The Blog of Andrew Syrios
  • Home
  • About
  • Writings and Interviews
  • Contact

The Blog of ANDREW sYRIOs

Gun Ownership's Utter Lack of Correlation with Murder Rates

3/26/2018

Comments

 
Contrary to popular wisdom, gun ownership actually does not correlate with just about anything. And to show that, I highly recommend checking out BJ Campell's recent piece on Medium: 

Here's the best-fit R^2 regression for the various states' in the United States:
Picture
A very slight negative best-fit correlation between gun ownership and gun murders with an R^2 value of 0.0031, which is in other words, noise. There is no statistical correlation between the two.

And here goes for every nation on Earth:
Picture
Again, the best-fit correlation is slightly negative but also worthless because the R^2 value is only 0.0107.

​Campbell then runs the same analysis for low-crime, high-crime and European countries and again, finds absolutely no worthwhile correlations. 

He then shows that many liberal sites have been cooking the books by including gun suicides, gun accidents and conveniently not including several countries. For example, while the United States has over 100 guns per 100 people, Germany, Switzerland and Canada all have around 25 to 35. Sweden, Finland and Norway, those Nordic countries love so much, do as well. And while Campbell doesn't go into this, what would the gun ownership rates in the United States be if we didn't include those rural areas where good ole boys own 20+ guns apiece? By the way, there are very, very few murders in rural areas.

He also doesn't note the statistical slight of hand in talking about "gun murders." The basic economic principal of substitution would imply that if someone wants to murder someone else, but can't get a gun, they're probably going to murder said person with a knife or poison or baseball bat or car or whatever. Gun murders are a red herring. The murder rate itself is what to look at.

That being said, this data still doesn't support that hardcore gun nuts that tell us "an armed society is a polite society. Guns don't seem to bring down crime rates, they're just, at least mostly, fairly irrelevant to  it. Although the gun nuts do seem to be right that gun bans generally increase murder rates, but that's another story.
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

    Andrew Syrios

    "Every day is a new life to the wise man."

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    November 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017

    Picture
    Business Websites

    Stewardship Properties
    333 Rent
    Blog Roll

    The Real Estate Brothers
    The Good Stewards


    Bigger Pockets
    REI Club
    Meet Kevin
    Tim Ferris
    Joe Rogan
    Adam Carolla
    MAREI
    1500 Days
    Worcester Investments
    Just Ask Ben Why
    Entrepreneur
    Inc.
    KC Source Link
    The Righteous Mind
    Star Slate Codex
    Mises Institute
    Tom Woods
    Michael Tracey

    Consulting by RPM
    The Scott Horton Show
    Swift Economics
    The Critical Drinker
    Red Letter Media

    Categories

    All

    View my profile on LinkedIn
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
  • Writings and Interviews
  • Contact