Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Dr. Eric Fleegler: Conclusions and Relevance – A higher number of firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of firearm fatalities in the state, overall and for suicides and homicides individually.
John Hinderaker: Conclusions and Relevance – [N]ote that Fleegler’s study covers all 50 states, but leaves out the District of Columbia. Why do you suppose he chose to do that? …. Now let’s redo Fleegler’s math, with the District counted as one of the ten strictest jurisdictions. We now have an average rate of 4.0 gun homicides per 100,000 in the ten most anti-gun jurisdictions, and a gun homicide rate of 3.5 per 100,000 in the ten jurisdictions with the fewest gun regulations, even if we include the outlier, Louisiana.
But that’s just tasting the icing of Dr. Fleegler’s statistical upside-down cake.
(click for full size)
Statistics are always what you want them to be. Just have to manipulate the numbers, add or delete something. 78% of the public agrees with me. No one knows and no one checks. The MSM will print whatever complies with their preconceived notions.
So the last column actually shows that gun laws have no association with homicide or suicide. And yet he claims it does? Selective conclusions.
If one also looks at the study here: http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1661390
One finds in Table 4 that gun laws such as Assault Weapon Bans, Child Safety Laws, and Laws Preventing Guns in Public have also had no effect.
Wow. The NRA would be so happy with these results.
I guess buddy conveniently forgot to mention that to the press.
“One finds in Table 4 that gun laws such as Assault Weapon Bans, Child Safety Laws, and Laws Preventing Guns in Public have also had no effect.
Wow. The NRA would be so happy with these results.
I guess buddy conveniently forgot to mention that to the press.”
Or maybe he knows that not any of the commie gun siezing laws mentioned above stop ONE effing thug,gangbanger,crooked cop,etc.,from getting a weapon???
Why do you psycho leftards always want to control everybody??What black hole of hell have you got in your guts you’re trying to fill?
Um Justthinkin,
Did you read what I said? I said that the author of this paper who has been making claims all day that more gun laws reduce homicide and suicide forgot to mention that he also found that assault weapons bans and banning guns in public have had no effect.
He kind of forgot to mention that to the press. Conveniently.
I’m on your side read what I said. Geez.
We have all known (and stated for some time) that it is not about the guns – it is about control. The libs could care less about who or how many get shot. Just as long as it is a “good” crisis that they can use for their own ends.
“Model 2 is adjusted for age and for control variables (state population density; non-firearm violence-related fatalities; and percentage of the study population that was male, white, black, Hispanic, in poverty, unemployed and college educated).”
Lots of room for making the numbers dance to your tune there.
“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html
Back in the days when I had time to play around with statistics, I remember finding the greatest correlation between homicide rates/state and fraction of the population that was black. When one included district of columbia (DC), the correlation was amazingly strong. Other factors that correlated highly with %of black population/state were crime rates and HIV rates.
After having a fast look at the paper, it was obvious that the whole methodology was fatally flawed. The authors correlate # of firearms laws/state with firearms homicides and suicides. The latter variable is easy to measure as finding a dead individual with a bullet hole at the back of their head makes it unlikely that one will consider West Nile virus in the differential diagnosis of what killed the person. Thus, firearms deaths are rather trivially easy to measure unlike heroin overdoses where one can’t determine whether the individual with what appears to be a fatal level of heroin in their system self-injected, or was the victim of a mob hit (in the early 1990’s when Vancouver was experiencing 5-10 heroin overdose deaths/day injecting an unwanted individual with a lethal dose of heroin was the favorite tactic of hitmen and the only clue that something might be amiss is when an individual showed up in ER with no track marks on their arms with severe hypoxic brain damage and high levels of opiates in their system. Similarly, vehicular homicides are very difficult to prove as there’s always the “stuck” gas pedal excuse.)
So, I’ll believe their figures on #’s of firearms deaths as there are likely very few individuals who are shot after first being killed with a fatal dose of curare. However, the # of firearms laws/state is a meaningless statistic. How does one define a firearms law? And, assuming one can define such a law, the assumption that summing the number of such laws/state results in a linear relationship is fatally flawed. One needs to establish equivalency between various states firearms laws and how is this done? DC has the strictest firearms laws in the US and the highest per-capita homicide rate. The notion that one can perform a valid statistical comparison between #’s of firearms laws and homicide rates is flawed on so many levels that the only reason it was ever published in JAMA is that it fits the anti-gun ideology of the medical establishment.
