Friday, January 9, 2015

Number of Shootings is Increasing

Bureau of Justice Statistics

Since 2008 the number of non-fatal incidents of gun violence has been increasing. Interestingly, that perfectly coincides with the extremely high gun sales that followed Obama's election.

So, as we pointed out in another post recently, the murder rate is basically static (or declining slightly) while the number of shootings is increasing.

More guns means more crime.  What a surprise.

11 comments:

  1. A couple things to point out here: First of all, these data are from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and is based on a survey and not hard data. Now where have we heard of the NCVS before? Oh, yeah, I remember, this is the survey that you called “bullshit” because they came up with 108,000 DGUs a year, 200 times more than what you ‘came up with’. But now you are going to call it gospel?

    Second, they are showing a “nonfatal firearm victimization rate” of 1.5 starting in 2008, then going to 1.6, 1.6, then 1.8 in 2011. It’s basically flat with a slight uptick in 2011, and the data do not include 2012-2014 yet which also showed steady decreases in violent crime and murder. So it’s a little early to say there is an upward trend in shootings, while murders, violent crime, and assaults are going down. Let’s see what the next three years shows.

    Third, shooting victims from DGUs are not excluded or separated from the results. We don’t know this from the data, but if there more “shooting victims” who were shot during the commission of a crime by good people defending themselves, it could very well show up as an increase in shootings, but a decrease in violent crime and murder (because the ‘good guys with guns’ are only interested in stopping the crime, not killing their attacker). This is pretty much your worst nightmare.

    Finally, we have this:

    MikeB: “More guns means more crime.”

    No, no. If you say “crime is up” that means something a lot more. Crimes are recordable incidents by the FBI, and they are down. Violent crimes (a subset of all crimes) are also verifiably down. You cannot make leaps like this based on a survey of gun shots only.

    In conclusion, I’ll accept a slight bump in shootings from 2008-2011, possibly attributed to the carry movement. I’ll await further data for 2012 to 2014 to see if there really is a trend going on, and you will in turn accept that you were off by a factor of 200 in your DGU estimates and acknowledge that there are at least 100K DGUs a year. Or we can just throw this whole thing out and call the NCVS “bullshit” like you previously concluded. Fair enough?

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    1. "Oh, yeah, I remember, this is the survey that you called “bullshit” because they came up with 108,000 DGUs a year, 200 times more than what you ‘came up with’. But now you are going to call it gospel?"

      TS, it sounds like you spent some quality time looking this over. Perhaps you can answer this for me. Did you happen to see in the report what qualifies as a "firearm victimization"? One thing that stuck out for me was that in Table 9 of the report, it showed that 77% of the firearm violence resulted in NO injury.
      Might have an affect on the severity of the problem, and maybe even if its going in the direction claimed.

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    2. "I’ll accept a slight bump in shootings from 2008-2011, possibly attributed to the carry movement."

      You could call it a "slight bump," I'd call it a bit more significant than that. Did you notice that the rate is based on 1,000 rather than the 100,000 used in the murder chart? That's like putting a magnifying glass on the result - more than a slight bump.

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    3. Mike: "Did you notice that the rate is based on 1,000 rather than the 100,000 used in the murder chart?"

      It's 20% either way.

      1.8/1.5 = 1.2 (20% increase)
      180/150 = 1.2 (20% increase)

      I also forgot to mention this in my previous post, but “non-fatal firearm victimization” is a broader category than shootings. If it were shootings, this would be showing that less than 2% of shooting victims die. So the title of you post is wrong.

      Now, are you conceding that you were way off on your DGU estimates based on the NCVS data?

      Sarge: " Did you happen to see in the report what qualifies as a "firearm victimization"?"

      It's up to the interviewee, since it's a phone survey. It would be interesting to see the actual questions, but that's not included in this document. From page 14:

      The NCVS is an annual data collection conducted by the U.S.
      Census Bureau for BJS. The NCVS is a self-report survey
      in which interviewed persons are asked about the number
      and characteristics of victimizations experienced during
      the prior 6 months. The NCVS collects information on
      nonfatal personal crimes (rape or sexual assault, robbery,
      aggravated assault, simple assault, and personal larceny) and
      household property crimes (burglary, motor vehicle theft,
      and other theft) both reported and not reported to police.

