Posted on 12/04/2002 10:58:29 AM PST by ServesURight
US States with More Gun Owners Have More Murders
By Charnicia E. Huggins
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Homicides in the United States are more common in states where more households own guns, according to researchers.
The study findings imply "that guns, 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 gun in the home is a risk factor for homicide, and starkly at odds with the unsubstantiated, yet often adduced, notion that guns are a public good," he added.
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.
They found that household gun ownership was linked to homicide rates throughout the nine census regions. At the state level, the link between rates of gun ownership and murder existed for all homicide victims older than age 5, according to the report in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
In fact, the six states with the highest rates of gun ownership--Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming, West Virginia and Arkansas--had more than 21,000 homicides, nearly three times as many as the four states with the lowest rates of gun ownership--Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey.
Further, people who lived in one of the six "high gun states" were nearly three times as likely to die from any homicide and more than four times as likely to die from gun-related homicide than those who lived in "low gun states," the report indicates. Their risk of dying in a non-gun-related homicide was also nearly double that of those who lived in states with the lowest rates of gun ownership.
On average, about half of households in high gun states had firearms, according to data reported by three of the six states, in comparison to 13% of households in low-gun states.
Although homicide rates were higher in poor areas and in states with higher rates of non-lethal violent crime and urbanization, the association between household firearm ownership and homicide 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 household gun ownership caused or resulted from the increased number of homicides.
"It is possible, for example, that locally elevated homicide rates may have led to increased local gun acquisition," they write.
SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health 2002;92:1988-1993.
STATES WITH MORE MURDERS HAVE MORE GUN OWNERS.
MA - 5.4 percent, 2.3
NJ - 13.6 percent, 4
RI - 4.5 percent, 3.7
HI - 1.8 percent, 2.6
AL - 26 percent, 8.5
Ark - 15.7 percent, 5.5
LA - 32.5 percent, 11.2
MI - 36.3 percent, 9.9
WV - 3.2 percent, 2.2
WY - .8 percent, 1.8
So with this simple bit of analysis, the high-gun ownership rate states of West Virginia and Wyoming have LOWER murder rates than the four low-gun ownership states. Hence the need to lump them with the four Southern states - to hide another possible finding of that study, one the PC folks at Harvard would NOT want to discover.
The Harvard School of Public Health is the laughing-stock of the medical world. See
http://www.guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html
I love how gun ownership has recently become a matter of "Health." FMCDH
Dr. Miller, a noted expert on cause and effect, went on to point out that wind is caused by all the trees getting together and wiggling their limbs.
Ummmm... Yeah. Got to this point, and knew this article was crap.
Typical dimocRAT BS.
Well, there is this:
In fact, the six states with the highest rates of gun ownership--Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming, West Virginia and Arkansas--had more than 21,000 homicides, nearly three times as many as the four states with the lowest rates of gun ownership--Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey.
Correct me if I'm wrong but did the author of this article compare raw numbers of homicides in six states to raw numbers of homicides in four other states? That's a pure BS comparison.
Of course, this may be the fault of the author of the news story and not the researchers, who may not have put forth such a comparison in their actual paper. But it certainly is "BS in the article". Comparing the number of homicides in a group of six states to the number of homicides in some other group of four states is a pure nonsense comparison. States have different populations and such. Especially take note of the fact that group 2 includes Rhode Island and Hawaii. I betcha group 1 also has "nearly three times as many" TiVos as group 2....
MA - 9.3 percent, 2.3
NJ - 8.5 percent, 4
RI - 11.9 percent, 3.7
HI - 10.7 percent, 2.6
AL - 16.1 percent, 8.5
Ark - 15.8 percent, 5.5
LA - 19.6 percent, 11.2
MI - 19.9 percent, 9.9
WV - 17.9 percent, 2.2
WY - 11.4 percent, 1.8
So, with the exception of West Virginia, the poverty rate has a fair correlation to the relative murder rate.
In other words, there are many, many factors that better model the murder rate than gun ownership.
Practically nobody owns a (legal) gun in DC.
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