This reminds me of the flurry of papers in CMAJ that occurred when C68 was being debated that purported to show a relationship between # of firearms/capita and homicide rates (the abysmally bad Kilias paper). Curiously, Switzerland was omitted from this comparison as it was illegal for individuals with full auto rifles in their homes to utilize them except for military use. Back in the usenet days I remember someone posting a comment to the effect that the free availability of firearms in the US results in domestic shootings, but in Switzerland the prohibition against use of military firearms without proper orders results in the phlegmatic Swiss male who’s pissed off at his wife who nags him to take out the garbage thinking: “I really should shoot her over this, but it would be illegal to use my machine gun so I will strangle her instead”.
The one thing that JAMA will never publish is the racial breakdown of homicides as most US homicides involve young black males shooting other black males. When one looks at the white population of the US, their homicide rate is less than the Canadian homicide rate. The success of Canadian firearms legislation, which is uniform across the country, can be seen to be very ineffective on Indian reserves where the firearms homicide rate, the last time that stats Canada (probably accidentally) chose to publish the statistics, was about 15/100,000 among native Indians. This is also a population where the police are least likely to enforce firearms laws because of the “special” status of Indians and the fact that the AK47 was an integral part of native culture back in the 1600’s before Kalashnikov stole the design from them and claimed it for himself.
Expect more junk science purporting to show that laws restricting firearms are good in the medical literature in the coming months. Doctors are just as likely as any other group in society to think that their personal biases are an integral part of external reality. Any doctor who doesn’t own firearms and shoot regularly should have his opinions on firearms given the same credibility as a pathologist who’s never done cardiac surgery commenting on minutae of cardiac surgery. Guns in the medical literature was the most glaring example of the failure of peer review in the scientific literature prior to climategate.
He must have been consulted on the global warming hockey stick graph.
I want to use this information in a discussion I am having… but where in the link is the part about DC not being included?
What jumps out at me is that all gun homicides are lumped in together. In any given year in the USA police shoot about 1,000 bad guys and the general public shoot more. These justifiable homicides (aka good shoots) are put in the same column as gangsta warfare and premeditated murder in order to inflate the numbers, so the career felon who gets shot breaking into an old widow’s house is treated the same as one of the victims at Sandy Hook by the gun control zealots.
Loki, try the FBIs Uniform Crime Reports. They provide the race of both victim and assailant and also list justifiable homicide separately. You’ll also need census data in order to find the per capita rate.
://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-offense-data
The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) seminal study of preventable medical errors estimated as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals and doctors offices every year at a cost of $29 billion.
181,000 are severely injured (wounded).
Sooooo…
I am 100 times more likely to die or be wounded at the hands of a hospital worker or doctor,
than die by the hands of a legal or illegal gun owner?
–
“I am really sick Doc,
would you please take me hunting?”
Lies, damn lies and statistics..
If anyone believes what the “experts” or “their betters” tell them they are lazy and stupid.
There is no one left to trust to be honest and funny enough I’m fine with that.
i read a stat awhile back that indicated that if black on black gun crime was taken out of the equation, the rate was 2.7 per 100,000.
Loki, pegs the stupidity of the gun grabbers and their made up statistics. If you want some entertainment, whenever a dedicated anti gun nutter, starts in on guns being a women’s issue, point out, more women are convicted ever year for killing their partner, than women killed with firearms.
Also, point out that domestic homicide on Indian reserves, is roughly 10 time the rest of the population, Interesting that the anti crowd, will use Indian homicides to inflate, rural domestic stats, but when challenged, they scream racist.
Another interesting point in Canadian stats, is that they never exclude police involved shootings from the overall stats, try to find out how many there are annually, then transpose them, it’ll open your eyes..
Loki,
True what you say.
What’s strange about this paper is that while the lead author says that the number of gun laws is associate with a decrease in homicide his actual results in his publication don’t show that at all!
What the heck? I can understand bad statistical methodology but I don’t understand how the author can conclude a positive result when his results are negative?
Can you help me on that?
The civilian disarmament zealotry state-side is just taking a cue from the Canadian police state worshppers on running a hysterical anti- gun legislating crusade – lying big with statistics. Up here they saw non compliance to their proposed tyranny was high and a large portion of the firearms known to be in the country remained unregistered as the registration deadline loomed. This would look very bad for the police state running the pogrom to criminalize civilian firearms owners. Solution? – “reassess” the number of firearms in circulation in the nation and lower that stat thus raising the alleged compliance level. Bada-boom bada-bing another inconvenient fact neutered by creative stat analysis.
