[ServesURight]

Where's the FReeper who usually posts that "Man on the lifeboat" BS graphic??

[Fiddlstix]

Where's the FReeper who usually posts that "Man on the lifeboat" BS graphic??

There are several Freepers who post it
I'm one of them....
But
This article needs more than just the "BS Meter"

[Timesink]

Of course, they're conveniently avoiding the real question: Does gun ownership in and of itself cause more homicides, or is it merely that people in pro-gun states are more likely to use a gun to kill somebody, instead of a baseball bat, a knife, poisoning, etc?

Not that we can even trust what little they claim in this article without seeing the entire study.

[JPJones]

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...

Stopped reading this article right there.

[HIDEK6]

"US States with more gun owners have more murders."

What BS.

damn statistics.

I wonder if the US states with more gun owners also have MORE PEOPLE (Sam Kinison imitation).

[Timesink]

Oh yeah, two more questions:

1) More than other states? That conveniently leaves out Washington, DC.

2) What about states that contain major cities that ban guns (and where gun violence is through the roof as a result) whereas the rest of the state is pro-gun and homicides are low? The authors of this study are choosing what are more or less random, arbitrary divisions of the population - state borders - as the basis for their studies. And that's useless. What if DC was part of Maryland? What if NYC was part of New Jersey? What if LA and the Southland were its own state? Any of those variables would wildly skew the results of this study, and thus proves that the results of any such study are too skewed to be of any use ... except as probaganda for the rapidly dying gun-grabber crowd.

[Joe Brower]

There is additional commentary on this over at The Firing Line.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

I agree: the presence of guns in a home is very dangerous for the life and health of criminal intruders.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Hmmm ... don't think he's ever heard of "correlation is not causation." Principle number one in social science investigations.

Perhaps states have more guns because there are more murders, so more people feel a need for lethal defense.

How do "gun-frei-ammunition-verboten" cities like Chicago, DC, LA, and NYC fit into this equation? I guess all those murdered people in those places were killed with pointed sticks or pomegranates?

[lavaroise]

legal or illegal gun ownership? If guns are so bad, should cops have them? Sheesh.

I have a job to do, and it is to own a gun. They can bite me. I don't stop them, so let them not stop me.

And while they are on the issue, crimes and coercive societal oppression from criminals do increase without gun owners around.

I do not fight for my privileges but for rights. So if they are willing to fight and kill people out of the privilege of being a gunfree equalitarian sheeple society, these people are clearly on the side of crime and murder. Crimes and liberals threatening people around exist, we have a job to do and it is to own guns. Sorry, they are the ones making an issue of it and they are the very reason owning guns is so important. Glad they made that point clear.

[Bonaparte]

Still unwilling to debate John Lott on the facts, the gun grabbers instead put out another phony "study."

Pathetic.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Didn't see Texas on the list.

[Atlas Sneezed]

Compare:

Statement 1: "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."

Statement 2: "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."

(He rings the bell loudly for political effect, then quietly tries to un-ring it to preserve his credibility within his small fraternity.)

[Plutarch]

The results are all because of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Wyoming and West Virginia are among the lowest murder rates, lower than MA!

[challenger]

Serial Truth-Murderers

Some researchers can't even lie imaginatively or competently. Thank God for small favors!

The current bogus "study" by the same authors appears to be a cookie-cutter replay, with just a slight change in subject matter, substituting "people" for "children". The same team of authors published "Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths,Suicide, and Homicide among 5–14 Year Olds" that appeared in the Feb., 2002 issue of "The Journal of Trauma", Vol. 52, number 2, pp. 267-276. I am assuming that they used the same methods in both studies since the general concept is the same, although I admit that I did not feel like spending any money to buy the complete current "study". If the methodology is substantially different, I may retract my analysis. However, the states with lowest firearms ownership and most of the high ownership states are the same in both studies.

The important point to notice is the way that they determine the level of firearms ownership in each state. They use various forms of "proxies", or supposed factors that tell how many firearms there are. Since it is not a direct measurement, it is usually going to be inexact. How inexact?

Well, you probably are going to fall off your chair laughing when you find out that the Feb. "study" found that some of the states with the lowest firearms ownership were: #6 South Dakota, #7 Minnesota, #9 Iowa, and #10 New Hampshire. This just illustrates how little the researchers understand about the real world. South Dakota? I am sure that SoDak will confirm that almost everyone in South Dakota has one or more firearms, and many people carry them in their vehicles, even if they don't have CCW's. Incidentally, South Dakota always has one of the 3 lowest murder rates in America, and in 2001, it was the lowest, with a rate of 0.9 per 100,000 residents, compared to the National Average of 5.6 or the "lowest gun ownership" Hawaii with 2.6 or tiny, liberal Rhode Island with 3.7. It is also interesting to note that South Dakota's murder rate (with all those guns!) is far lower than Britain's or France's, and it is the same as "gun free since 1588" Japan's rate.

As others have noted on this thread, there are many other factors that correlate well with the murder rates. One of the most consistent is the observation that the murder rates generally decline as you move Northward. In fact, our Northern states have murder rates not much different than Canada's, which has far more restrictive firearms laws.
______________________________

Randall N. Herrst, J.D.
President
The Center For The Study Of Crime
JOIN NOW! The Premier Resource for Innovative Activists!
http://www.studycrime.org

[go star go]

Being a resident in one of these "high gun" states I can attest to the fact that we will homocide any jackass that breaks into our home...

[go star go]

http://consumerlawpage.com/article/breast.shtml

there's some more havard study info

[go star go]

http://www.junkscience.com/news/secret.html

not again...

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Can't wait to find out what the flaws in this study are (apart from the one mentioned...does the murder rate cause the higher gun ownership, or vice-versa?).

My initial opinion...gotta be bullsh*t!

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

BWANNG!

[copycat]

US STATES WITH MORE GUN OWNERS HAVE MORE MURDERS

This just in...They also have more people, more houses, more traffic lights, more barbeques, more banks, and more automobiles...what with them being the most populated states and all.