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One of the favorite tactics of anti-rights cultists is to loudly point to the differences in murder rates between the United States and once-Great Britain, and proclaim that the latter’s significantly lower murder rate is due to their draconian and oppressive "gun control"… despite the complete and utter lack of any evidence of causality (see "correlation != causation"). This is all good and well… except for the small detail that none of the released [...]
The hits just keep on coming for those poor benighted fools who still bitterly cling to the notion that "gun control" is the correct course of action. It is that time of the year again, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has released their 2011 Uniform Crime Report; the highlights? 3.8% drop in violent crime from last year, and a 15.4% drop over the past five years, and all this despite (or, perhaps, because?) of [...]
A few days ago, yet another anti-rights cultist made some bleating tweet about how Americans needed to have a "conversation" about "gun violence" and "gun deaths". Obviously, we have already had this conversation (hint: the anti-rights cultists lost, and rightfully so), but this "conversation" schtick is the current "gun control" talking point, so all of the useful idiots are out in droves harping on it as hard as they can. Anywise, I pointed out [...]
Over the weekend, the below email came in from Miguel at Gun Free Zone: Have you done a correlation/whatever is called between the number of guns in a country and the # murders and/or violent crimes? The attachment is a list of countries and their number of guns according to the Small Arms Survey which the antis can’t bitch about because it is a group on their side. I used this wikipedia link to [...]
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I could have told them this: The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun [...]
Thank God for my helpful readers. Last time around, thanks to commenter TS, we were able to integrate importation numbers into the "graphics matter" series of posts, which only served to perforate the "more guns = more deaths" hypothesis even worse. Unfortunately, though, Shooting Industry Magazine rearranged their site sufficiently that some data was apparently lost, and I had to drop the 1981-1985 section of the graph due to not being able to adequately [...]
[Please disregard this post, and instead reference this updated version, which has more data.] No, unfortunately, the FBI has not released a finalized version of their 2011 Uniform Crime Report (it is scheduled for September), so I cannot update the second half of this post series, but commenter TS brought up a very valid point on the 2009 update for the CDC side of this post: what about firearms imported into America? I actually had [...]
[Please consider this updated version of this post, which has integrated firearm importation data as well as production numbers.] Thanks to the newest preliminary FBI stats on crime coming out recently (the past pattern was replicated again: crime is down overall), I was reminded that I needed to check up on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and see if they had updated their WISQARS system to include fatal injury data from 2009; lo [...]
Speaking of graphics, it would appear as though the hoplophobic "gun control" extremists at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence Ownership has released another one of their yearly "scorecards"*. What does that have to do with pretty pictures? Not a darned thing, but Barron’s analysis of that scorecard generated some nice graphs that I am going to steal, along with their explanations, below: Here is the straight comparison of the score versus the [...]
Correlation does not imply causation. That is a sentence which – in various phrasings and rewordings – I have repeated at least twice a year for the past three years in my Graphics Matter series of posts. But, really, for the non-mathematicians amongst us (including myself), what does that actually mean? Well, by way of the inimitable genius behind Dilbert, we have this example: And today, by way of Bloomberg Businessweek, [...]
While this is not exactly what I have been saying for years, it does dovetail in nicely: “No significant beneficial associations between firearms legislation and homicide or spousal homicide rates were found,” reads the abstract on the study, written by Caillin Langmann, a resident in the division of emergency medicine at McMaster University, and himself a vocal foe of gun-control measures who has argued instead for enhanced social programs to combat the causes of [...]
Going a slightly different direction with the data, Barron Barnett has taken a look at the FBI UCR report and how it correlates to the Brady Campaign state "scores". Predictably enough, it does not: While R2 has increased, it is still inconsequential and shows absolutely zero correlation over the entire data set. It is worth nothing though the overall score vs. crime trend has gone from being slightly negative to positive. By looking [...]
Hot on the heels of the CDC updating their information for 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finalized their 2010 Uniform Crime Report, and I am happy to announce the below update to last year’s "Graphics Matter, Part Two" post, including some changes to standardize the "graphics matter" series: And now for the standard round of disclaimers: 1. Intellectual property: While all of this data is publicly available from the sources [...]
Now that my newest version of my "graphics matter" series is up and running, I get to participate in the yearly, "Address comments/concerns/questions/etc. that were already covered in the post if people had bothered to actually read it." Yay me. However, one thing I do want to address as a separate post, primarily because it keeps coming up, is the myth that the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was responsible for the precipitous [...]
Now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have finally updated their WISQARS system to include fatal injury data from 2008*, I am happy to announce the below update to last year’s "Graphics Matter" post, including some slight changes prompted by viewer feedback: This year, we are just going to start over with the disclaimers, and go at it from the top. 1. Intellectual property: While all of this data is [...]
“Gun control” is a dying cause, and rightfully so. You know it, I know it, and even the anti-rights cultists themselves know it (which could explain why their tactics are becoming increasingly vicious, abusive, and thuggish). But the interesting thing is how many of those anti-rights cultists (aka “gun control” supporters) are acknowledging their failure and rationalizing it to themselves: WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR the strange death of gun control? Paradoxically, the story begins with [...]
Thank you, dear Twitter gods, for giving the willfully ignorant, narrow-minded, and bigoted a place to demonstrate their shortcomings freely and without limitations to the rest of the world. Sincerely, Someone who enjoys blogfodder. Now that we have taken care of giving thanks, let us turn to the matter at hands. This morning, I had the… privilege… of engaging in the following conversation with an anti-rights cultist who, as her words will [...]
Exhibit A: Exhibit B: Exhibit C: Exhibit D: (Note: All images were screencaptured at 1800 on 07JUL11, and may no longer be representative of the sites.) Exhibit E: The first product listed on each of those pages – 20 rounds of 180 Grain FMJ Sellier and Bellot 7.62x54r ammunition – all have the same identical product number: 1708. (You have to "View Source" to track down the numbers, but they are [...]
Regular readers will be familiar with my belief that pretty pictures can make otherwise-complicated concepts easier to understand, and, thankfully, a lot of people are getting the chance to see why. However, I am always open to suggestions or new interpretations, and while I do not always have the chance to generate them on my own (speaking of, does anyone know when the CDC will be providing the 2008 fatal injury data?), I can definitely [...]
A little while ago, I bemoaned the distinct and marked lack of logically-consistent individuals amongst the anti-rights nuts of America: I feel like a modern-day Diogenes with his lamp, looking for a consistent man amongst the anti-rights nuts… and while the Internet provides one hell of a lot of wattage, I am not making a whole lot of progress. … and that complaint has held true even to a few days back with the [...]  |
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