A Harvard study

[Berserker]

found that that the oft-repeated notion that more guns in the hands of ordinary citizens means more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths, is full of ”misconceptions and factual error, and focus on comparisons that are unrepresentative.”

After Russia forced a complete disarmament of its people in the 1960-1970′s, the Harvard study showed that “manifest success in keeping its people disarmed did not prevent the Soviet Union from having far and away the highest murder rate in the developed world. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the gun‐less Soviet Union’s murder rates paralleled or generally exceeded those of gun‐ridden America. While American rates stabilized and then steeply declined, however, Russian murder increased so drastically that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times higher than that of the United States. Between 1998‐2004 (the latest figure available for Russia), Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates. Similar murder rates also characterize the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and various other now‐independent European nations of the former U.S.S.R.”

Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe.
http://www.calwatchdog.com/2012/08/07/ignorance-abounds-in-gun-control-stories/

For every drive by google dump posting lets counter post FACTS

[thereismore]

1. Economy is obviously a confounding variable. nt

[nichomachus]

2. Rife with logical fallacies, but nice try -- C-

[gejohnston]

3. that would make it equal all gun control rants,

how about the paper itself?

[nichomachus]

5. You do realize that you're quoting an interpreation of research

posted on a radical right-wing site.

[gejohnston]

7. never heard of these people

and I have no idea who they are. I did read the paper years ago. Mauser is a Canadian economist and Kates is a lawyer/criminologist who worked with Bill Kunstler. During the civil rights era, he worked as an armed guard for civil rights workers registering African American voters. I don't know about Mauser's personal politics, but I have read more papers and books by Kates. Kates is as critical of the NRA as he is of other extreme. They did get the interpretation of the paper correctly. Although "Harvard study" is misleading. It is a paper in their law publication, not a sociological study and neither Kates nor Mauser have any connection with the university.

[nichomachus]

10. It's not a "study" -- just a polemic with cherry picked data and false data

It's been pretty much debunked in the past. It's been around for a while.

Reminds me a lot of the stuff you see come out of the tobacco industry shills.

[gejohnston]

14. that pretty well explains any gun control study

for example?

[Clames]

20. Debunked?

You have any proof? I'm sure you have all kinds of false and cherry picked data to support your claims...

[Berserker]

17. right wing left wing middle wing

doesn't matter all that matters is the facts. GUNS are not right wing or left wing they are just tools.

[shadowrider]

9. Radical right wing site = Anything that disagrees with gun control/bans n/t

[busterbrown]

4. Cal.watchdog.com? Give me a break. Do you honestly think you can get away with this crap?

In the meantime.......http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list

[slackmaster]

6. The cited article has a link to the published Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy study

Do you have any comment about what the research discovered?

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

[nichomachus]

8. Yes, not a peer reviewed study

Cherry picked data, a lot of false data, and more polemic than research. Bottom line: garbage study

[gejohnston]

11. for example?

[nichomachus]

13. You can use the Google.

[gejohnston]

16. that's not how it works

I'm not making any claim either way. You use the Google, I prefer the Ixquick

[Eleanors38]

53. You asserted, you back it up. Basic academic approach.nt

[shadowrider]

15. Would you care to point out the cherry picked and false data please? n/t

[busterbrown]

12. Yea, I have a problem with Don B.Kates.

Leading attorney in U.S. on the rights to self defense. "Has written countless articles
on ineffectiveness of gun control". You think I'd be impressed with "Harvard"? They
publish contrary opinions all the time. I'm sure they have someone who has written on the
"lies of climate change". You guys usually piss all over intellectuality. Except when it fits
your narrative!

[slackmaster]

18. Please explain exactly what you mean by the term "you guys"

Thanks in advance.

You guys usually piss all over intellectuality. Except when it fits your narrative!

Everyone cites intellectual authority when it fits their narrative. There's nothing wrong with that.

[busterbrown]

22. You Guys? Lets see.....perhaps the NRA? ...Wayne La Pieerriee (whatever).

[slackmaster]

23. You're not a very good guesser

Don't quit your day job.

