
Firearms vs. Intentional Homicide - sturgill
https://guns-vs-homicide.github.io/
======
dkokelley
"The data clearly supports your opinion"

What a great subtitle to the page. The first thing I looked for in the graph
was data that supported my opinion. The subtitle called me out, and I read the
rest of the page with (what I hope was) a more objective eye.

Unfortunately guns are a very polarizing topic, and reliable, unbiased
analysis is difficult to come by. The magnitude of other confounding factors
(income, crime, education, family history, policing policies and intensity,
etc.) make an honest attempt at understanding their influence even more
difficult.

~~~
hga
I loved it as well, and I've been a pro-gun activist since the early '70s.

Although my opinion is "not a strong correlation between the two", and that
certainly seems to be supported by the supplied data.

~~~
dice
>Although my opinion is "not a strong correlation between the two", and that
certainly seems to be supported by the supplied data.

That position is supported by the first analysis, but not the other two. The
three analyses provide three different conclusions: no correlation,
correlation with increased homicide, correlation with decreased homicide.

~~~
hga
Could be, I only eyeballed the pretty graph.

------
jessaustin
This is great. It's interesting that they can support the anti-gun argument
without even resorting to the typical advocacy cheat we see of excluding all
but a few nations from the analysis. 143 nations isn't all of them, but it's
enough to prevent cherry-picking. Yesterday I saw something about suicide that
excluded _Japan_. Hilarious!

~~~
oneloop
You seem to think that's somehow wrong. Excluding ouliers some times makes
sense. If you're trying to decide whether variable x ptedicts y, it makes
sense to remove data points where you have strong reasons to believe that
other variables stronger than x might be at play.

What was the argument to exclude Japan?

~~~
jessaustin
No argument was made. Japan wasn't mentioned. It was something like, "these
are the top ten nations measured by quality of life as judged by the
international administration of judgmental assholes, and you can see that they
all have lower suicide rates than USA."

 _When_ the exclusion is mentioned, _and_ some reference to other, more
decisive factors is made, your point might be valid, although in that case one
has to wonder why we're not looking at the more decisive factors instead. It
is rarely the case that such caveats are mentioned when trying to dress up
political opinions in sociological camouflage. USA is a postcolonial nation of
the Americas with a large, diverse population. As such, when considering
health or violence it should be compared to other postcolonial nations of the
Americas with large, diverse populations, e.g. Mexico or Brazil. It's rare for
that to take place. TFA succeeds in that, so it has my compliments.

------
sirtastic
1) the effect of firearms on homicide, if it exists, must be small 2) more
firearms means more homicide... 3) unless you live in a developed country in
which case more firearms means less homicide

My favorite part about this is how it demonstrates how data can "clearly
support your opinion". So what's the verdict here, do guns = more homicide as
it relates to most of us in a first world country? Would this change your
opinion on gun control?

------
PhasmaFelis
I've always felt that both sides' arguments about gun control are
frustratingly uncertain, so this data does in fact support my opinion! :D

Has there been any significant effort to really comprehensively evaluate the
data around gun violence and gun control? I've seen arguments on both sides
that seem convincing given the data they present, but they always seem to be
cherry-picked to support the "right" conclusion. Nobody is interested in
evaluating first and then making policy.

~~~
hga
It's genuinely hard. You have to go to a granularity of counties at minimum,
and pro-gun John Lott is the only guy I know who's done that.

E.g. look at this by state and hit the column sorting buttons:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state)

Maryland, which I lived next to while in Arlington, VA for a dozen years, and
Missouri where I was born, raised, and have retired to, have very similar
statistics with very different gun control regimes. Just looked at racial
makeup on their separate state pages, and Maryland has almost 3 times the
percentage of blacks, which would not at all support a thesis that they're
generically overly prone to murder with guns.

Or look at Joplin, and at the other end of I-44, which replaced Route 66, is
St. Louis, just now the murder capital of the US. Night and day, same gun
control laws or lack thereof, e.g. no more difficult to buy them than anywhere
else in the US and easy to obtain concealed carry licenses.

~~~
geggam
Should tell you gun violence is more a symptom of other issues.

I grew up where you could go deer hunting and leave school early to do so.
Rule was you had to put your gun / bullets in the principals office. Same
place those of us who were in trouble sat.

Unattended. 50+ guns / couple hundred bullets. No one ever got shot nor was it
ever even talked about.

~~~
hga
When my father went to high school here in the late '40s, he and his peers
would keep their long guns in their lockers for the same reason, same result
with absolutely no control by the school authorities. The late Supreme Court
justice Scalia, 3 years younger, related in the oral arguments of _Heller_ how
he'd carry his target rifle on the NYC subway to and from his school/JROTC?
rifle range.

When I attended in the late '70s, the JROTC rifles were in a safe to which we
did not have the combination (well, they were government property), now they
use air rifles :-(.

------
A1kmm
All of the statistics are misleading. The third one is particularly so,
because they are weighting by s$population * s$homicides_per_100000, i.e.
100000 * homicides which makes it completely meaningless).