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    4. First of all, these data are from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and is based on a survey and not hard data. Now where have we heard of the NCVS before? Oh, yeah, I remember, this is the survey that you called “bullshit” because they came up with 108,000 DGUs a year, 200 times more than what you ‘came up with’. But now you are going to call it gospel?

      And yet another bullseye, TS.

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    5. For one thing, I didn't call anything gospel. For another, although I certainly prefer this DGU estimate to some of the others, I call it bullshit because it includes incidents of shooting at dogs and snakes as well as who-knows-how-many false DGUs, you know those who drew their guns or actually fired them unnecessarily.

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    6. " I call it bullshit because it includes incidents of shooting at dogs and snakes as well as who-knows-how-many false DGUs, you know those who drew their guns or actually fired them unnecessarily."

      That sounds much like the number of gun violence events where there was no injury. So they could be considered a false gun violence victimization, much like what you refer to as a false DGU.

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    7. MikeB: “For one thing, I didn't call anything gospel.”

      You titled the post “Number of Shootings is Increasing”. You didn’t put a question mark at the end, or say “estimated shootings”, or lead it with “according to one survey…”

      MikeB: “I call it bullshit because it includes incidents of shooting at dogs and snakes as well as who-knows-how-many false DGUs, you know those who drew their guns or actually fired them unnecessarily.”

      And you say 99.5% of these cases are “shooting at snakes” and such? Look Mike, the point is you’ve already dismissed this survey, so now you can’t rely on this same survey to conclude that “shooting are up”- especially when it doesn’t even have any data on just shootings.

      But let me help you consider the plausibility of a 100K/year DGU estimate:

      There are 1.6 million burglary incidents in the most recent recorded year (according to the NCVS there are 3.4 million per year, but we’ll just stick with the reported incidents to help you out). 28% of burglaries are hot burglaries (someone is home) making for 450,000 of them. According to the latest poll on gun ownership that you’ve shown here, 41% of households have a gun, so that’s 184,000 opportunities for DGUs for home burglaries alone. Further still, 48% of respondents answered that they own a gun for the primary purpose of self-defense, so minimally, that’s 88,000 opportunities where someone has a guns, keeps it available for self-defense (so not a hunting rifle unloaded and locked in a safe in the basement), where someone has broken into their home while they are there. And taking it yet another level further, 7% of home invasions involve violence to a family member, making for 22,000 incidents a year where someone is receiving violence from a home invader (or violence to a loved one) while they have a gun at home, which they specifically keep for self-defense. Using your common sense reasoning of only 500 DGUs per year, you conclude that 98% of these people don’t even try to stop it.

      Now, I am not saying every one of these incidents would result in a legitimate DGU (there are many reasons why it wouldn’t), but they are prime opportunities, and this is just looking at one aspect where a DGU could happen- home invasions. There are still major categories like domestic violence, attacks to someone at home without a burglary, and violence that happens to CCW/car carry people outside their home. So you can see that as a rough order of magnitude, DGU counts in the six digits is quite realistic, and your three or four digit estimates are a gross under exaggeration.

      And just in case you need a refresher on my stance, using DGU counts as a metric to call for more gun-control is incredibly unjust. If the amount of violence stopped by guns is disproportionally small to the amount of violence happening to people where they’d be justified in using a gun in defense, then we’d have to ask ourselves if gun control is disarming too many good people- not use it as a reason to further disarm people.

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    8. TS, that was the best explanation I've seen from you. I guess you've finally dumbed it down enough for me to follow. Thanks. I may have to revise my 500 estimate, but we'd still be talking about only a few thousand.

      It's good that you don't depend on the DGU count, because you'd really have a loser there. Half a million guns stolen each year plus half a million gun crimes and of course we've got the relatively small but still important number of so-called accidents. If I were you I wouldn't want to get into a comparing match either. Guns do more harm than good, period.

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    9. I don't play that "guns do more harm than good" game with you because it is an incredibly poor metric. Gun control laws affect how much good they can do. They don't affect the bad side. I've showed you this countless times using hard data. Guns do a lot more harm than good in the UK- because they do almost no good over there. So what does that mean? Even more gun control for them?

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  2. More guns IN BAD GUYS hands means more gun crimes.
    Guns don't make bad guys out of good guys. There would be 50 million in jail if all it took was a gun to turn a good guy in to a bad guy. If gun laws are getting in to bad guys hands to much, then we obviously have lax gun laws.

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