[gejohnston]

19. there is a lot more than that.

Don B. Kates, Jr., attended Reed College and Yale Law School. During the Civil rights movement, he worked in the South for civil rights lawyers including William Kunstler. Thereafter, he specialized in civil rights and police misconduct litigation for the federal War on Poverty program. After three years of teaching constitutional law, criminal law, and criminal procedure at Saint Louis University School of Law, he returned to San Francisco where he currently practices law, teaches, and writes on criminology. He is editor of Firearms and Violence: Issues of Public Policy (San Francisco: 1984, Pacific Research Institute) and the Winter 1986 issue of Law & Contemporary Problems. He is author of the entry on the Second Amendment in M. Levy & K. Karst, The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution; "Firearms and Violence: Old Premises, Current Evidence," in T. Gurr (ed.), Violence in America (1989); and "Precautionary Handgun Ownership: Reasonable Choice or Dangerous Delusion," B. Danto (ed.), Gun Control and Criminal Homicide, forthcoming (1990).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Kates

[busterbrown]

24. His main meal ticket over the past few has been specializing in self defense cases!

Just because at one time in his life specialized in Civil Rights and worked for the good cause
does not mean that he deserves any more credibility on this subject.
AS a matter of fact I personally think guys like him have been partially responsible for the
situation we are in today!

[slackmaster]

25. Self-defense IS a basic human right

[gejohnston]

28. are you saying people should not defend themselves?

What situation we are in today? Our streets are safer now since the 1960s. Hopefully it will continually go down to 1950s levels.
you realize Castle Doctrine dates back to English common law, and is law in UK, and commonwealth countries as well. There is no duty to retreat from your home.

Outside of that, it gets complicated. Never the less, defending yourself is a basic human, in fact a basic right of all species.

[Simo 1939_1940]

74. You are aware that Mr. Kates made a small contribution to the Civil Rights Act

and stood watch (with rifle) to protect civil rights workers, yeah?

(rhetorical question.......the answer is obviously no.)

[beevul]

76. One can only wonder (assuming thats true) why...

One can only wonder (assuming thats true) why you would be so intimately familiar with "His main meal ticket over the past few" (years, one can only assume?), and if perhaps its because you are some sort of "counterpart", on the other side of the gun issue from him.

Would you care to shed some light on that?

[Clames]

21. The CDC has published it's own review on studies dealing with gun control laws.

Have anything to say against the CDC? Looks like you do a fine job of pissing on your own "intellectuality".

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm#tab

[busterbrown]

26. I was not aware that the CDC is now pushing the NRA agenda?

[slackmaster]

27. OK, you have just tipped your hand

You can't possibly be serious.

[busterbrown]

33. Just remind me who I'm dealing with here?

Not much,is what I think.

[Eleanors38]

56. Buster. You got nothin' to show. nt

[gejohnston]

30. in other words,

you have no interest in honest dialog.

[busterbrown]

35. Honest Dialog with those who will churn up data from any sleazy disingenuous study they can find?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list

Reply please!

[slackmaster]

39. The interactive chart pretty well torpedoes any idea that gun ownership rates correlate strongly...

...with homicide rates.

[larrybx]

91. it jolly well doesn't!

In fact, I'd say the torpedo did a 360.

Sort the chart by "Homicide by Firearm Rate per 100,000 Pop." and presto, you find that indeed the US ranks 28th. But which countries are 1 through 27? Let's check them out:

Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, Venezuela, Guatemala, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Belize, Puerto Rico, Brazil, South Africa, Dominican Republic, Panama, Bahamas, Ecuador, Guyana, Mexico, Philippines, Paraguay, Anguilla, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, Argentina, Barbados.

So what can we conclude?

1. Every single one is an impoverished developing country (with the exception of Argentina and Brazil which historically share the same cowboy gun culture as the US and where most of the murders are committed in slum areas like the Brazilian favelas)

2. 17 of 27 are small, poor Caribbean countries, where the guns are probably imported or smuggled from the US. Puerto Rico should be counted as part of the US, which would raise the US homicide rate.

