Saturday, October 4, 2014

States with Most Gun Owners Have More ‘Non-Stranger’ Homicides

Examining data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports for all 50 states from 1981 to 2010, the researchers confirmed a 2013 study, which found total homicide rates were higher in states with the highest percentage of gun owners. But the latest finding published in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health also found no difference among states in the incidence of murders committed by those who didn’t know their victims.
What did increase with gun ownership? The incidence in murders committed by loved ones, friends, and acquaintances, such as rival gang members.
“Not only do guns not protect people from having strangers kill them but having those guns around puts them at greater risk for being killed in a situation with someone that they do know,” said study co-author Dr. Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at the BU School of Public Health.
The new study found that, for each one-percentage point increase in state-level gun ownership, the state’s non-stranger homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent, with firearm homicides increasing by 1.4 percent.
In Wyoming where nearly 74 percent of households own guns, 12 percent of gun homicides were committed by strangers — and 88 percent were committed by those who knew each other. In Hawaii, where just 13 percent of homes have a gun, 21 percent of gun murders were committed by strangers.

11 comments:

  1. The most dangerous ammosexual gunsuck is the one who pours coffee for you in the morning.

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  2. "and acquaintances, such as rival gang members."

    FBI statistics show homicides be these "acquaintances make up over half of the total. I wonder if the same trend would be present with acquaintances removed.
    Apparently the FBI also seems to class same sex intimate relations under this classification also. That likely needs to be brought up to the 21st century.

    http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_10_murder_circumstances_by_relationship_2012.xls

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  3. This is the opposite of what your gun loons have been saying all along. Gee, big surprise.

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  4. Looks like the study failed to include falsification tests for instrumental variables, and the autoregressive integrated moving average models didn't account for heteroskedasticity or significance in the partial autocorrelation function. Good effort for a college freshman.

    LawProfessor

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  5. Somebody help me out here. Is killing someone you know in self-defense somehow less legitimate than killing an assailant whom you've never met?

    If so, why the hell???

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    Replies
    1. Nice attempt at diversion. You never disappoint. The report shows - once again - that guns do more harm than good.

      “Not only do guns not protect people from having strangers kill them but having those guns around puts them at greater risk for being killed in a situation with someone that they do know,”

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    2. Well, since I don't know or associate with any homicidal people, there's nothing in this "study" to worry me.

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    3. I hate to break it to you Kurt, but there's a big world out there, I mean aside from you and your own personal household. In that big world, guns do more harm than good, as the report says.

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    4. Without conceding for a second the very dubious conclusion presented by this junk "science" propaganda piece, I will point out that the "big world out there" isn't my responsibility. In the part over which I have any control--and any responsibility--guns are doing only good.

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    5. The same tactic SS uses. If it's not something he's doing, it's not happening, or at least it's not a problem. I wish the only gun loons in the country we had to worry about are the handful that comment here.

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  6. I hope to have a chance to delve into this deeper later, but at first glance something is fishy. The first paragraph from the Boston Globe says they confirmed a 2013 study that total homicides were higher in states with more guns. Obviously I’ve been over that one over and over. But they curiously used the word “also” when talking about this “latest finding” where it found no difference in murders “committed by those who didn’t know their victims”. Then they led the next paragraph with “what did increase with gun ownership?” It seems like they made a typo in saying total homicides were found to relate to gun ownership, when they meant to say “weren’t”.

    Sure enough, when you click on that study, we see that the objectives, methods, results, and conclusions made no mention of total homicides, but is another “gun death” study- or rather partial gun death because they are not including suicides in this one:

    CONCLUSIONS: We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.

    Invariably, when your side does some “study” using comprehensive data, the only correlation they can come up with is linking guns to gun use, and not to violence or murder.

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