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« Down with deer! | Main | Lawsuit filed today, challenging bumpstock ban »

Gun ownership and firearm-related homicide rates

Posted by David Hardy · 26 December 2018 12:46 PM

Here's an interesting piece of statistical work on that question, by B. J. Campbell. The first paragraph sums it up:

"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 doesn't make us safer. It doesn't make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn't 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.

4 Comments | Leave a comment

Bruce Arnold | December 27, 2018 11:38 AM | Reply

Thanks for the link to this great article. Sharing as widely as I can. We need good, reliable information.

Anonymous | December 27, 2018 12:55 PM | Reply

Death from traumatic injury, including from gunshot wounds, is highly dependent on medical treatment received, or not received, immediately post-trauma.

Get a cap busted in your ass on MLK Blvd in Bawlmer, and in 10 minutes you're in one of the world's premiere trauma centers. Get shot in Honduras, well, good luck.

So death from gunshots is a poor metric because it is confounded with medical care after wounding.

A better metric is total criminal gunshot attacks, whether a hit was scored or not. That depends only on the criminal element, not the followup care.

Gary Griffiths | December 28, 2018 4:46 PM | Reply

Would appreciate a link to Campbell's article. Only snippet appears on your site.

Alan Smith | January 6, 2019 10:20 PM | Reply

Just because a correlation is buried deep beneath noise, doesn't mean there is no correlation, it just means there is no detectable correlation when using that particular analysis method on a data set with that level of noise. It seems very likely that gun ownership does indeed make us either significantly more safe or less safe, it's just hard to be completely certain which it is. Its also important not to focus exclusively on common street crime, but to take into account those once every several decades events that don't happen very often, but have millions of victims.

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