3. Only three countries are outside of Latin America: South Africa and Zimbabwe (which still suffer the effects of Apartheid and where the majority black population live in urban slums) and the Philippines, a former US commonwealth

4. After the US, the next western industrialized countries on the list whose economy and society can be fairly compared to ours are Turkey (45), Switzerland (46) which has a standing militia (including almost all male citizens between 20 and 30, who keep their weapons at home), and Italy (48).

5. Their homicide rates are between 0.71 and 0.77, about ONE QUARTER of the US rate of 2.97 per 100000.

6. Now let's do some statistics. I'm no expert but it's easy enough to plug the data of x = homicide rate versus y = gun ownership rate into an online correlation calculator like this one: http://www.alcula.com/calculators/statistics/correlation-coefficient/

I have selected from the list 27 countries, most of them from Europe plus Canada and New Zealand. So I don't get accused of cherry picking, I will explain that I left out developing countries, tiny countries like Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Malta, countries that experienced civil war in the recent past like Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, and isolated countries with unique demographics like Iceland.

So here's the data:

USA 2.97, 88.8
CH 0.77, 45.7
FI 0.45, 45.3
CY 0.46, 36.4
S 0.41, 31.6
N 0.05, 31.3
F 0.06, 31.2
CA 0.51, 30.8
A 0.22, 30.4
D 0.19, 30.3
NZ 0.16, 22.6
GR 0.26, 22.5
B 0.68, 17.2
CZ 0.19, 16.3
SI 0.1, 13.5
DK 0.27, 12
I 0.71, 11.9
E 0.2, 10.4
EST 0.24, 9.2
IRL 0.48, 8.6
P 0.41, 8.5
SK 0.18, 8.3
England & Wales 0.07, 6.2
BU 0.67, 6.2
HU 0.07, 5.5
NL 0.33, 3.9
PL 0.09, 1.3

Despite the fact that there are outliers like France and Norway which have relatively high gun ownership but very low homicide rates, and Italy and Bulgaria which have the reverse (possibly due to Mafia killings in Italy, poverty and corruption in Bulgaria), the correlation rate r = 0.73, which is considered to be moderate to strong.

Better statisticians than I may take issue with the assumption of a linear relationship between gun ownership and homicide rates, but at least this little exercise shows that one cannot glibly conclude from the data that the two are not correlated.

[slackmaster]

92. We're talking about two different figures here - homicide by firearm vs. homicide

Here is a state-by-state may of the homicide rate, irrespective of the method or weapon used.

Note that even some states with strict gun control laws, such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey have among the highest rates. Louisiana is obviously out of control. Vermont, Maine, and Wyoming all have relatively loose gun laws, and are among the safest in terms of homicide risk.

[hrmjustin]

93. Welcome to DU and I hope you enjoy the site.

[gejohnston]

58. the wiki page is all homicides

regardless of weapon.

[Clames]

31. Well since the aren't pushing anyone's agenda (including your flawed one)...

...that basically means you aren't aware of anything.

[Eleanors38]

55. You have a problem with Kates. What is it? nt

[eqfan592]

48. Sorry, but measuring the affect of gun laws by ONLY measuring gun crime is idiotic.

It is the overall violent crime rate that is important, because if all you are doing is changing the implement, it is a pointless exercise anyway.

[safeinOhio]

29. Norway?

You might want to check out the gun laws there. License to own and purchase guns and bullets. Licence must be approved by local police. Very strict laws on transporting guns outside the home,no CCWs. Guns must be secure in a locked safe bolted to the floor and may be inspected by the local police.
great example to use for lots of guns, along with common sence laws to keep them out of the hands of those that would use them to break the law.

[gejohnston]

32. European illegal guns

trafficking routes are also the illegal drug routes. According to Wikipedia, most crime guns in Norway are ripped off from the military, kind of like our 1930s national guard armories and machine guns.
As for CCW, it was rare to nonexistent in the US from 1920s-1990s outside of Vermont. From 1886-1995 it was actually easier to get one in New York than Wyoming.

