
Less guns = more violence: Harvard Study - JohnDakota
http://lifesciencephdadventures.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/harvard-gun-study-less-guns-results-in-more-violence/
======
bostik
Having skimmed the paper over, I'd like to quote this parapgraph, running from
end of page 16 and rolling over to page 17.

 _Once again, we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun
control _causes_ nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring
nations that permit handgun ownership. Rather, we assert a political causation
for the observed correlation that nations with stringent gun controls tend to
have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns. The political
causation is that nations which have violence problems tend to adopt severe
gun controls, but these do not reduce violence, which is determined by basic
socio‐cultural and economic factors._

Stringent gun control policies tend to appear in nations and/or regions where
violence is _already_ a problem. This study merely underlines the futility of
any single tunnel-visioned policy - people who are willing to commit murder,
are also willing to expend effort to find any weapon(s) to allow them to
proceed in their endeavours.

Here in Finland, we have quite a few weapons, but they are rarely used in
violent crimes. This nation tends to favour bladed weapons in their homicides:
knives, axes and other things that are easy to pick up and use in drunken
anger.

~~~
cpncrunch
At least with knives and axes you have some chance to run away.

~~~
gizzlon
And it's hard to stab 70 people ..

~~~
Zelphyr
The #1 weapon of mass murderers, despite what the media would have you
believe, is fire.

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ctdonath
Remove just four cities from US homicide rates and the USA drops from one of
the highest on the per-capita murder list to one of the lowest. Interestingly,
those cities also have the highest level of gun control.

~~~
bmelton
I don't have the numbers on hand, but I've tested that claim in the past, and
have to say that it isn't true.

Without knowing which 4 cities you were citing, let's assume that we're
talking about 4 Chicagos (the national worst), whose homicide tally for last
year was 500 (435 gun-based), that means we could remove as much as 2,000 from
the intentional homicide rate, which doesn't move us substantially along the
scale, and certainly doesn't put is within even a couple dozen of the bottom
of the list.

If we refine the parameters even to be more optimistic, and limit it from
first-world countries with similar domestic output, it still doesn't push us
substantially down the list to consider us even remotely "one of the lowest".

Of note, perhaps, is that I am a civil rights supporter, and I believe that
the second amendment grants us the right to keep and bear arms without
infringement. Regardless, I tried for a few days to make that claim reconcile
with reality, and couldn't.

If anybody knows of the criteria chosen, I'd gladly re-do the numbers, but I
feel it would have to stack the deck pretty deliberately to get even close to
that outcome in actuality.

~~~
ctdonath
The extent of the jurisdiction may be a squishy factor. The "greater
metropolitan area" may extend well beyond the strictly-speaking city limits.

~~~
bmelton
Very fine point. I don't know that I've ever looked at data that represented
crime in "a given city" and "surrounding areas".

Might indeed be the tipping point. Thanks!

~~~
hga
Indeed. In the case I'm most familiar with, a whole lot of people decamped
from impossible D.C. to Prince George's county, Maryland.

Now, to someone who lived in Arlington, Virginia for a dozen years the crime
in PG was awful. To someone living in D.C. I strongly suspect PG was not bad
at all, and being allowed to own a firearm in your house made I'm sure a
significant difference.

Or take Boston, which the WASPs kept small after the Irish took over the city;
without looking in more detail, the top level Wikipedia page indicates
annexations stopped after 1874 with one non-WASP exception
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park,_Boston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park,_Boston)).

------
lutusp
> Less guns = more violence: Harvard Study

"Less guns"? No one at Harvard would dare write such an ungrammatical headline
-- this had to be the work of the submitter. And it is.

[http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-
vs-l...](http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-less/)

