Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David . Firearm availability and homicide: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal . 2004; 9:417-40.
2. Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide.
We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew . Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma . 2000; 49:985-88.
3. Across states, more guns = more homicide
Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period (1988-1997).
After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David . Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states, 1988-1997. American Journal of Public Health . 2002: 92:1988-1993.
4. Across states, more guns = more homicide (2)
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003 . Social Science and Medicine . 2007; 64:656-64.http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
Look at the dates of all the "Literature Reviews"!!!!!! Most of them are well over 10 years old! Such bullshit!
Contrast that to the UK:
Nice try.
Debunked:
According to a recent National Journal analysis of data from 2013, "the states that impose the most restrictions on gun users also have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths, while states with fewer regulations typically have a much higher death rate from guns." Bearing in mind that correlation does not prove causation, what should we make of this conclusion?
Notably, "gun-related deaths" include not only homicides but suicides, accidents, and "legal intervention involving firearms." In fact, suicides account for three-fifths of gun-related deaths in the United States, twice as many as homicides do. That breakdown is obviously relevant to the question of whether particular laws can be credited with reducing gun-related deaths. Making it harder to buy a handgun might affect suicides, for instance, while making it harder to carry a handgun in public or easier to beat homicide charges with a self-defense claim probably would not.
Focusing on homicides can have a dramatic impact on a state's rank. Wyoming, for instance, has a high suicide rate but a low homicide rate . The District of Columbia, by contrast, has a low suicide rate but a high homicide rate .
According to National Journal , the six states with the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in 2013, ranging from 2.6 to 5.7 per 100,000, were Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, which do indeed have relatively strict gun policies as measured by requirements for buying and carrying handguns. National Journal also considered whether states impose a duty to retreat on people attacked in public places, which all six of these states do.
Once you get past those six states, the hypothesis that low gun death rates go hand in hand with strict gun control starts to break down. New Hampshire, with a gun death rate just a little higher than New Jersey's, has permissive gun policies. Likewise Minnesota, Washington, Vermont, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, all of which have gun death rates of 10 or less per 100,000. New Hampshire and Minnesota have lower rates than California, Illinois, the District of Columbia, and Maryland, all of which have substantially stricter gun rules.
At the other end of the list, Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Wyoming have both permissive gun policies and high gun death rates, ranging from around 17 to nearly 20 per 100,000. But of these six states, only Louisiana has a very high gun murder rate (based on 2010 data). The rate in Mississippi is fairly high but still lower than in D.C. or Maryland, which have much stricter gun laws. Alaska, Wyoming, Alabama, and Arkansas have lower gun murder rates than California, which has more gun restrictions.
Although its overall analysis looks at all gun-related deaths, National Journal (after some prodding, judging from the note in italics) focuses on gun homicides in charts that compare states based on three policies: whether they impose a duty to retreat, whether they require background checks for all gun sales, and whether they issue carry permits to anyone who meets a short list of objective criteria. Excluding suicides makes sense for at least two of those comparisons, since you would not expect the rules for self-defense or for carrying guns in public to affect suicide rates. Background checks conceivably could, since among other things they are supposed to prevent gun purchases by people who were forcibly subjected to psychiatric treatment because they were deemed a threat to themselves.
According to the first chart, the average rate of gun-related homicides in states with "some form of 'stand your ground' law" in 2013 was 4.23 per 100,000, compared to 3.08 in the other states. (Oddly, Arkansas is included in the former category, although its "stand your ground" law was not enacted until this year.) States that did not require background checks for private sales also had a higher average gun homicide rate: 4.02 per 100,000, compared to 3.41 for the other states. But the average rates were the same (3.78 per 100,000) regardless of whether states had discretionary or "must issue" carry permit policies, which is consistent with the observation that permit holders rarely commit violent crimes.
Some states were excluded from these analyses, and the reason is revealing. The fine print at the bottom of the charts says "Alaska, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming had too few homicides in 2013 to calculate a reliable rate" (emphasis added). These are all states with permissive gun laws, and three of them are among the seven states with the highest overall gun death rates, which highlights the importance of distinguishing between suicides and homicides. Had National Journal 's main analysis excluded suicides, some of the states with few gun controls, including Alaska and Wyoming, would have looked much safer.
"The states with the most gun laws see the fewest gun-related deaths," say the headline and subhead over the National Journal post, "but there's still little appetite to talk about more restrictions." The implication is that the data prove a cause-and-effect relationship. But the question of whether stricter gun control policies cause lower gun death rates cannot be addressed by this sort of static analysis. Gun laws obviously are not the only way in which Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Wyoming differ from Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Furthermore, while the latter states have both low suicide and low homicide rates, the former states (with the notable exception of Louisiana) are distinguished mainly by high suicide rates.
