Gun Ownership's Utter Lack of Correlation with Murder Rates

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:

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:

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.