Since Norwegian cops are not routinely armed, like UK, it would be kind of awkward to apply for a CCW, don't you think? Since their crime is very low, a change either way would be a solution in search of a problem.

[Clames]

34. Those laws really stopped Anders Brevic didn't they? n/t

[busterbrown]

36. O.k., Now I know whom we're dealing with!

[Clames]

59. Shouldn't lie to yourself. n/t

[busterbrown]

37. Your right, kids and counselors should have been armed!

[Clames]

60. Somebody should have been. n/t

[busterbrown]

38. I'm relatively new here. Tell me about these gunners who hang around supposedly a progressive site.

[safeinOhio]

40. May sound crazy, but the progressive tent is pretty big.

[busterbrown]

41. I'm sorry but it just doesn't make sense. So many innocent people, children, have their lives...

destroyed by guns. I'm not saying ban guns but for Gods sake make it harder for a guy who just
got pissed off at his boss to go find a gun. Steal it, purchase it, trade for it, whatever, it sucks!

[safeinOhio]

42. Good point and I'm with you.

But, you'll catch hell with that kind of talk around here.

[slackmaster]

44. Lives get destroyed in many, many different ways, and guns are usually used for perfectly...

...peaceful purposes. ETA they are sometimes used for self-defense.

Criminal misuse of a gun is chosen behavior that is done by people who don't follow society's rules. It is those people, not guns, that are to blame for people being hurt.

I'm not saying ban guns but for Gods sake make it harder for a guy who just
got pissed off at his boss to go find a gun.

If you have a concrete suggestion for doing that in a way that doesn't violate peoples' right to keep and bear arms, I'd love to see your plan.

[busterbrown]

45. Boy if they only new how guys like you would misuse this concept!

[slackmaster]

51. Please define "they" and "guys like you" so I can understand what you mean

You aren't being very clear here.

[busterbrown]

52. You're a pretty smart guy. I know that you van figure it out and ya know something, Your right!

[Clames]

61. Let's help you out a little.

You're a pretty smart guy. I know that you can figure it out and ya know something, you're right!

[Eleanors38]

57. Are we your enemy?

[ProgressiveProfessor]

54. Then you need to revisit the racist and classist roots of gun control in the US

and free your mind to consider that personal firearms ownership is a progressive value

[busterbrown]

62. My God this is hard to believe. They said this was a big tent, but seems there is a lot of

elephant poop in it.

[gejohnston]

71. since you are new

perhaps you can answer this question
http://www.democraticunderground.com/117269792
as for the "elephant poop" might want to research when some of the state laws were written, like North Carolina's handgun licensing law, why until the 1960s the south, outside of New York, had the strictest gun laws.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/mlk-and-his-guns_b_810132.html
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3857/talking_about_guns_fighting_about_race/

[ProgressiveProfessor]

81. Not sure whom or what your worship, but its quite real in terms of US history

Historically gun control in the north was used against the poor. In the south against blacks.

There are a lot of pro RKBA Democrats. Its more a urban vs non urban thing than a right/left thing.

On the weekends I teach firearms to mostly GLBTs and women, the vast majority of whom are liberals. Its a growing number. Deciding to own guns for sport and self defense does not make them any less liberal, gay, or female. I would also mention the Pink Pistols, a gay pro gun group...You cannot bash an armed gay.

[oneshooter]

43. And the results are.......................

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201208/anders-behring-breivik-norway-massacre-story

27 dead

All your laws did no good at all.

[safeinOhio]

46. Exceptions make the rule.

Murder rates per 100,000. Norway 0.6. U.S.A 4.2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

[busterbrown]

63. According to our NRA friends around here, your link is not relevant.

So many other aspects must be considered!

[gejohnston]

67. do you realize you said that same link was a very questionable source?

I'm guessing you didn't read the links, or actually pay attention to them?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1172&pid=83381
they are the same link. You know, the one that says we are closer to 107 than 8.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1172&pid=83386

[busterbrown]

47. So the counselors and staff being armed would have prevented this?

Question? Where does Norway rank in firearm homicides compared with U.S. I believe we rank
8th. Columbia is #1. Great!

