TV banner claims {states with higher gun control have lower gun violence}

[KMatch]

Like the title says. This was on ABC I believe and it was on the text banner across the bottom of the screen. I wonder where did this data come from? Are all you guys and my own eyes lying to me? Is this data maybe comparing gun violence statewide in some states while only using gun violence inside courthouses in gun controlled states? What does one smoke to come up with this much of a slant?? I've always been proud to be drug free but I'd like a hit of whatever these guys are smoking.

 

[GAF]

If you don't read the newspaper
you are uninformed, if you do
read the newspaper you are
misinformed. -- Mark Twain

 

[Lo-Fi]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/07/gun-violence-study-chicago/1969227/

Saw it on my google news feed this morning. Isn't this the study that excluded major city populations because they had their own gun laws?

 

[jamesbeat]

The only thing I can think of is that maybe gun violence is indeed lower, but overall violence is higher?
They probably included suicides in the statistics too.
It's also probable that they included lawful self defense as 'violence'.

Other than that, they probably just made it up. It's called propaganda.

 

[DouglasW]

I saw that too, and was immediately bothered by the flawed logic.

It would be far more useful if these talking heads ask the right question:

Does gun control reduce violence in our communities (not gun violence). I suspect not. And if more stringent laws merely shift the weapons that violent aggressors use to attack -- and removes a viable means of defense from smaller or physically weaker victims -- has it improved our communities?

The answer is, of course, no.

'gun violence' is becoming one of my least favorite catch phrases in this debate...right after 'common sense solutions'.

 

[Ryanxia]

While false information like this should be stopped. I don't care if my area is 5985732475% more dangerous because we exercise our freedoms, I'm still going to keep my Constitutional Rights thank you very much.

 

[akv3g4n]

Fleegler and researchers from Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health studied information from all 50 states between 2007 to 2010, analyzing all firearm-related deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and data on firearm laws compiled by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Hardly an unbiased study. I'm pretty sure they started with the results and worked backwards from there....

 

[Double Naught Spy]

I don't see anyone presenting data to the contrary, just posturing and castong dispersions. Can any show contrary results to the claims made, not other claims, but to the claims made?

 

[para.2]

Another article on the same subject with a slightlty different take:
http://news.yahoo.com/more-gun-laws-fewer-deaths-134804944.html
The key, to me is the last sentence,"Wintemute said it's likely that gun control measures are more readily enacted in states with few gun owners — a factor that might have more influence on gun deaths than the number of laws. "

 

[r1derbike]

Brady Center. 'nuff said.

 

[Ryanxia]

Another article on the same subject with a slightlty different take:
http://news.yahoo.com/more-gun-laws-fewer-deaths-134804944.html
The key, to me is the last sentence,"Wintemute said it's likely that gun control measures are more readily enacted in states with few gun owners — a factor that might have more influence on gun deaths than the number of laws. "

Good point.

 

[para.2]

The actual study is here, if anyone is interested: http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1661390

I'm still slugging through it, but here's a few highlights:

Our study has limitations. First, the legislative strength score, which tallies a single point per law, has not been validated. Neither has the weighted Brady scoring system, and we are unaware of any such scoring systems that have been validated.

...we found some heterogeneity in the firearm fatality rates among the states within each level of the legislative strength scores (eg, South Dakota has weak gun control laws and low rates of firearm fatality)

Fifth, although we found that states with more legislation have lower fatality rates, ie, are “safer” states, in a cross-sectional ecological study we could not determine if the greater number of laws were the reason for the reduced fatality rates. The association could have been confounded by firearm ownership rates or other unaccounted factors.

In other words, "We don't know that what we're saying is true, but it supports our world view."

 

[Akita1]

Another article on the same subject with a slightlty different take:
http://news.yahoo.com/more-gun-laws-fewer-deaths-134804944.html
The key, to me is the last sentence,"Wintemute said it's likely that gun control measures are more readily enacted in states with few gun owners — a factor that might have more influence on gun deaths than the number of laws. "

Echo that. Plus your Clash signature line of course!

 

[denton]

There is so much disinformation floating around that you can hardly tell what's real and what's concocted. So, since I do a lot of stats in my job, I did my own research and ran my own stats. That gives a result I can believe in.

Here's reality:

For a handy starting point, I used state Brady grades as an indicator of how strict a state's gun laws are. I then looked up each state's homicide rate in the FBI online database. Finally, I ran a regression on the two sets of numbers.

Brady successfully mislead me for a short time. More about that in a moment.

