know why but the graphic isn't showing for me?

    Here's a stupid idea.

    Of course the van and ammo burned

    Man drives van carrying ammunition over Missouri field fire
    Chicago Tribune-10 hours ago
    www.chicagotribune.com/news/weird/ct-van-ammunition-garbage-fire-20151014-story.html

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  3. Great stuff. Thanks for your efforts on this.

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  4. The problem is that people are caught up arguing about this in the first place. It doesn't have anything to do with the right to keep and bear arms either way. Crime up or down, rates where guns are, who does or doesn't carry them, permitted or not, is all useless and needless fodder designed to do one thing and one thing alone -

    Keep people from having the argument that matters. The Second Amendment is the PRODUCT OF the debate, not a bullet point to be debated.

    The right to keep and bear arms doesn't hinge upon crime statistics or even who is and isn't armed in relation to crimes in any particular area. That right remains no matter what causation or correlation is found or not found.

    Why waste our time and effort arguing about a meaningless set of statistics rather than keep the faith and force the stage to address what really does matter?

    Why take the bait left by the disarmists to argue endlessly about subjective aspects that mean nothing? The disarmists are happy to "lose" such a debate because they "win" in that loss. They won by themselves framing a debate that matters not. They win because they keep the existing gun control all the while the needless argument plays out.

    We won this fight long ago, upon ratification. Let's start acting like it.

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  5. The real fact is nobody is reading the second amendment or the tenth amendment. there are no legal gun laws, shall Not infringe still means shall not infringe. the tenth amendment requires the states to recognize shall not infringe. congress can not infringe and neither can the states.

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