Huffington Post
The Law Center then looked at the rate of gun deaths in each state, tallying homicides, suicides and other accidental shootings from the Centers for Disease Control's 2013 Fatal Injury Report, the latest year for which data is available. The report found that the gun death rate tends to get higher as firearms laws get weaker. In fact, the average gun death rate in states with failing grades was more than twice as high as it was in those with A grades.
I am reminded of Judge Judy and the title of her book, "Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining".
ReplyDeleteorlin sellers
The author of this article must be hoping for a discount in his Everytown membership. This is just an editorial pretending to be real news considering that there appears to be nobody looking at any contradicting facts.
ReplyDeleteNationwide, homicide and unintentional gun deaths have been dropping steadily while suicides have been increasing. One has but to visit the CDC's WISQARS page which allows you to view data gun gun deaths to see that. On the same site, you can also see some glaring exceptions to the articles assertions in regards to gun homicides.
I'd invite everyone to go there and play with their page because you can do a lot with it in regards to viewing data.
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/fatal_injury_reports.html
And of course, there's the FBI crime reports which have just been updated with the report for 2014 which again shows drops in gun homicides and violent crime overall. And again, shows violent crime and homicide rates of Texas, a state which got an "F" and California, which got an "A-" to be pretty much the same.
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-5
Is it getting harder for you to deny that the correlation isn't there when you substitute "gun deaths" for murder or violent crime?
ReplyDeleteHave you ever wondered why they always use "gun deaths"? Years ago you said you would avoid them going forward- but you haven't. That's because you'd be posting pro-gun commentaries if you stuck to meaningful measures, right?
By the way, I don't deny that there is a correlation between gun laws and "gun deaths". It is a pointless correlation, but I don't deny it's existence (like you, Mike, deny the lack of correlation with murder and violent crime). However, I do deny the effect claim that this author is making in the title. Gun laws have not shown any effect on "gun deaths"- as in passing laws hasn't lowered them, even when we look at the silly metric of "gun deaths" instead of something meaningful. The actual effect happens the other way. The effect of having low gun ownership (which also means low suicide incidents using guns) is that your state is going to have increasing gun laws. That is a clear cause and effect.
ReplyDeleteAgain, where there is a lack of gun deaths due to gun control laws, there is NOT a corresponding increase in deaths by other means. Just think about all the double and multiple homicides and mass shootings that could rarely be committed with knives or other weapons.
DeleteRarely? Really Mike.
DeleteIf we want to think about whether or not homicides are committed then we could just look at murder rate instead of "gun deaths" to find out. And of course you know what happens when we do that. That's why you guys always show these "gun death" studies instead.
DeleteEven still, the variation in "gun deaths" is not a result of gun control. It is a result of low gun ownership (which means fewer gun suicides), and low gun ownership causes more gun control.
Key detail we find here also is that the states with the "better" gun laws also tend to be those with higher population and more urban centers. The convenience of using the gun death rate is that 900 deaths in a population of 1million is a lower rate than 10 deaths in a population of 100000. Not to mention that most of the deaths are concentrated in the urban centers and use the entire states population to dilute the fact.A single death in a small population area will affect the rate more than several deaths in a high population
ReplyDeleteUseless to argue statistics when the NRA has been successful in stopping the gathering of gun statistics.
ReplyDelete"Useless to argue statistics when the NRA has been successful in stopping the gathering of gun statistics."
DeleteNonsense Anon, the legislation restricting funds for studies that advocate or promote gun control only applied to the CDC.
The Department of Justice collects quite a bit of data regarding gun crimes along with all of the others. In fact, the CDC actually collects a lot of statistics on gun violence too. I've used them many times here.
This is a classic case of taking a few numbers that aren't really meaningful and trying to incorporate them into some type of logical anti-gun editorial. Most readers can see through the convoluted logic in these numbers and figure out that there is a lot more to the gun control debate than what is presented here.
ReplyDeleteYou're the one spewing convoluted nonsense. Those numbers are perfectly meaningful - you just don't like what they say.
DeleteMike, perhaps you haven't seen other credible studies, too. Here's one from the Washington Times from July 2015: http://bit.ly/1ZET7FC and another from Truth in Media http://bit.ly/1JaNXd7. My point is not to convince you, but to say that are stats on both sides of this argument. You can't point to one study and call it gospel.
DeleteIn honesty, I don't know if either side is "right" when it comes to stats. We're fed studies and stats all the time, that push whatever agenda the folks presenting it want to push. I was a sociology major in college and the first thing we were taught about statistics is that you can skew them in any direction you want to in order to make your point. Just sayin.'