The result of the regression was that there is no correlation between Brady grades and homicide rates. Neither is there a correlation between Brady grades and violent crime. Your chances of being murdered, raped, or violently assaulted are not influenced by how strict your state's gun laws are. In other words, strict gun laws do not demonstrably make you safer.

Well, maybe.

Brady did not give grades to Washington DC or to Puerto Rico. Why? Well, perhaps because they are not states. But they are state-like entities, and they have obscenely strict laws and astronomical homicide and violent crime rates. They are also included in the FBI database. So why did Brady not include grades for them? Quite possibly because they knew someone like me would run the stats. I have not re-run the math, but I'm pretty sure that with DC and PR in the mix there is a correlation, and that it's negative. That is, more strict gun laws are associated with higher homicide and violence rates.

Now that's a real study done by a real statistician. If someone comes up with a completely contrary answer, I have a lot of questions about their methods and analysis.

 

[Spdracr39]

Agree this study is bogus because it only compares rates with the firearm related declines not the overall rate. I bet the same or more people committed suicide just not with a gun.

 

[mljdeckard]

Show me the data and methodogy.

In a nation that had 11,000 some-odd homicides last year, over 500 of them were in Chicago alone. No freakin' way.

 

[HorseSoldier]

I don't see anyone presenting data to the contrary, just posturing and castong dispersions. Can any show contrary results to the claims made, not other claims, but to the claims made?

Does anyone have a link to the actual study by Fleegler et al? I'm not seeing one in a google search.

I can see a number of critiques for the methodology I'm reading about, but the core one that leaps out at me is omitting consideration of access to emergency medical services and trauma care, which has nothing to do with race, poverty, or the other issues allegedly controlled for. The states with the most oppressive gun laws also tend to be heavily urbanized. Urban areas translates into higher density of emergency and critical care medical assets and reduced transit time from scene of a shooting to definitive care. Even in gun-strict states with large rural areas like New York or California, I'm quite certain that non-suicide shootings (but not necessarily deaths) cluster in urban areas very predictably.

You get shot in a bad drug deal in Metro Chicago, you're probably five minutes or less from an ER and not much further from a top-rated trauma center via an ambulance running code (and there's probably responsive medical air evacuation on call if you are more than five or ten minutes from definitive care). You get shot in the same drug deal gone bad in Alaska outside of Anchorage or maybe Fairbanks, you're probably hours from an ER by road and not much better if they scramble the PJs or other SAR assets we have in state to come get you. If you make it to a rural clinic or even an ER, you're still going to be a medevac flight away from definitive care in Anchorage or possibly even out of state (we ship a lot of serious trauma to Seattle once stabilized).

Consequently, you're less likely to be a stat in this study if you get shot in NYC, Chicago, LA, Washington DC, and all our other hubs of urban decay and societal decline than if you get shot in a more rural area where access to medical care is delayed by distance to facilities and possibly by lower quality assets when you get there. I would note that when the military Special Operations community sends their medics and corpsmen in training into clinical rotations, they specifically send them to major metro areas so they can see gun shot wounds, and work with doctors and surgeons expert in their care, whereas this study would suggest that just sending them to any old red state would do. Reality demonstrates otherwise.

The root lie in the study is looking only at firearms deaths. I suspect had they expanded their study to look at both deaths and felonious assaults involving a firearm, the benefits of living in those charming totalitarian states with all their egalitarian gun laws vanishes. Most likely, the numbers actually show an opposite relationship once you expand the study to include firearms crimes where the victim survived. Given that those doing this study are medical professionals, they are aware of this discrepancy in their data set and it is hard to look at this study as anything but a propaganda piece as a consequence.

 

[InkEd]

I think that it's time to start legally going after media outlets that clearly broadcast proven misinformation as factual unbiased news.

I have no problem with shows that broadcast biased viewpoints to my own (it's their right) as long as it is clearly stated that it is NOT presented as legitimate news.

When stuff like that is broadcast, there needs to be some kind of "truth in advertising" type disclaimer message stating key information like "The Brady Center is a gun control lobby organization. Major metro-cities like Chicago, NYC, etc have been excluded from the results of this survey."

 

[USAF_Vet]

The city if Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, yet they experienced more murders in 2012 than any other city in the nation. They consistently have high murder rates. That is not a fluke. This study is garbage.

 

[rdhood]

This article was not about gun violence. It is about gun deaths. There is a BIG difference between the two. One merely tracks guns used in violence. The other tracks the OUTCOME of a gun shot victim.

Hint: If someone gets shot in Boston or Chicago or New York City or LA ... all places with strict gun laws... they are going to have a better chance of survival than the backwoods of Alabama or Georgia. Why? Because urban blue areas have more/better HOSPITALS and MEDICAL CARE. The OUTCOME of the gun shot victim is generally better in gun-controlled blue states because they have better medical care... not because they have more restrictive gun laws.

