Armed with Reason
We recently discussed a
YouTube video entitled, “Number One With A Bullet”
How Not To Compare International Homicide Rates
Unsurprisingly, the United States does indeed have a lower homicide
rate than countries in the middle of civil war, run by despots, or
struggling with crippling poverty. Should we really be patting ourselves
on the back though that our homicide rate just
barely beats out Yemen, number 109 on the list, and the
fifth most dangerous
country in the world? Should we be bragging that our country has less
per capita murder than Somalia or Zimbabwe — countries that are
literally run by warlords?
Comparing the U.S. with countries that have
nothing in common only guarantees that whatever the true relationship
between guns and homicide is, we won’t be able to find it.
Indeed, using Whittle’s methodology, you can make almost all of
America’s problems disappear overnight by simply expanding our peer
group. For example, our
infant mortality rate
is the highest among industrialized nations, but if we include all of
the world’s countries in our comparison, including those where children
regularly die from diarrhea and measles within a couple months of being
born,
we rank No. 34!
What A Valid Analysis Reveals
But that’s clearly not the appropriate way to think about public
health problems. Serious academics restrict their analysis to countries
that have attained a certain level of gross national income (GNI). This
is extremely important because it enables researchers to control for
confounding variables that may drive the homicide rate upwards, such as
the presence of ethnic or religious conflict, or widespread poverty. One
way to do this is by using the World Bank’s definition of a high-income
OECD country. Thirty-one
countries meet the criteria of a per capita GNI $12,616.
When academics further refine this list of countries using socio-economic factors they reveal a harrowing picture.
Compared
with other high-income countries, the United States has a homicide rate
6.9 times higher, a difference driven almost exclusively by firearm
homicide rates that are 19.5 times higher. The same is true for firearm
suicide and unintentional firearm death, for which the United States has
rates that are 5.8 and 5.2 times higher, respectively, than other
industrialized countries.
A 2013 study also showed that among the
highest income countries “there was a significant positive correlation
between guns per capita per country and the rate of firearm-related
deaths.”
A recent study in the
American Journal of Medicine also
showed that among the highest income countries, “there was a
significant positive correlation between guns per capita per country and
the rate of firearm-related deaths.” The authors concluded that: “the
current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a
nation safer.”
Research on
female homicide victimization reveals an even more startling picture:
the United States is the sole outlier in female homicide rates among
high-income countries. Even though American females represent only 32
percent of the overall female population among industrialized nations,
the United States accounts for 84 percent of all female firearm
homicides.