Stateside the push is on by the fascist-progressive alliance to destroy the 2nd amendment. The glaring riff in their crusade was John Lott’s exhaustive study which proved what everyone from the founding fathers to the unpoliticized police already knew – more guns in civilan hands = less crime. These stats gathered from all police and FBI crime stats were empirical and unassailable proof that armed self defense and the constitutionally responsible gun laws which enable it, reduce crime. 20 years of must-issue concealed carry laws enforced this reality – it reduced crime and there was no blood bath the antis predicted when civilians were carrying handguns. But the maniacal anti-civil gun zealotry can’t have fact fouling up an emotion-charged purge of civil rights. They had to concoct new reality (fascists and communists are good at reality manipulating) and counter Lott’s study with a cooked study which supports their tyranny.
No matter where you find them, folks, these anti-gun zealots are a wicked lot of lying, devious, treacherous authoritarian scum. Scratch a gun control freak, find a police state fascist.
The nation would be better served if they were as concerned over the statistics that show 10 times as many people die from medical misadventure than from gun crime.
The right to use a scalpel and syringe has been licenced for years but there are still killers out there shielded by the AMA.
Actually, taking away firearms does lower the firearm homicide, suicide and accident rates. However, it does not lower the OVERALL homicide, suicide and accident rates as people switch to other methods of killing themselves and one another:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/28/newsid_2527000/2527805.stm
Then, as in Britain, where the leftist politicians realized that confiscating firearms does not lower the homicide rate, they start concentrating on a samurai sword ban, then a knife ban, cricket bat ban, plastic bag ban, etc. until what are left are hoodlums kicking other people to death (or using illegal firearms, illegal knives, illegal cricket bats, etc.).
At that point the law-abiding population realizes it is defenseless and truly f*****. A strange cult develops where people start hanging balls of yarn from trees as supernatural talismans against violence. Much like the native ghost shirt dancers at the turn of the 19th century. Cultural extinction follows shortly afterwards.
The good Dr Caillin Langmann said this at the parliamentary committee report: http://openparliament.ca/committees/public-safety/41-1/14/dr-caillin-langmann-1/only/
The report used was peer reviewed, solid data. In a nutshell, it stated that the registry, and most gun laws have had no effect on homicide in Canada. Such a waste.
“No matter where you find them, folks, these anti-gun zealots are a wicked lot of lying, devious, treacherous authoritarian scum. Scratch a gun control freak, find a police state fascist.” Occam at 9:40
You gotta stop beating around the bush, my man.
I was going to comment on the fact that using the sheer number of gun laws as a metric of the effectiveness of gun legislation was completely ludicrous, but Loki has already done so, and much better than I would have done. Kudos, Loki.
But it haaas to be that simple, it has to be!
I have found a handy rule of thumb that applies in this situation. I presume that anything coming out of academia or the leftstream media that is even remotely “political” is a pack of lies. I know this is simplistic, but it is saves me a lot of time sifting through their garbage.
Thanks,Loki. The MSM failed as usual,when the Chretien government enacted the strict FAC/registration legislation, but excluded the Reserve Indians from that legislation.
Many of us gun owners questioned the wisdom of excluding the people most likely to use firearms to solve their differences,and we were called, wait for it…..racist!
During the early 90’s,there was one Reserve near my home town in Manitoba,where two families were fighting for control of the Reserve. There were open gun battles, several deaths,woundings,and house burnings,but the only way I found out about it was when my Brother-in-law who lived in Manitoba,mentioned the situation when out here visiting.
But the MSM, in their editorial wisdom, neglected to mention that a practical state of war existed on that Reserve. Too upsetting for the delicate psyches of their readers I suppose.
Everyone knows that the only measure that would have more than a communist’s chance of getting into heaven of reducing gun crime is reducing the number of criminals. Forget reducing production and importation of guns—halt production and importation of blacks, Muslims and Indians (including Mexicans). As soon as it is appreciated that there are far more aspiring rappers than North America has room for, neutering and spaying suggests itself immediately as a humane solution.
This will never happen, as Democrats depend on blacks to stuff ballot boxes in their favour at every election.