[eqfan592]

49. Again, measuring only firearm related homicides is next to meaningless.

In order to measure the impact of gun control, one must examine its impact on overall homicide and violent crime rates.

[rDigital]

68. Did you know that Russia has over 3x our TOTAL homicide rate and

has not a single civilian legal handgun.

Did you know that Japan's suicide numbers completely dwarf our total number of gun homicides and they are around 1/3 of our total population.

Did you know you are 10x more likely to be violently raped in France than the U.S.?

Food for thought and all of that jazz.

[busterbrown]

72. Suicide is a personal choice. Whats your point? Link me to a site which states My girlfriend has a

ten time better chance of being raped in France. We've been there for several years, Never heard of
that kind of crime...being prevalent. . Made that shit up didn't you?

[gejohnston]

73. but it is part of the "gun violence" statistics

gun control advocates drag out. You know, the 30K a year. 65 percent of them are suicides. That is the US.
Japan, is a little more complex. There are no murder/suicides in Japan, they are simply suicides. There is a different word to describe the difference. The generic word for suicide is jisatsu
http://www.japanpsychiatrist.com/Abstracts/Shinju.html
The cops have been known to write off cold case murders as suicides just to close the case.

[hack89]

80. So why do gun grabbers always pad their numbers with suicides?

besides the obvious one that gun deaths due to crime are steadily falling and are at historic lows?

[rDigital]

86. You need not be so crude, it makes civil discussion much more difficult.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap-crime-rapes
There are the stats on rape. You can google the rest yourself.

[DanTex]

50. Every now and then some gun fanatic posts this piece of psuedoscience.

It's not actually a "Harvard study". It's an article published by a right-wing law review edited by Harvard Law Students. Here's what I posted last time...

This is not a "Harvard study". It's a non-peer-reviewed article written in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, which is a conservative Law Review edited by right-wing Harvard Law students. The people who wrote it do not appear to be trained in even the most rudimentary statistical techniques. And on top of that, there are actual factual errors and bad data. This "study" would never have made it through a peer review.

There are actual peer-reviewed "Harvard studies" on gun violence, and they generally come to the opposite conclusion than this piece of garbage. You can find some of it here.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/

I'd go on, but since every six months or so, a new mouth-breathing gun fanatic decides to post this "Harvard study", so I've already covered this before...
Most incompetent pro-gun "researchers" tend to try to use at least slightly subtle methods for distorting and misrepresenting data. A good example is Gary Kleck, comparing estimates of defensive gun uses arrived at using one very loose methodology versus gun crimes estimated using a tighter methodology in order to come to the absurd conclusion that there are more defensive gun uses than criminal gun uses, despite the fact that any "apples-to-apples" comparison shows that there are far more criminal gun uses.

But Kates and Mauser raise the bar by simply using false data. It makes propagandizing so much easier! As has been pointed out on this board before, the authors quote the homicide rate of Luxembourg as 9.01/100K. Of course, as anyone even marginally knowledgeable about international crime statistics knows, this is completely out of the question, unless there were some kind of anomalous mass killing in that year. It is common knowledge that the only first-world nation with a homicide rate even close to that is the USA (which, not coincidentally, has far higher gun ownership than any other first-world nation).

What happened was there was a decimal point error: the Luxembourg homicide rate is actually 0.9/100K. Now, if this was some number hidden away in some table, maybe it wouldn't matter much. But it's not: they refer directly to this supposedly sky-high homicide rate of Luxembourg in the text, and they even highlight the number in Table 2. And with good reason: if that actually were the homicide rate of Luxembourg, then it would deserve to be highlighted.