To get a clearer idea of what's going on, you would at least want to see whether the adoption of certain gun controls is associated with reductions in gun death rates, as compared to pre-existing trends in the states that adopt them and ongoing trends in the rest of the country. In any case, it clearly is not true that permissive gun laws are inevitably accompanied by higher gun death rates, especially if you focus on homicides, which is the main threat cited by proponents of new gun controls.
More Debunking:
Obama and anti-gun liberals everywhere are citing a National Journal article that features a chart that purports to show that states with more gun laws have less “gun deaths”. Obama said “ States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens [to obtain guns] and criminals will still get their guns, is not borne out by the evidence.” There’s a problem with this claim though: it’s completely wrong.
The chart in National Journal ranks each state by their rate of “gun-related deaths” and a check list in column format showing whether each state has gun-restricting laws like waiting periods, state-level universal background checks, or requiring a gun permit to purchase a gun, and also laws that expand gun accessibility and use, like concealed-carry, or ‘right to carry’ laws and stand-your-ground laws. The chart’s is offered as the proof of the article’s title: The States With The Most Gun Laws See The Fewest Gun-Related Deaths .
Fact Checking
Liberals everywhere have taken this article and it’s chart and run off with it in glee: if only teabilly, ammosexual, intellectual midgets would just stop clinging to their guns and religion and let the benevolent benefactors on the Left implement some “common-sense gun controls”, then we’d see less mass murders like the Roseburg, OR shooting at Umpqua Community College. This was President Obama’s point in his comments about the shooting and the assertion that states with more gun laws are somehow safer. Obama’s comments have been criticized by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, who gave Obama “Two Pinocchios” which means “ Significant omissions and/or exaggerations ”. The Washington Post cited academic studies (including by authors from Harvard and Boston University) that “have shown little connection between suicides and access to guns,” and “A 2004 report published by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.” The Post recalculated the chart taking out suicides and found no correlation between gun laws and gun deaths: some highly restrictive gun law states had high gun deaths, and some states with comparatively looser gun laws had fewer gun deaths. They note there is a mix and academics disagree on whether there is an overall trend.
Homicides or just gun homicides?
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh (author at the Volokh Conspiracy) wrote a response in the Washington Post titled “ Zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws ”, where he writes “it turns out that there is essentially zero correlation between [homicide] numbers and state gun laws.” Professor Volokh’s approach is more honest when talking about crime reduction as he focuses on homicide rates overall, not just homicides committed with a gun. There are two common tactics by the anti-gun rights Left: one is to conflate gun homicides with other non-criminal gun deaths and refer to it as “ gun-related ” or simply “ gun deaths ” while they are purportedly advocating reducing crime . The other is to ignore other methods of homicides and focus solely on homicides committed by a gun, as if that somehow not crime, or that it is uniquely worthy of your moral outrage, where murder by any other means is somehow not. Murder doesn’t exist in a vacuum however, and focusing on one instrument by which it is carried out is morally bankrupt and intellectually inane.
Lawful interventions disingenuously included
There is additional criticism that both the Washington Post Fact Check and professor Volokh did not address. Neither tackles the fact that the National Journal chart includes lawful intervention in the context of criminal activity. The key here is that Obama and others on the anti-gun rights Left argue and/or imply that more restrictive gun laws will reduce criminal gun activity (“… criminals will still get their guns, is not borne out by the evidence.” ).
Lawful intervention may be either by law enforcement or by law-abiding citizens. Neither is criminal activity. Do anti-gun rights activists want the police to not intervene to stop crime? Including lawful interventions as part of nefarious-sounding “gun deaths” is the height of duplicity. No crime is occurring when lawful intervention results in the death of (a criminal) by use of a gun.
Gun control doesn’t address suicide deaths
The much larger problem is the suicide numbers, which are two-thirds of “gun deaths”. The FBI Uniform Crime Reports show 8,124 firearms homicides, 444 justifiable homicides by law enforcement and 277 justifiable homicides by civilian in 2014. The CDC reports 505 accidental gun deaths and 21,175 gun suicides out of approximately 41,149 total annual suicides (page 22, Table 10, full PDF linked below) in 2013. There is some debate about access to guns resulting in successful suicide attempt versus other means, but unless anti-gun rights activists are taking the position that all guns should be outlawed and confiscated and destroyed, then this is a disingenuous point to quibble over. To date, very few gun control advocates are brazen enough to suggest repealing the Second Amendment and confiscating all firearms.
There are several problems with including suicide gun deaths in the total when pushing for gun control policy like universal background checks, magazine capacity restrictions, banning certain types of firearms, so-called “smart” gun technology, micro-stamping bullet casings, increasing waiting periods, or any of the other policies advocated to-date by gun control activists.
First, gun control advocates don’t actually at all about suicides. Anti-gun rights activists have been documented admitting that suicides are not their problem, nor are they interested in solving the issue of suicides. Falsely conflating suicides with gun homicides just a convenient way to make it appear that gun crime is three times as bad as it actually is. Which begs the question: if the anti-gun rights Left believed the facts support their case, then why do they feel compelled in exaggerate the facts and conflate data to make their case?