~~~
ctdonath
The wording is probably influenced by the title of the popular book "More
Guns, Less Crime".

~~~
lutusp
Yes, and ironically enough, that's grammatical, because crime is a continuous
quantity. Oh, well, I guess it's all a bit arcane.

------
dubcanada
I really hate random people taking an article and twisting it for there own
link bait. No where in this study does it say that "less guns" equals "more
violence". All it says is that areas with high violence (irregardless of guns,
this also does not take into account the % of those murders that happen due to
guns) have high gun control.

This article also does not take into account areas in Africa, and the Middle
East and instead focuses on Europe, which is greatly swayed due to the high
level of murders in Russia.

This article should be called "In Europe More Guns != More Violence".

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bsbechtel
Here is a thought experiment:

You are someone who is considering committing a crime. Let's say a robbery of
a convenience store. You already own a gun. It doesn't matter how you acquired
your gun, you already have it. You now have the choice of where to commit your
crime. You can commit that crime in an area where it is illegal to own a
firearm, and your victim will very likely not be able to defend himself, or
you can commit that crime in an area where your victim can legitimately own a
crime, and may shoot you if you try to rob him. Where do you choose to commit
your crime?

~~~
mef
How plausible is it that enough people cross state or country borders in order
to rob convenience stores to make a difference in the measured violent crime
rates?

~~~
ctdonath
Correcting your question to replace "state or country" with "jurisdiction",
considering the extreme variance of gun laws within the USA, the answer is it
_does_ make a difference.

There is growing evidence that criminals DO, at least to a meaningful degree
(hey, they're criminals - most are stupid), choose their targets based on odds
of the would-be victim fighting back. Of late and in particular, several mass
murders have occurred in "gun-free zones" when more convenient/suitable (to
the killer) venues existed but allowed civilian weapon carry.

Parallel answer to your question is that the measured violent crime rates you
reference are too broad, aggregating a few small high-violence areas with
broad low-violence zones, creating misguided statistics.

~~~
hga
ALL the notorious recent mass murders except for the Arizona Congresswoman
shooting happened in gun free zones. If the people right there hadn't
restrained the shooter he would likely have been stopped by an armed citizen
who showed up moments later (while the restraining was still an act in
progress).

------
KyleBrandt
"With increased firearm regulations you find an increase in violent crime."

Is there some control for the possibility that those areas enacted firearm
regulations due to already having a lot of violent crime?

Edit: It is addressed in the linked to document:

"But the more plausible explanation for many nations having widespread gun
ownership with low violence is that these nations never had high murder and
violence rates and so never had occasion to enact severe anti‐gun laws. On the
other hand, in nations that have ex‐perienced high and rising violent crime
rates, the legislative reaction has generally been to enact increasingly
severe antigun laws" \- (Bottom of Pg. 672)

------
Pxtl
Should be obvious. Violent areas need to create more laws to control the
violence. Peaceful areas don't need to tell their citizens not to have guns.

See also
[http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-03-03/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-03-03/)

~~~
ctdonath
The point is those additional laws _don 't_ control the violence. Good/law-
abiding/upstanding armed citizens, however, do.

~~~
VBprogrammer
I'd love to see a citation for that.

Maybe its just the sad fact that bad news tends to travel more widely but I
have yet to hear (on UK news) of a situation were an honest law abiding
citizen has stopped a tragedy. I realize that their very intervention may have
stopped a tragedy, making it not news worthy but I'm sure there should be more
instances to justify that argument.

~~~
GVIrish
Well in the UK law-abiding citizens can't arm themselves so you'll never hear
that story. The law in the UK even goes so far as to prohibit citizens from
carrying an 'offensive weapon' without a good reason.

So if you happened to be walking down the street with a knife and you were not
a chef on the way to work, you could be arrested.

~~~
hga
Even using "more force" than the assailant is illegal. Even if both are
examples of deadly force, e.g gun v. knife. Done by the courts in the '50s,
the Parliament in the '60s, so even the habits of self-defense are a distant
memory.

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VikingCoder
Removing bullets from people causes violent crime.

Look, we can statistically show that everywhere someone has tried to do
something about people getting injured with guns, there is more violent gun
crime!

We must stop these surgeons! Clearly, by trying to help, they're causing the
problem!

</sarcasm> <logicalFallacyReference name="post hoc ergo propter hoc" />

~~~
onebaddude
Don't assume that everyone, especially Harvard researchers, are as ignorant of
statistics, correlation and causation as you appear to be. Their intention and
conclusion is clear in the paper. They aren't making any bold, ridiculous
claims.

