US STATES WITH MORE GUN OWNERS HAVE MORE MURDERS

Reuters ^ | 12/04/02 | Reuters - Charnicia E Huggins

[Joe Hadenuf]

LOL! They don't.

[hgro]

In those southern states, lets have a breakdown by racial groupings please.

[camle]

gee, lemme see... each morning, the rooster flies to the top of the barn and crows. then the sun comes up. Now that must be irrefutable proof that the rooster crowing causes the sun to come up. yessireebob!

[PatrioticAmerican]

You don't see any BS? I do, and you should look a little closer.

For one thing, 6 states? 6? Do the numbers not support the anti-gun propaganda if the seventh is included?

[FreedomCalls]

The headline was incorrectly written:

"In States With More Murders, People Have Needed to Arm Themselves With More Guns for Self-Defense Purposes"

[Tijeras_Slim]

Miller and his team investigated the association between homicide and rates of household firearm ownership using 1988-1997 data collected from the nine US census regions and the 50 states.

You KNOW if the 2000 Census had asked about gun ownership, there would have been MASSIVE threads here.

[gcruse]

Please point out the lies in the article.

[avg_freeper]

LOL! They don't.

yet

[FreedomCalls]

In states that have lots of SUV owners, there is more snowfall each year than in states where people drive small two-wheel drive cars.

Uh-Oh, I don't want to give them any ideas.

It can't be that heavy snowfall causes people to buy four-wheel drive vehicles, nah.

[big gray tabby]

They quote the doctor at Harvard as saying the study "implies" causality and the "inferences" are at odds with claims to the contrary. His comments could have easily been lifted from statements ridiculing the study.

[teeman8r]

if i lived in a state hostile to gun ownership, i sure wouldn't put the fact i owned a gun on my census form...

the real story here is that we spend too much money on stupid research projects.

[appeal2]

This study means absolutely nothing. Homicides don't necessarily equate with murders. There is self-defense, suicide and accidental gun death which can be classified as homicides. In addition, they don't mention how many of these homicides are the result of illegal guns. Finally, the idea that the NJ cities such as Newark, Camden, Trenton, Jersey City, Patterson and others are safe because guns are virtually banned is more BS. I'd much rather walk down Broad and Market at 10pm with my Glock than go around naked.

[michaelt]

Take Louisiana out of those six high gun ownership states, and I wonder how these "results" change. Doesn't New Orleans have one of the highest murder rates in the country?

[Joe Brower]

the last sentence could very well be the conclusion to be drawn from the article.

Yes, varations of which are at post #12. A good read that is also germane can be found HERE.

[dirtboy]

In those southern states, lets have a breakdown by racial groupings please.

Already did that. Here, from the Census Bureau website, is the breakdown by state of the two groups - percentage of African-American, and total population in millions:

MA - 5.4 percent, 6.3 million
NJ - 13.6 percent, 8.5 million
RI - 4.5 percent, 1.1 million
HI - 1.8 percent, 1.2 million

AL - 26 percent, 4.4 million
Ark - 15.7 percent, 2.7 million
LA - 32.5 percent, 4.4 million
MI - 36.3 percent, 2.9 million
WV - 3.2 percent, 1.8 million
WY - .8 percent, .5 million

Note that the researchers were careful to lump states together, to make it impossible to look for variations within the high-ownership states and low-ownership states.

[michaelt]

It is not so much lies as the bad use of statistics - lack of controls, the direction of causality, etc.

[Texas_Jarhead]

ROFL!!!

[TC Rider]

This just in: The same six states have many more births, proving guns are an instrument of love.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

When we lived in Minnesota, I noticed the first winter's snowfall would coincide with the appearance hundreds of old rusty cars; "winter beaters" as they were called. Ergo, rusty Chevies must have had something to do with all that snow...

[Atlas Sneezed]

US Facilities with More Doctors Have More Deaths

By Disarmia E. Frauder

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Deaths in the United States are more common in facilities such as gospitals where more occupants are doctors, according to researchers.

The study findings imply "that doctors, on balance, lethally imperil rather than protect Americans," lead study author Dr. Matthew Miller of Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, told Reuters Health.

"This inference is consistent with previous...studies that have found that the presence of a doctor in the building is a risk factor for death, and starkly at odds with the unsubstantiated, yet often adduced, notion that doctors are a public good," he added.

Miller and his team investigated the association between death and rates of medical professional presence, using 1988-1997 data collected from the nine US census regions and the 50 states.

They found that physician prevalence was linked to death rates throughout the nine census regions. At the state level, the link between rates of physician prevalence in a given facility and death existed for all death victims older than age 5, according to the report in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

In fact, the six types of facilities with the highest rates of physician presence--hospitals, medical office buildings, senior car facilities, trauma centers, cancer treatment centers, and golf clubhouses --had more than 2,000,000 deaths, nearly three times as many as the four types of buildings with the lowest physician presence--homes, non-medical offices, schools, and retail stores.

Further, people who visited one of the six "high doctor facilities" were nearly three times as likely to die from any disease and more than four times as likely to die from doctor-related surgery than those who visited only "low doctor facilities," the report indicates. Their risk of dying of a non-surgery-related disease was also nearly double that of those who remained in facilities with the lowest rates of physician presence.

On average, about half of people in high-doctor facilities were physicians, according to data reported by three of the six states, in comparison to 1.3% of occupants of low-doctor facilities being doctors.

Although death rates were higher in poor-health areas and in facilities with higher rates of non-lethal diseases and injuries, the association between physician prevalence and death remained true when the researchers took these and other factors into consideration.

Still, Miller's team notes that it is not clear whether the higher rates of physician prevalence caused or resulted from the increased number of deaths.

"It is possible, for example, that locally elevated death rates may have led to increased numbers of physicians going to where people were dying," they write.

SOURCE: American Journal of Political Health 2002;92:1988-1993.