Second, the empirical data for suicide rates overall in the U.S. compared to gun sales rates do not logically support the idea that less guns results in less suicide. Gun sales have skyrocketed over recent years (with estimates ranging from 310 to 350 million ), while suicide rates in the U.S. have plummeted . We have more guns and less suicide, which is the exact opposite correlation from the false narrative promoted by gun control advocates like Obama. Finally, on an international level, many nations with very strict gun control have much higher suicide rates than the U.S. does, which cannot be attributed to more guns in those nations. Japan, for instance, which virtually no gun ownership and no gun homicides but almost double the U.S. suicide rate. Australia, which is frequently referred to as a shining example of gun control in a developed nation, has higher suicide per capita than the U.S. does (13.8 per 100k vs 10.1 per 100k in the U.S.). The data does not support the claim that fewer guns results in less suicide. A Harvard-published study of 36 developed nations by professors Kates and Mauser found there is no link between gun availability and suicide rates.
Third, there is no gun control policy proposal that would logically reduce suicides. Magazine capacity restrictions? How many bullets over 1 does it take to suicide? How could a person even attempt to commit suicide by firing a weapon even 10 times, which is the current policy being advocated, much less a full 30 times? How would universal background checks solve suicide? What stops a person from passing the check, maybe years prior to attempting suicide, and then committing suicide later? The problem of waiting periods also suffers from the same issue: how does a five or 10 day waiting period stop a suicide attempt after they’ve passed the waiting period and now have possession of the gun? How would micro-stamping, which simply marks the bullet casing with a unique mark, prevent suicide? How would banning certain types of guns prevent suicide? Suicide has been successful even with .22LR, which is about the smallest, least-powerful bullet caliber available. The fact that anti-gun rights activists do not have a single proposal that would actually address suicide demonstrates that this is not an issue that genuinely concerns them.
Self-defense ignored
Further, what is not considered in the anti-gun rights equation is the number of instances where guns are lawfully used for self-defense. According to the CDC , lawful self-defense with a gun occurs a minimum of 500,000 times annually, deters crime and reduces injury to potential victims when they use a gun for their own defense. Other academic criminologists have put the number of defensive gun uses much higher. Other studies found the number of instances to be 1.5 million annually (and higher). Whatever the accurate number is, anti-gun rights activists have completely ignored the lives saved with a gun, while fraudulently including gun suicides as justification for how bad “crime” is.
There is no clear link between gun control restrictions and reducing suicides, in fact, the empirical evidence shows quite the opposite correlation. Even if there were a clear link, there is no gun control policy being pushed that could be logically expected to reduce suicides. What is being promoted by the anti-gun rights Left is misinformation, cherry-picked partial information, and half-truths to outright falsehoods.
Criminal violence and mass murder are problems that we ought to work towards reducing. In point of fact, child homicides in schools , the national homicide rate overall, and violent crime nationally have dropped by half since the early 1990’s. It’s a good start. More could be done, but not by promoting falsehoods and misinformation. We ought to increase lawful gun carry, which is the CDC reports deters crime and is supported by law enforcement, and we should end completely ineffective “gun free” zones. We ought to address the underlying causes of violence, including drug abuse, the drug trade, gangs, poverty (especially urban poverty), and other factors that lead to increased crime per capita in Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA’s). Exploiting tragedies to push false narratives doesn’t genuinely help anyone.
Do I need to go on? I got plenty more to show this is pure bullshit.
First, gun control advocates don’t actually at all about suicides. Anti-gun rights activists have been documented admitting that suicides are not their problem, nor are they interested in solving the issue of suicides. Falsely conflating suicides with gun homicides just a convenient way to make it appear that gun crime is three times as bad as it actually is. Which begs the question: if the anti-gun rights Left believed the facts support their case, then why do they feel compelled in exaggerate the facts and conflate data to make their case?
What a pile of crap this is. Suicide by gun is a major issue in this country. People who try to kill themselves with a method other than a gun usually FAIL. People who try to kill themselves with a gun usually SUCCEED. This fact in itself elevates suicide by gun into a national issue, unless you simply don't care whether or not other people kill themselves.
"Where there are more guns there is more Homicide"
While pondering this statement please completely ignore the city of Chicago and the entire state of California
Well Pavlov was right....
Lemmings gotta do what lemmings do, only Pavlov taught the controllers how to make it slimey...
{chuckle}
In places like Chicago, and other cities, gang warfare and drug trafficking account for almost all the murders that put these places over the "national average" .
I've got news for you, gang bangers and drug traffickers don't care whether or not the other guy has a gun. these killings are done from ambush, not a gunfight in the middle of the street outside the town saloon.
Good guys with a gun may prevent some crimes at times, I don't doubt it happens, but they don't materially affect the murder rate, anywhere.