~~~
VikingCoder
First, "as you appear to be." Where did that come from? Do you have any basis
for that thought, or do you just enjoy typing angry words that sound good to
you?

Second, the Hacker News article headline is, "Less guns = more violence." That
is an absolute declaration of causation.

The linked article makes this assertion without any backing:

 _And enacting legislation without proper evidence supporting that it will
have the desired effects can actually result in, as these studies show, the
complete opposite._

The study does not show that. In fact:

 _we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun control _causes_
nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit
handgun ownership._

As close as they get in the report:

 _these [laws] do not reduce violence,_

While the linked article claims that they _increase_ violence.

TL;DR: The linked article makes false claims about what the report says, and
the Hacker News article headline is just as bad or worse.

------
dragonwriter
Its not a "Harvard study", its a study by people with no affiliation with
Harvard published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Polic, which isn't
a scientific journal but a Harvard Law student-run publication that bills
itself as "The nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal
scholarship."

Its also not a structured analysis (or meta-analysis), but a polemic with
footnotes.

------
dsizzle
Note the title of the article in the link has changed (after a comment there)
to "more gun regulation correlates to more violence", which is quite a bit
different from less guns correlate to more violence (the current title here).

~~~
lutusp
Yes -- it's grammatically correct, and this title isn't.

~~~
dsizzle
Well, the tacit assumption that "more gun control" means "fewer guns" is a
more substantive problem. I think other "Harvard studies" (Hemenway) show, in
fact, that fewer guns correlate with LESS homicide.
[http://nyti.ms/142rOJe](http://nyti.ms/142rOJe)

~~~
lutusp
Shifting topics away from grammar for a moment, it's unfortunate that these
issues can't really be studied scientifically. The result is that people can
take the existing data and twist it to suit any conclusion.

Most European countries have fewer guns or no guns, and much lower levels of
violence. But then, they're different people with different values -- the role
of guns in their societies might be an effect, not a cause.

------
frakkingcylons
What makes the title more absurd than usual (regardless of if it's been edited
or not) is that the final paragraph of the post emphasizes that complex
systems of society can't be boiled down to simplistic relationships. Such as
"less guns == more violence" or vice versa.

------
known
'Diverse society will fail' \--Robert Putnam.

[http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/)

------
greesil
And correlation is still causation!

~~~
Pxtl
In this case, it is causation. Just not in the direction the gun advocates
would like to think. Gun violence causes gun control laws, not the other way
around.

------
rasengan0
Gee,I hope there is no bias.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute)

------
TausAmmer
You can't ban stupid people by law. Or there isn't one that succeed yet.

------
gingersnap
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

------
cpncrunch
Looks like they are cherrypicking data to prove their pet theory. A couple of
points:

\- Legally held guns in England are generally owned by farmers, collectors and
hunters. Those people predominantly live in rural areas, where crime is low.
High rates of homicide generally occur in cities using illegal guns. So
naturally you will see a negative correlation between LEGAL guns and violence.
However it isn't the gun control legislation that is causing the increase in
violence (LOL). In fact if you allowed teenagers in the shitty housing estates
to legally own guns, I suspect you'd have a lot more homicides.

\- Compare Canada to the USA. We have 1/3 of the legally held guns you have,
and about 1/3rd of the homicide rate.

~~~
GVIrish
The Harvard study unequivocally does not say that gun control legislation
causes the increased violence, nor does the linked blog post.

The Harvard study is simply stating that murder rates are not appreciably
affected by gun control legislation, and that the big drivers of violence are
socioeconomic.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The Harvard study

Contrary to the headline (here and of the blog post), there is no Harvard
study involved. If you can call the paper a study (which is, I think, somewhat
dubious -- that implies a structured analysis or meta-analysis, which this is
not) by two non-Harvard-affiliated scholars (one of which is affiliated with a
right-wing think tank) published a student-run publication out of Harvard that
bills itself as "the nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian
legal scholarship."

