[dirtboy]

Now, let's look at murder rates, percentage of African-Americans for the ten states. Murder rate is number of murders per 100,000 people:

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.

[wardaddy]

Well done.....they took a few Southern states with epidemic minority homicides and high gun ownership (largely due to that fact and hunting) and lumped them together with WY and WV to make a faulty political statement.

Incredible.

[Mr. Mojo]

Nice job.

[Flying Circus]

I took your numbers as data for a statistical model in a program called JMP. I had a very interesting result: There was no statistically significant relationship between the ownership of guns (not having the ownership rate, I entered the states as catagorical, yes or no on gun ownership), but there was a very high corrolation between murder rate and the minority population. I wish I could show the model profiler and leverage plots here.

Can anyone get me more complete data on this including the actual ownership rates and other demographic factors? I would love to stick it into the program to see how this result holds up.

[pw2000]

"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."

If they wanted to skew the numbers, they would have LEFT OUT the low murder rate states like WV and WY.

One other point: I thought that gun ownership made a place safer. Isn't that the claim of the NRA etc....Even if the Harvard study doesn't prove that guns are more dangerous, it doesn't support the case that high gun ownership makes a community safer.

[Travis McGee]

Nice research.

Things that make you go "Hmmmm...."