Starting from the data defined in that article:

> d$homicides = d$homicides_per_100000 * d$population / 100000 > d$firearms =
> d$firearms_per_100 * d$population / 100 > summary(lm(formula = d$homicides ~
> d$firearms))

Call: lm(formula = d$homicides ~ d$firearms)

Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -12851 -2081 -1841 -978 50042

Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 2.114e+03
5.592e+02 3.780 0.000231 __* d$firearms 9.142e-05 2.253e-05 4.058 8.18e-05 __*
\--- Signif. codes: 0 ‘ __ _’ 0.001 ‘_ _’ 0.01 ‘_ ’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 6561 on 141 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared:
0.1046, Adjusted R-squared: 0.0982 F-statistic: 16.46 on 1 and 141 DF,
p-value: 8.179e-05

> s <\- d[d$gdp_ppp_per_capita > median(d$gdp_ppp_per_capita),] >
> summary(lm(formula = s$homicides ~ s$firearms))

Call: lm(formula = s$homicides ~ s$firearms)

Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -4509 -2097 -1997 -1747 50543

Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 2.096e+03
9.202e+02 2.278 0.0258 * s$firearms 6.158e-05 2.739e-05 2.248 0.0277 * \---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘ __ _’ 0.001 ‘_ _’ 0.01 ‘_ ’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 7591 on 69 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared:
0.06827, Adjusted R-squared: 0.05477 F-statistic: 5.056 on 1 and 69 DF,
p-value: 0.02774

In other words, the most obvious analysis to do shows strong evidence for a
positive relationship between total homicides and total firearms - the link is
in the same direction but much weaker when you only look at the upper half of
countries by GDP.

Correlation doesn't imply causation - it could be that in some countries,
people obtain firearms because the homicide rate is high, or there could be
some other confounding factor not even in the data that drives both.

If this had been an experiment and each country had been assigned a firearm
ownership rate, it would have been safe to conclude that each million firearm
owners cause between 55 and 68 homicides (99% confidence interval).

~~~
pps43
Weighting by number of homicides is actually reasonable. Since homicides are
rare, variance of homicide rate is driven by number of homicides rather than
by population. Weighting by inverse variance is pretty common.

------
banku_brougham
p<0.14 reads "the likelihood that the observed positive correlation between
intentional homicide rate and firearms per population rate is due to random
effects is < 14%"

That is not that same as "statistically insignificant" which OP uses.

~~~
A1kmm
It is a p-value, not a Bayesian probability. A p-value is the probability of
seeing data as or more extreme purely due to chance, not the probability that
your data is due to chance.

In other words, X is the event of observing data as or more extreme than what
you observed, H0 is the event that the relationship is due to random effects.
P(E1 | E2) is the probability of E1 given E. You are claiming that P(H0 | X) <
0.14, but the evidence is that P(X | H0) < 0.14.

If you wanted to do Bayesian statistics, you could obtain P(H0 | X) = P(X |
H0) * P(H0) / P(X) = P(X | H0) * P(H0) / (P(X | H0) * H0 + P(X | not H0) *
(1-H0))

To do that, you need a prior probability of H0 - in other words, to do
Bayesian inference you need a prior belief about how likely something is to be
true and evidence will update your belief. If you are already absolutely
certain of H0 or not H0, no amount of evidence will shift your view in
Bayesian inference, as any amount of evidence is best explained as random
variation.

~~~
banku_brougham
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value)

------
mistaken
I think that China and India should be removed, since they seem to be
outliers. jk :) Nice article on how statistics can support any argument.

------
threatofrain
Maybe the site is a joke about abuse of statistics, but I wish the data were
organized by gun owning individuals vs. gun-related murders.

------
r00fus
Why qualify the homocides? Even unintentional homocides are bad; the number of
stories of parents shooting their kids unintentionally or kids shooting
themselves or their family unintentionally are pretty legion.

I would be more interested in all gun-related homocides per capita.

~~~
DrScump
<kids shooting themselves or their family>

Realize that a lot of these press and anecdotal reports are false. Depicting
an innocent (and more importantly, _unprosecutable_ ) child as the shooter
lets a negligent (or perp) teen or adult evade investigation and prosecution.

There were several stories last year about a 2-year-old finding a handgun and
shooting a family member with it. Given the hand strength and coordination of
even your strongest 2-year-old, the idea that any could actually lift, grip
(given the hand size vs. the frame size of even the smallest production
handgun) aim, enable (e.g. take off safety where appropriate), and _squeeze_ a
trigger with the action necessary to make it fire straight is at best lottery
odds. I don't think it's ever been demonstrated in a laboratory condition
(which you would think anti-RKBA researchers must have attempted).

I _could_ theoretically picture a kid pulling a trigger with _thumb_ strength,
but that could only hit the child or somebody directly behind him.

~~~
scott_s
Are you aware of any documented incidents of this happening?

~~~
hga
I know of one akin, in my home town:
[http://www.koamtv.com/story/13749977/joplin-teen-dead-
after-...](http://www.koamtv.com/story/13749977/joplin-teen-dead-after-being-
shot-during-slumber-party)

TL;DR and details probably left out of that article:

14 year old had some "friends" over for a slumber party. Father had left a gun
outside of the safe while working on getting a holster to fit, in an area of
the house where they weren't allowed to be in.

Of course they ventured there, one "friend" saw the gun, picked it up and
pointed it at her head, and pulled the trigger.

It was ruled a "tragic" accident when it was at minimum manslaughter.

~~~
LyndsySimon
GP's post was about a 2-year-old. Obviously a 14-year-old has the strength to
operate a firearm.

~~~
hga
That's why I said it was "akin", a like case, where in a different way, it was
officially scored as an accident when it was obviously was nothing of the
sort.

He used 2 year olds as an example where, physically, they couldn't have done
what was officially blamed on them.

Bottom line, the authorities are _known_ to lie, in my home town they white
knighted the killer and blamed the father. Be especially wary of statistics
from cities with high murder rates when the politicians apply pressure to
reduce the murder statistics, Chicago being only the latest example I've heard
of.

