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Vox recently published an article by German Lopez that makes a logical error. The article conflates an increase in “gun deaths” with a decrease in public safety. The jump is made from an article published last year, in 2018, where the Rand Corporation published a chart based on a number of different and dubious studies on “gun deaths”. From the previous article: But there were some things that could be gleaned from the available evidence. While RAND as a nonpartisan group avoided any sweeping policy conclusions in its analysis, its review does seem to point in a direction, based on...

The number and rate of firearm murders has hit a new low since the sky-high gun killings during the 1990s, with California topping an FBI list despite having some of the toughest anti-gun laws on the books. Data from the FBI and Pew Research Center show that all gun violence has declined since the Clinton era, though suicides blamed on guns has ticked up. In a new report, Pew said that between 1993 and 2000, the firearm murder rate dropped by almost half, from seven homicides to 3.8 homicides per 100,000 people. It also said that all gun deaths --...

The United States is one of the greatest nations in the world. But compared to our peers, we’re one of the worst when it comes to gun violence. In America, you can be shot at an elementary school. You can be murdered at a church or movie theatre. You can even be executed on live TV — and yet there’s no real expectation of gun reform. Gun-related violence and death is a real public health problem in America, researchers say. And these three charts illustrate why. 1. Gun-related deaths in America wildly outpace our peer nations

The label "gun violence" has become epidemic in the debate about firearms law and the second amendment.  "Gun Violence" is a propaganda metric designed to win the debate in public discourse about the second amendment.  It accomplishes this by defining the terms in a way favorable to gun prohibition efforts.   Here is a example to illustrate this, using hospitals. No one favors people dieing in hospitals.  Why would anyone want someone to die in a hospital?  Therefore, we can create a legislative solution to hospital deaths.   We can prevent nearly all hospital deaths with a simple law.  All we...

Harvard medical researchers just published a scholarly paper in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, claiming that more firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of gun homicides and suicides. However, examination of their data and research methods shows the opposite. McMaster University researcher Caillin Langmann, MD, PhD noted that the Harvard authors’ own best analysis: * Does not show that states with more gun laws have fewer gun deaths * Demonstrates that “assault weapon” bans have no effect on homicide * Demonstrates that laws prohibiting guns in public places have no effect on homicide Even more...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about how the gun-death data showed a very weak correlation with gun-law strictness. I used data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) to derive a gun-homicide rate. In the comments section, a reader pointed me toward more-detailed data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which captures death-certificate data from all the states. Despite interference by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the CDC has kept up the basic data, if not research into the details of who, how, and why. But what we can...