John Hinderaker: fun with gun and homicide statistics
John Hinderaker points out how the latest study of the relation between gun control laws and homicide rates uses the statistics therein to make a certain policy point, and how they could just as easily be used to refute that point:
…[W]hat jumps out at you when you read Fleegler’s article is that the decrease in fatalities that he documents relates almost exclusively to suicides. What his study really shows is that strict gun laws have little or no impact on gun homicides…
If you do the math, the ten “top” states, i.e., those with the most controls on guns, averaged 3.2 gun homicides per 100,000 population, while the ten “bottom” states averaged 3.5 gun homicides per 100,000. So the rate was slightly higher in the least regulated states. But that is only because Louisiana is an outlier”“it has the highest homicide rate of any state, while it also has relatively few gun statutes…You can see what an anomaly Louisiana is. If you take Louisiana out of the equation, the remaining nine lowest-regulation states have an average gun homicide rate of 2.8 per 100,000, which is 12.5% less than the average of the ten states with the strictest gun control laws…
But there is more: note that Fleegler’s study covers all 50 states, but leaves out the District of Columbia. Why do you suppose he chose to do that? Because the District has 1) some of the nation’s most draconian gun laws, and 2) the highest murder rate in the country, higher even than Louisiana’s.
Back when I was in graduate school, even though I was in a clinical master’s program and not an experimental one, we were required to take statistics at the graduate level, which is significantly more difficult than the statistics course at the undergrad level through which I’d already plowed. What’s more, we had to learn how to design our own research and to closely read and critique that of others. These studies were, of course, in social science fields; we weren’t critiquing physics (nor were we equipped to). But I developed the ability to skim a social science study—in psychology or sociology, primarily, or even medicine, which has some of the same characteristics—and the flaws would rather quickly jump out at me.
Those flaws were always present, and they were not trivial. Sometimes I would suspect that the author[s] had succumbed through bias, and sometimes merely through the inherent difficulty of designing such studies for human subjects, with all their built-in limitations in terms of controls and confounding variables that were either inadequately dealt with or not taken into consideration at all. I learned that one has to be very, very wary, and that such scholarship can be used to almost any purpose.
But used, it will be. Despite the work Hinderaker has done to expose the flaws in this one, that message will not get to nearly as many people as will the message the CNN headline gives the study.
The part that will get no coverage at all is the horrendous murder rate among young black men. Racism, of the liberal variety. Or should it more correctly be called Monkeyism, see no evil…
I’ve followed this subject for decades. I’ve read many studies, both pro and con. The studies concentrate on the numbers and types of guns, strict laws, lenient laws, and so forth. There may be some nuggets of use in all of these studies.
But the root problem is culture. By culture I do not mean movies, video games, etc. I blame the cultural breakdown in the black community, the absence of a committed father is the norm, and couple this with poor education and little incentive to work hard, it is rather simple to explain why the vast majority of our homicides involve young blacks killing young blacks.
Beyond the black community; there is in general a degree of shallowness in much of home life were busy parents and busy children rarely interact beyond here’s the microwave meal, now lets watch TV before you do your home work and go to bed. Next, society no longer introduces the young to the safe and constructive use of firearms. A lot of that comes from the change from a rural society to an urban one. And then there is the overall lack of politeness and an over abundance of rude and offensive public behavior.
Sorry if I rambled.
Parker, I wonder if things were so nice way back when. A lot of history was never recorded, and the good old days were, by our standards, awful. I doubt there are any reliable statistics on black on black crime or anything else prior to the 1950s. What little I heard about white on white murder is that the levels are close to European standards, in other words, low.
As for the homicide rate versus guns laws; the most obvious conclusion is that those states with tough gun laws enacted them because of the high murder rates and not that the gun laws make no difference. Without the tough laws the murder rates could be higher. There are no statistics showing what did not happen.
Remember the saying, statistics are like psychologists at a trial, they testify for both sides. That sounds more refined than the traditional, lies, damn lies and statistics.
I can only bear witness to my experience. Beginning at age 6 I was instructed in the principals of firearm safety with a BB gun. At age 8 I received my personal model 62 Winchester 22LR. In the 10th grade, once a month boys (and a few girls) took their 22LR rifles to school along with 100 rounds of ammo. We propped our rifles in the cloak room and placed our 2 boxes of ammo in our desks. Starting at 1 PM every 4th Friday we collected our rifles and ammo and met the instructor, who happened to be the PE instructor and all around sports coach, for 45 minutes of range instruction.
There were no accidents and no one, not a single kid, ever considered misusing their rifle. It was a better, more rational, and sane era. Coming from that era I accept no authority over my right to possess and use firearms in a legal, responsible matter.
Actually, crime statistics have been kept in America since the 19th century.
In 1880 in New York State, e.g., about four blacks were imprisoned for every white — today, that ratio is 12:1. The white crime level is very low in absolute terms, but something interesting has happened to the (always higher) black crime rate, which was level from 1880 to 1960.
Starting in 1965-70, it took off — vertically. And what happened in that time, ladies and gentlemen? Yes, that’s right: LBJ’s “Great Society” initiative and the vast expansion of the Welfare State.
Fathers leaving families; men no longer marrying women. In the black community, that is: in the white community, the crime rate has remained fairly steady at its comparatively low levels.
In 1880: just over 200 blacks were in jail per 100,000 population.
In 1960: just over 250.
In 2000: about 1,200 blacks per 100,000 population.
That’s an almost 500% increase in 40 years. Five Hundred Percent.
(Source: M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 2010. Alexander ascribes this radical increase in criminal behavior to white “racism.” But it used to be much worse: so let’s have another hypothesis, shall we?)
“It” being worse meaning racism, Jim Crow, etc.