As for the fact that doctors kill more people than guns, well, Loki, I’d trust you with my life but the Pakistani hack who can’t be stuffed to wash his hands before cutting a kaffir open votes NDP or Alberta Tory with far greater regularity than the kaffirs.
Political correctness makes the statistical argument a losers game as by peeling out the racial issues one clearly sees how the Progressive’s Great Society has socially degraded a certain race in the US. By excluding such arguments as racist, the statistical mush continues ad infinitum.
Even if good statistical work showed a positive correlation between lack of “gun legislation” and gun murders, it doesn’t justify the usurpation of the essence of a free society – the right to own guns and defend oneself with them. By this metric alone, there are very few places left on the planet one could describe as truly free.
Loki – this is a classic post. Well worth circulating – widely.
Lines like “..finding a dead individual with a bullet hole at the back of their head makes it unlikely that one will consider West Nile virus in the differential diagnosis of what killed the person” and “..there are likely very few individuals who are shot after first being killed with a fatal dose of curare” are just too much.
You’ve made my day!! Thanks!!
Want to prove a point? Find correlations and ignore the rest. Number of laws, as a statistical measure, is bizarre. Relating each characteristic of gun control to the gun homicide rate and weighing them in totality would make sense but wouldn’t prove the point that could be made with elementary school stats and prejudgement.
Loki, well stated, and as U touched on and another poster stated, U can not honestly do a “homicide” study by studing only one aspect of the problem. This study , to be honest, should have been an all homicides inclueded study. Also inclueding suicides was dishonest, as people who kill themselves will do so whether they use a gun or drugs or some other means, so that should not have been inclueded. But than context has never been a strong lefty point, they rather EMOTE!!
A few of you have pointed out that avoidable medical mistakes kill significantly more people every year than guns do. This has me wondering – will the number of people who die from lack of access to critical medical care because of PPACA be greater or less than the number of people who aren’t negligently killed because they couldn’t put their lives in the hands of medical personnel for otherwise non-life-threatening conditions? In other words, will Reid, Pelosi, Obama, et al actually decrease the number of dead Americans by limiting access to medical care?
Loki and others have covered pretty much everything of note in this paper from a technical/scientific perspective. As they say, this is doodoo.
I wanted to take note of three things that mark this paper as propaganda.
First, its published in JAMA. That’s a major red flag right there, pretty much everything published in JAMA with the word “gun” in it since 1968 has been the worst sort of anti-gun propaganda. I’m not just saying that, I’ve read most of them. The JAMA editorial staff have made no secret of their virulent hatred for guns over the years either.
Second, this Harvard operation. “Author Affiliations: Division of Emergency Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts (Drs Fleegler, Lee, Monuteaux, and Mannix); Harvard Medical School, Boston (Drs Fleegler, Lee, Monuteaux, and Mannix); and Harvard School of Public Health, Boston (Dr Hemenway).”
Harvard medical school is ground zero for David Hemenway’s anti-gun propaganda mill. Nothing he’s ever published holds up under even the most cursory examination, but he seems to be able to keep doing it regardless.
Third, the clincher: “Funding/Support: Dr Hemenway received funding from the Joyce Foundation to conduct and disseminate research on firearms.”
Pure propaganda, bought and paid for by the Joyce Foundation.
Therefore, the one point I have to make is that there’s nothing to be gained by arguing facts with these @$$h0les. There are not scientists, they’re wh0res. They’re in it for the money. There’s no argument you could make that would even get them to raise an eyebrow.
Therefore you have to attack their funding. Kick them in the wallet, that’ll get you some attention.
Phantom:
The irony is that if you look at Table 4 of their study Phantom, you find that even they show that Assault Weapon bans, banning guns in public, child safety, and tranfiking laws like 1 gun a month, are not associated with homicide.
Of course they never mention that part of their study.
Just thought I’d add this one link to Dr. Suter’s seminal paper from 1994; Guns in the medical literature: a failure of peer review
http://www.rkba.org/research/suter/med-lit.html
Suter was way ahead of his time in raising the alarm about the incestuous cliques of “scientists” that abused the peer review process by assuming since they all agreed with one another on a topic that nothing else mattered. We’ve seen far greater abuse of the peer-review process in climategate.
