correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws

2

2damnold4this

New member
I thought this might be interesting to look at in light of the recent interest in enacting gun control laws. The gist is there is no correlation between a state's gun laws and its homicide rate:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...e-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/?tid=sm_fb

There’s been much talk recently — including from President Obama — about there being a substantial correlation between state-level gun death rates and state gun laws. Now correlation obviously doesn’t equal causation; there may be lots of other factors that are the true causes of both of the things that are being measured. But if we do look for now at correlation, it seems to me that the key question should focus on state total homicide rates, or perhaps (for reasons I describe below) total intentional homicide plus.....
 
Would be interesting to see the same data for large cities including Baltimore, DC, and Chicago with their very restrictive gun laws.
 
What Volokh writes about suicides is especially important to understand with respect to the misleading (and IMHO near-worthless) state-to-state "death rate" statistics that the gun-control crowd likes to bandy about.

My general talking points:
  • One shot with virtually any gun will suffice to commit suicide. Since a single-shot .410 will work, gun-control laws that focus on "assault weapons", handguns, and/or "high-capacity" magazines can be expected to have little or no effect. Furthermore, this makes it more difficult to draw firm conclusions based on the strength of state gun laws as it relates to suicide, since a number of the laws are likely meaningless to the analysis.
  • Few US gun-control laws seek to actively force people to surrender guns they already own, and those that do tend to focus on "evil" guns while ignoring those owned by "legitimate hunters" (see above). Restricting availability of guns in the future will have little effect on guns already owned by people who want to do themselves in. Speaking of which...
  • Most serious studies of suicide indicate that likelihood to commit suicide is strongly tied to demographics. This raises the possibility that a correlation is a demographic fluke, i.e. a certain demographic has a tendency to commit suicide a lot, that demographic also tends to own lots of guns for unrelated reasons, and that demographic is heavily over-represented in the state in question. It's the classic Chicken vs. Egg question. Most "gun death" stats don't even attempt to control for this factor.
  • A person who wants to commit suicide may not care about the possible penalties for illegally obtaining a gun on the black market, because he/she presumably won't be around to suffer the legal consequences.
  • Most gun-control efforts aren't accompanied by a corresponding effort to restrict the lawful availability of high bridges or strong rope.
 
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The curious thing is that California has just joined four other "right to die" states. That would seem to take the suicide argument off the table in those states --- but we know it won't.
 
This is a refutation of a prior "study" from a couple of weeks ago. That study made headlines at HuffPo and the like because it "proved" that states with lax gun laws had higher death rates from firearms.

Conveniently, that study excluded several states (Alaska, New Hampshire and others) to get the numbers to line up.

The thing about Volokh is, he can't be accused of being an NRA stooley. He's highly respected in the legal community.
 
I think one big difference between the study and Volokh's article is that the study compared firearm deaths (firearm homicides, firearm suicides and firearm accidental deaths) to gun laws while Volokh compared all homicides and accidental gun deaths to state gun laws.

The other big difference is one will get a lot of media play and the other won't.
 
I don't think there is any correlation between gun laws and violent homicides. It depends on how many violent criminals and crazy people a state has. I have this hypothesis that if you could keep the population of a state static ( nobody going out and nobody going in ) and lifted all gun laws the violent gun crimes rates would remain relatively stable. We already that the most restrictive gun laws don't seem to affect gun crimes in a positive way. Why, because of violent criminals and crazy people.
 
You really don't hear much said in the media about Japan's 18.5 suicides per year per 100,000 people.
By comparison, the U.S. has a rate of 12.1 suicides per year per 100,000 people.
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Great fact. I also notice that, using WHO figures, some western European countries with stronger gun control laws than the U.S. have higher suicide rates than the U.S. --- France, Finland, Belgium, Iceland. Several more industrialized countries have higher rates. South Korea has the second highest suicide rate in the world. Of interest are the methods most women employ in South Korea:
Because South Korea restricts firearms, only one third of Korean women use violent methods to commit suicide. Poisoning is the most commonly used method, as half of Korean women who commit suicide use pesticides. 58.3% of suicides from 1996 to 2005 used pesticide poisoning. Another prevalent method that people use is hanging.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea#Methods

Obviously, South Korea needs to ban both pesticides and ropes.
 
Here's an interesting take on the issue.

The Brady Campaign issues grades to states based on the stringency of their gun laws. The author took the states with the highest and lowest grades and compared their homicide rates.

There are all sorts of ways one can skew the math to fit their allegations.
 
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