And that, as a side, is why Obamacare is fundamentally broken. Obamacare is a guarantee of insurance... not of care. If I live in Montana or Idaho, 40 miles from the nearest doctor and 100 or more miles from the nearest hospital, it doesn't help much ot have insurance with no medical provider (or substandard medical facilities/providers/etc). The range of care varies so much: Boston is going to have better care than Atlanta, which is going to have better care than podunkville Kansas. We all pay the same amount, have the same fines, but those in high population blue states (you know, the ones that passed Obamacare....) have much better medical facilities. And when those medical facilities are applied to gunshot victims, I'm willing to bet that they have better outcomes and lower rates of gun deaths.

 

[Rob G]

I can think of three reasons we can completely disregard this study:

1. Correlation does not prove causation. This is probably the most basic rule of all statistics.

2. They chose to omit data, in the form of ignoring the effect of greater gun control in areas like Chicago, which will have the effect of changing their overall data.

3. They chose to go with "gun deaths" which includes suicides. Suicides are not relevant to the current national conversation on gun control and its' effects on violent crime. In my experience suicidal people always find a way to off themselves when they're serious. The lack or presence of a gun would only marginally effect their rates. Take suicides out of the equation and then tell me what the results of the study are.

 

[denton]

Limiting the scope to "gun deaths" is statistical sleight of hand. When an investigator does that, it is with intent to deceive.

The math error at the core of a major anti-gun talking point is that if half your homicides or suicides are committed with guns, and you eliminate guns from the population, the homicide or suicide rate will fall by half. The evidence is, it just doesn't work that way. If you eliminate guns, the homicide rate remains the same. The only thing that changes is the tool of choice.

There is practically no private firearm ownership in Malaysia. The law provides an automatic death penalty for possessing a firearm and one round of ammunition. So you'd think that they wouldn't have any homicides there. But they do. Their rate is about the same as my home state, Utah, which is practically awash in guns.

There is also practically no private firearm ownership in Japan. You'd think their suicide rate would be zero. But it is about twice that of the US. Apparently not having firearms does not deter determined, suicidal Japanese.

And of course, the is the issue of access to medical help, which biases the result.

There is no valid reason for any sort of special consideration of firearm violence. The only thing that matters is total violence. But most people don't listen critically and all they hear is that if gun controls are tighter, fewer people will die. Which, incidentally, is completely contrary to practically every study on the topic that has ever been done.

edited to add:

1. Correlation does not prove causation. This is probably the most basic rule of all statistics.

That's absolutely correct.

It's also interesting to look at the reverse: If there is causation, there will be correlation. Finding none, the statement you can make is that if there is an effect, it is not distinguishable from random noise. Hence, if there is an effect, it is not worth your interest.

 

[Lucifer_Sam]

I saw this last night, and started to post it, but I was pretty tired and decided to finish it later. Anyway, heres what I wrote, sorry if it seems a bit awkward, or covers points already made--

----------

They didn't even take into the account the types of laws present, just the bulk number of laws. And they included suicides, of course. And didn't mention overall non firearm homicide rate.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/loca...gun-laws-fewer-deaths-50-state-study-says.ece

http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/201...tates-with-most-gun-laws-study-finds#comments


The doctor behind looks like a confirmed anti--

Fleegler is also among hundreds of doctors who have signed a petition urging President Barack Obama and Congress to pass gun safety legislation, a campaign organized by the advocacy group Doctors for America."

...and hes a pediatrician, apparently. Which, unless I'm missing something, makes him about as qualified to be doing studies on gun control as I am.

One key point--

During the four-years studied, there were nearly 122,000 gun deaths, 60 percent of them suicides.

Overall, states with the most laws had a 42 percent lower gun death rate than states with the least number of laws

So, looks to me like states with higher gun ownership might have more people that are killing themselves with guns. Thanks Dr Fleegler, I would never have guessed that.

Looks like its already being criticized, even on NBC. I guess the doctors thought that they'd get a free pass, like they do on things like second hand smoke studies.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets referenced for a while, as many second rate anti gun studies do.

 

[denton]

second rate anti gun studies

You give it too much credit.

 

[blaisenguns]

Does gun control reduce violence in our communities (not gun violence). I suspect not. And if more stringent laws merely shift the weapons that violent aggressors use to attack -- and removes a viable means of defense from smaller or physically weaker victims -- has it improved our communities?

Like The Nuge said to Morgan: "Do you care about murder, or just murder with guns?"