Phantom, you’re right about the sources of funding for this study. If the authors truly wanted to make their study bulletproof, they would have published it online and invited criticism. Of course they probably knew it would be torn to shreds by the evidence which is why statists never allow crowd-sourced review of their publications. The CAGW warmists, with their billions in funding, complain about “oil interests” funding WUWT and similar sites which allow crowd-sourced review of anything they post and the resultant process results in the truth coming out. The combined wisdom of the people greatly exceeds that of the statist self-selected “elite”.
Niall Mor, that’s what happens when you combine working for 21 days straight with a bottle of wine after my last long day knowing I get a week off now.
NME666 – good point that all homicides should be included. With suicide data in Canada, one of the unexpected accomplishments of C68 was to increase the number of suicides by hanging dramatically – about 1.5x as many hanging suicides as there were decreased firearms suicides. Now the nice thing about people shooting themselves is they don’t often mess up (except for a drunken idiot who blew his face off with a shotgun that I saw a couple of years ago). Hanging takes longer to kill someone than a properly aimed gunshot wound to the head and this means that half-strangled people are often found and recussitated. Often, the remainder of their days are spent as brain damaged vegetables in extended care facilities. Thus, I suspect that medical costs went up significantly when C68 replaced firearms suicides with hanging.
dmorris, thanks for your local reserve anecdote. I suspect this process has occurred many times across the country with the lack of MSM coverage explainable only by the MSM being a statist propaganda arm.
WRT “medical misadventure”, I’m sure that the standard argument trotted out would be that doctors save far more people than they kill. Just like when I’ve talked to doctors about automotive deaths they point out that vehicles do far more good than harm and I’ve yet to see an ER doc who rants about people coming in with gunshot wounds propose banning vehicles because of the far larger of MVA victims that come in. The hospital I work in gets lots of trauma from outlying areas and most are MVA’s. Curiously, when one starts bringing up the number of assaults and rapes prevented by having armed citizens around, the medical hoplophobes can’t understand the argument.
Expect way more of this junk “science” in the next few months as various statist hoplophobes compete with one another to publish “peer reviewed” garbage. At least in the US there’s the 2nd amendment which the SCOTUS has ruled is an individual right. Also the NRA has taken a very hard line with Obozo and his gun grabbers and I’ve supported the NRA financially in this battle and would suggest that other NRA members send them a donation at this critical time for firearms freedom.
Now I’m really puzzled by the spam filter. Wrote a post with more firearms related material and it got held up by the spam filter. Didn’t mention $ex or PDE5 inhibitors once in that post.
AndyN
Actually proper statistical analysis indicates that participation in the Viet Nam War was less hazardous than being admitted to a hospital.
In fact, here locally our older hospital was a pandemic of staff infections…I have yet to check if the cycle has been broken with the new facility….I suspect not….hospital infection rates are more a human/personel matter than infrastructure.
Occam
Are you referring to the “angels of death” (serial killers) who long escape dectection until they get totally sloppy and give themselves away….
As I have said elsewhere I do not discriminate…I hate everybody….for good and proper reason.
Loki:
I think you’re missing the point.
The study abstract and conclusion says that more laws reduce violence.
Their own data tables show that it doesn’t.
No need for any more statisticians.
Here’s the paper. In particular look at Table 4: http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1661390
sasquatch “Actually proper statistical analysis indicates that participation in the Viet Nam War was less hazardous than being admitted to a hospital.”
The half million soldiers in the First Gulf War suffered a lower rate of death than the same demographic that stayed home. Or so I’ve been told.
Innumerates are easy to fool, and they are everywhere.
scar
“The half million soldiers in the First Gulf War suffered a lower rate of death than the same demographic that stayed home.”
Yeah I wuz thar….
We had half a million young guys….a high risk demographic….glomming about armed to the teeth,away from home but the fatality rate was waaaay less than on civie street.
Desert shield had about 150-200 fatalities but Desert storm had 33…all friendly fire incidents.
The casualties rate went down once we went north of the berm and the serious shootin’ started….not for the Iraqui’s though…
It was my experience from way back when that you had more casualties from range accidents/training accidents, jeep roll-overs and weekend passes than from enemy action.
The Clinton era disarmament of military personnel on base, except when engaged in training, was grounded/justified upon this accident rate. However, it had no effect upon range accidents, but it did make the Fort Hood shooting possible.
That “missunderstood” psychiatrist would have been swiftly only identifiable by DNA, in past times.
Figures don’t lie but liars figure. That makes the good Doc the latter