Quote: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. The 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.

And anyone with access to the internet and a basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel can check for themselves. Here’s how you do it.

First, go to the Wikipedia page on firearm death rates in the United States. If you don’t like referencing Wikipedia, then instead go to this study from the
journal Injury Prevention, which was widely sourced by media on both the left and right after it came out, based on a survey of 4000 respondents. Then go to this table published by the FBI, detailing overall homicide rates, as well as gun homicide rates, by state. Copy and paste the data into Excel, and plot one versus the other on a scatter diagram. Alternately, do the whole thing on the back of a napkin. It’s not hard. Here’s what you get:

This looks less like data and more like someone shot a piece of graph paper with #8 birdshot.

Quote: embellished a little with the plot, coloring the data points to correspond with whether a state is “red,” “blue,” or “swing,” according to the Romney-Obama era in which political demarcations were a little more even and a little more sensical. That should give the reader a vague sense of what the gun laws in each state are like. As you can see, there is not only no correlation whatsoever with gun ownership rate, there’s also no correlation whatsoever with state level politics.

Quote:So let’s briefly recap. Gun Murder Rate is not correlated with firearm ownership rate in the United States, on a state by state basis. Firearm Homicide Rate is not correlated with guns per capita globally. It’s not correlated with guns per capita among peaceful countries, nor among violent countries, nor among European countries. So what in the heck is going on in the media, where we are constantly berated with signaling indicating that “more guns = more murder?”

Quote:One: They’re sneaking suicide in with the data, and then obfuscating that inclusion with rhetoric.

This is the biggest trick I see in the media, and very few people seem to pick up on it. Suicide, numerically speaking, is around twice the problem homicide is, both in overall rate and in rate by gun. Two thirds of gun deaths are suicides in the USA. And suicide rates are correlated with gun ownership rates in the USA, because suicide is much easier, and much more final, when done with a gun. If you’re going to kill yourself anyway, and you happen to have a gun in the house, then you choose that method out of convenience. Beyond that, there’s some correlation between overall suicide and gun ownership, owing to the fact that a failed suicide doesn’t show up as a suicide in the numbers, and suicides with guns rarely fail.

Accidents are a relatively small portion of total gun deaths, but obviously that entire chunk of the numbers happen to people who own guns. Can’t die of a gun accident without a gun.

So when you include both of those factors in your data set, you end up with a positive correlation for this new quantity you’ve brewed up, called “gun deaths.”

Quote:Two: They’re cooking the homicide data.

The most comprehensive example of this is probably this study from the American Journal of Public Health. It’s widely cited, and was very comprehensive in its analytical approach, and was built by people I admire and whom I admit are smarter than me. But to understand how they ended up with their conclusions, and whether those conclusions actually mean what the pundits say they mean, we have to look at what they actually did and what they actually concluded.

First off, they didn’t use actual gun ownership rates. They used fractional suicide-by-gun rates as a proxy for gun ownership. This is apparently a very common technique by gun policy researchers, but the results of that analysis ended up being very different from the ownership data in the Injury Prevention journal in my first graph of the article. The AJPH study had Hawaii at 25.8% gun ownership rate, compared to 45% in IP, and had Mississippi at 76.8% gun ownership rate, compared to 42.8% in IP. Could it be that suicidal people in Hawaii prefer different suicide methods than in Mississippi, and that might impact their proxy? I don’t know, but it would seem to me that the very use of a proxy at all puts the study on a very sketchy foundation.

Quote:Applying the Lesson

So now that you have a more complete toolkit to understand how the media is warping the narrative, let’s take a look at a typical left media hit piece. Vox does a lot of these, and spends a tremendous amount of time on very carefully and very viciously mangling data and graphs to support them, which is a bit of a tragedy because their graphical presentation is beautiful, and I quite enjoy their articles on other topics.

Quote:The main difference here, is they’re leaving off data they don’t want you to see. Guns-per-capita varies widely across these data points. Certainly the USA tops the list, but Switzerland at 24 guns per 100 inhabitants has five times more homicides than New Zealand at around 30 guns per 100 inhabitants. Germany has around 30 guns per 100 inhabitants and they’ve got a gun homicide rate that’s a third of Belgium’s, who only have around 17 guns per 100 inhabitants. So Vox has a nice graph here, but they’re intentionally omitting data that would unravel their case.

Further, they’re excluding data points. The USA is #10 in “Human Development Index” according to the current rankings as of March 2018. Norway and Iceland are ahead of us on the HDI rank, but are missing from the graphic. Curiously, both of these countries have over 30 guns per 100 inhabitants as well.

So let’s pause for a moment, purely because this is pretty fun, and look at that HDI list. Norway (31.3 guns per 100 inhabitants), Switzerland (24.5 guns per 100 inhabitants), Germany (30.3 guns per 100 inhabitants), Iceland (30.3 guns per 100 inhabitants) and Canada (30.8 guns per 100 inhabitants) are all higher than the USA on the list, making it six of the top ten HDI ranked countries at over 24 guns per 100 inhabitants. There are only 15 countries in the world with gun ownership rates this high, and 6 are in the top ten of HDI rank.

Quote:These are the tricks being played. The only way to even engage in this dialog rationally is to understand how the tricks work and keep an eye out for them. Especially when reading Vox, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and by transitive property, MSNBC, CNN, and the majority of the Blue Church sources, who use Everytown and such as blindly trusted sources when they publish their hastily thrown together articles on gun violence in the wake of one of our seemingly semi-annual yet statistically insignificant school shooting incidents.