The Violence Policy Center is Just Plain Bad at Math
campuscarry.com
Focusing on “gun deaths,” rather than on homicides (or even firearm-related homicides), is a common ploy among gun control advocates. It’s their way of twisting and hammering statistics until the numbers finally relent and say what they want them to say. For example, if you want to suggest that Great Britain’s handgun ban has made England safer, you can’t compare the homicide rate before the ban to the homicide rate after the ban because England’s homicide rate has actually gone up since the ban went into effect (while, at the same time, the homicide rate in the U.S. has gone down). But you can compare the low “gun death” rate in England to the high “gun death” rate in the U.S. and suggest that this disparity proves that the handgun ban has made England safer (even though violent crimes and homicides in England have actually increased). To borrow Gregg Easterbrook’s famous line, “Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.”
There are two main problems with focusing on “gun deaths.” The first is that the total number includes both lawful interventions (self-defense shootings and shootings by police) and, more significantly, suicides. According to the Center for Disease Control, 56.2% of U.S. firearm-related deaths in 2007 were suicides. Should the focus of the gun control debate be on protecting the people who want to die or on defending the people who want to live? I tend to lean toward the latter.
The second problem is that the focus on “gun deaths” doesn’t reflect the overall safety of the populace. Is someone who is killed with a gun any deader than someone who is killed with a knife or a baseball bat or any other weapon? In order to fairly assess whether or not living in a state with high gun ownership places a person at greater risk of meeting a violent end, we must compare not just the number of “gun deaths” but the number of homicides as a whole.
When the 50 states are ranked by homicide rate (highest to lowest), it becomes immediately clear that there is no correlation between a state’s murder rate and its rate of firearm ownership. Though Louisiana still holds the top spot, with a homicide rate of 14.2 homicides for every 100,000 persons, the number two spot is held by Maryland—the state with the ninth lowest rate of gun ownership, according to the VPC’s own source, and the fifth toughest gun control laws, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence—with a homicide rate of 9.8 homicides for every 100,000 persons. On the other end of the spectrum, the three states with the lowest homicide rates are New Hampshire (thirty-ninth highest rate of gun ownership, twenty-third most permissive gun laws, murder rate of 1.1 per 100,000), Iowa (twenty-first highest rate of gun ownership, thirty-first most permissive gun laws, murder rate of 1.2 per 100,000), and Montana (second highest rate of gun ownership, eighth most permissive gun laws, murder rate of 1.5 per 100,000).
The state with the highest rate of gun ownership, Wyoming, and the state with the lowest rate of gun ownership, Hawaii, are separated on the list by only eleven places—Wyoming at number 35, with 3.1 homicides per 100,000 persons, and Hawaii at number 46, with 1.7 homicides per 100,000 persons. Utah, the state with the most permissive gun control laws and the sixteenth highest rate of gun ownership, is ranked fortieth, with only 2.2 homicides for every 100,000 persons; whereas, California, the state with the strictest gun control laws and the seventh lowest rate of gun ownership, is ranked seventeenth, with 6.2 homicides for every 100,000 persons.
Clearly, the Violence Policy Center’s assertions are built on a pretty flimsy foundation. But wait—isn’t something missing? Isn’t the VPC study based on a report titled “Prevalence of Household Firearms and Firearm-Storage Practices in the 50 States and the District of Columbia”? Where is the District of Columbia? It shows up in the source article but is conspicuously absent from the VPC press release (and the accompanying chart).
When the District of Columbia (widely considered to have the strictest gun control laws in the U.S.) is included in the list, the VPC’s claims about gun ownership completely fall apart. With only 5.2% of households containing firearms, D.C. easily beats out Hawaii, where 9.2% of households contain firearms, as having the lowest rate of gun ownership in the U.S. And with a “gun death” rate of 24.50 “gun deaths” per 100,000 persons, D.C. easily beats out Louisiana, where the “gun death” rate is 19.87 “gun deaths” per 100,000 persons, as having the highest rate of “gun deaths” in the U.S. When homicide rates are compared, the difference is even more staggering. The homicide rate in D.C. (30.8 homicides for every 100,000 persons) is more than twice that of Louisiana (14.2 homicides for every 100,000 persons). |
