Desertdog
Member
Misleading Gun Facts
http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds215.html
by Brad Edmonds
A particularly gullible member of the public watched Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, in which Moore apparently (and in keeping with his pattern) blames the existence of guns for gun crimes, and quotes false statistics. This viewer then read one or another of my gun articles, and decided I needed correcting. His thinking is probably common, and some of his misconceptions need to be dispelled, the more so the more common they are.
First, and most telling, the reader told me "there’s only one statistic that needs to be addressed," that being that there are more guns in the US than in Japan, and more gun deaths in the US than in Japan. This kind of thinking makes one’s mind ripe for takeover by such hucksters as Michael Moore. There is never only one statistic that needs to be addressed.
For example, there’s just one statistic that will tell you the US has both the world’s highest per-capita incidence of osteoporosis and the world’s highest per-capita intake of calcium. This one statistic would tell a naïve reader that calcium causes osteoporosis. Our doctors believe just the opposite, and they prescribe calcium to treat osteoporosis. The more likely explanation of our high rates of osteoporosis in the US is that our older women don’t lift a lot of heavy weights. Lifting makes your body demand growth in bone density. People lift things more in other countries as part of their daily activities.
My reader then stated that the only differences between Japan and the United States are "homogeneity and race factors," after which he concluded that the difference in gun deaths is explainable only by the presence of guns. There are other significant differences between the US and Japan, however, that help explain the difference in gun violence.
For one, Japan is officially a gun-free state. While the Japanese enjoy more civil liberties than Americans in many respects, owning a gun legally is beyond the reach of nearly every Japanese citizen. Hence, in Japan, only organized criminals and the police own guns. I would consider this unacceptable.
For another, the US wasn’t a high-crime area until the 1960s, when our courts decided that leniency, understanding, and protecting convicted criminals would reduce crime. Per the Dave Kopel research linked above, Japan is not lenient toward criminals. For another, most gun deaths in the US – 52% – are suicides. The suicide rate in Japan is so much higher than in the US, combining suicides with gun deaths makes the combined rate in Japan actually higher than in the US. Hence, the true gun violence rate, when that violence is directed from one person to another, is not as much higher in the US as raw statistics would lead you to believe.
My reader quoted some numbers that must have come Moore directly – for example, that the gun violence rate is 43,000% higher in the US than in Japan. The UN tells us the US rate is only 8 times higher than Japan’s. Further, crime is on the rise in Japan, while for years in the US it has been falling as city and state governments relax gun-control laws (and local police departments perhaps fudge the statistics a bit, as you’ll see in the news from time to time).
If you could undo the damage done by our judges, undo the difference in culture (Japan has had centuries of often unquestioning obedience to government, while the US has had a few centuries of rugged individualism – now on the wane; and for centuries in Japan, weapons have been owned only by the ruling classes), separate the contaminating effect of suicides, and make gun laws the same in both places, you’d probably find violence rates to be very similar between the two countries.
And every time you relax gun laws, allowing more people to own guns, gun crime will go down – in any country.
This is because all the statistics are driven by ordinary human nature. Given the opportunity to be able to defend themselves and their families, fathers and mothers will take the opportunity, making criminals and government (or do I repeat myself?) less daring in their threats against our lives and property. At the same time, the vast majority of us, in every country, don’t want to go out and commit crimes against others for a living. With these two ordinary, observable facts together, you can bet that in any country, taking guns away from people will result in an increase in ordinary crime and in government oppression. Ultimately, the statistics paint a picture consistent with that.
When you see vast disparities in a single datum between one country and another, nothing as simple as the "presence of guns" will be the explanation. Guns are, after all, completely inanimate. And there is no case in which a single correlation is all you need to know.
This much you can know, however: You are better off when you are allowed to own all the guns you want; and so is your neighbor.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds215.html
by Brad Edmonds
A particularly gullible member of the public watched Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, in which Moore apparently (and in keeping with his pattern) blames the existence of guns for gun crimes, and quotes false statistics. This viewer then read one or another of my gun articles, and decided I needed correcting. His thinking is probably common, and some of his misconceptions need to be dispelled, the more so the more common they are.
First, and most telling, the reader told me "there’s only one statistic that needs to be addressed," that being that there are more guns in the US than in Japan, and more gun deaths in the US than in Japan. This kind of thinking makes one’s mind ripe for takeover by such hucksters as Michael Moore. There is never only one statistic that needs to be addressed.
For example, there’s just one statistic that will tell you the US has both the world’s highest per-capita incidence of osteoporosis and the world’s highest per-capita intake of calcium. This one statistic would tell a naïve reader that calcium causes osteoporosis. Our doctors believe just the opposite, and they prescribe calcium to treat osteoporosis. The more likely explanation of our high rates of osteoporosis in the US is that our older women don’t lift a lot of heavy weights. Lifting makes your body demand growth in bone density. People lift things more in other countries as part of their daily activities.
My reader then stated that the only differences between Japan and the United States are "homogeneity and race factors," after which he concluded that the difference in gun deaths is explainable only by the presence of guns. There are other significant differences between the US and Japan, however, that help explain the difference in gun violence.
For one, Japan is officially a gun-free state. While the Japanese enjoy more civil liberties than Americans in many respects, owning a gun legally is beyond the reach of nearly every Japanese citizen. Hence, in Japan, only organized criminals and the police own guns. I would consider this unacceptable.
For another, the US wasn’t a high-crime area until the 1960s, when our courts decided that leniency, understanding, and protecting convicted criminals would reduce crime. Per the Dave Kopel research linked above, Japan is not lenient toward criminals. For another, most gun deaths in the US – 52% – are suicides. The suicide rate in Japan is so much higher than in the US, combining suicides with gun deaths makes the combined rate in Japan actually higher than in the US. Hence, the true gun violence rate, when that violence is directed from one person to another, is not as much higher in the US as raw statistics would lead you to believe.
My reader quoted some numbers that must have come Moore directly – for example, that the gun violence rate is 43,000% higher in the US than in Japan. The UN tells us the US rate is only 8 times higher than Japan’s. Further, crime is on the rise in Japan, while for years in the US it has been falling as city and state governments relax gun-control laws (and local police departments perhaps fudge the statistics a bit, as you’ll see in the news from time to time).
If you could undo the damage done by our judges, undo the difference in culture (Japan has had centuries of often unquestioning obedience to government, while the US has had a few centuries of rugged individualism – now on the wane; and for centuries in Japan, weapons have been owned only by the ruling classes), separate the contaminating effect of suicides, and make gun laws the same in both places, you’d probably find violence rates to be very similar between the two countries.
And every time you relax gun laws, allowing more people to own guns, gun crime will go down – in any country.
This is because all the statistics are driven by ordinary human nature. Given the opportunity to be able to defend themselves and their families, fathers and mothers will take the opportunity, making criminals and government (or do I repeat myself?) less daring in their threats against our lives and property. At the same time, the vast majority of us, in every country, don’t want to go out and commit crimes against others for a living. With these two ordinary, observable facts together, you can bet that in any country, taking guns away from people will result in an increase in ordinary crime and in government oppression. Ultimately, the statistics paint a picture consistent with that.
When you see vast disparities in a single datum between one country and another, nothing as simple as the "presence of guns" will be the explanation. Guns are, after all, completely inanimate. And there is no case in which a single correlation is all you need to know.
This much you can know, however: You are better off when you are allowed to own all the guns you want; and so is your neighbor.