This leaves us with the standard two possibilities for pro-gunner propaganda:
1) (Dishonesty) Kates and Mauser knew the number was bad, but chose to highlight it anyway, perhaps because it felt so good, for once, to have a statistic that didn't have to be further manipulated in any way in order to support their case.
2) (Incompetence) Kates and Mauser really didn't double check the number despite the fact that even an amateur would instantly be able to spot this as way out of line with reality.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the answer is. For most people I'd say dishonesty is the only possible answer, because it's such an egregious error. It would be like a climate scientist citing an increase in temperature of 8 degrees Celsius as opposed to 0.8 over the last century. But, based on the quality of the rest of this paper, along with other things I've seen by Kates and Mauser, in this case it is possible that these guys are actually clueless enough to slide by with the incompetence defense.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x475526#475562

http://www.democraticunderground.com/117264314#post5

[busterbrown]

64. Well, you certainly a hard worker.I just don't have the patience to work through all the bullshit

they spew around here. Mis info, exaggerations, slight of hand it doesn't end. I'm new around here and
got involved with the gunners. Very little support, thank God you showed up!
I was about to say "hell with it". These guys are nuts!

[gejohnston]

65. he has them booked marked

Last edited Thu Nov 1, 2012, 03:23 AM - Edit history (1)

and mentions once in awhile, BTW, can you show one example of misinformation, exaggeration, or even a slight of hand and back up your claim?

[rDigital]

66. "they".... "thank god you showed up"... "hell with it" "very little support" "i'm new"

[Berserker]

75. Welcome to DU

While it is true that Democratic Underground will not put up with any right wing bullshit you can't turn DU against itself. We believe in the 2A which is protected by the constitution.
Although you did try by posting in GD and getting your thread locked whining about this group and admitting you were spoiling for a fight and saying we were nuts.
RKBA is a great part of DU and I am sure everyone here respects your views as long as there is no name calling and you respect ours.

[beevul]

77. Are you sure you're new?

"all the bullshit they spew around here"

"I'm new around here..."

And yet you speak as if you aren't.

[DanTex]

78. Yeah, the gungeon is an ... ummm ... "interesting" place, as you've figured out.

Guns are one topic where DU permits unvarnished right-wing propaganda to be posted (such as this OP). As a result, a lot of trolls have figured out that as long as they stick to guns only, they can last quite a long time pushing a right-wing ideology. Of course, every now and then some of the trolls will let their guard down and start making right-wing posts about other things and then get banned.

As far as the science, this is one of a number of pieces of pseudoscience that gets posted here from time to time. There is, of course, also legitimate peer-reviewed research on gun violence -- for example, here is a recent survey by Harvard professor David Hemenway. Of course, if you start posting actual peer-reviewed studies, the NRA crowd will insist that all the top research universities, along with the editorial boards at the academic journals and so on all have "anti-gun bias" so you can't trust anything the scientific community has to say about guns, and that the real truth can only be found on gun blogs and grainy youtube videos.

[gejohnston]

83. right wing propaganda written by a left winger

like Kates is rather ironic.

[DanTex]

84. Kates is a libertarian.

But, most importantly, he is a pro-gun ideologue who has no background in statistics or science or social science or anything else that would make him qualified to analyze international homicide and gun ownership statistics at a professional level. And that is why, rather than attempting to submit this "study" to a peer-reviewed journal, instead he went with a right-wing law review.

There have been peer-reviewed studies looking into international correlations between gun ownership and homicide and suicide, such as this one.

OBJECTIVE: To examine international correlations between reported rates of household gun ownership and rates of homicide and suicide with a gun. DESIGN: Survey. POPULATION: People who responded to a telephone survey conducted by the 1989 International Crime Survey in 11 European countries, Australia, Canada and the United States. RESULTS: Positive correlations were obtained between the rates of household gun ownership and the national rates of homicide and suicide as well as the proportions of homicides and suicides committed with a gun. There was no negative correlation between the rates of ownership and the rates of homicide and suicide committed by other means; this indicated that the other means were not used to "compensate" for the absence of guns in countries with a lower rate of gun ownership. CONCLUSION: Larger studies are needed to examine more closely possible confounding factors such as the national tendency toward violent solutions, and more information on the type and availability of guns will be helpful in future studies. Nevertheless, the correlations detected in this study suggest that the presence of a gun in the home increases the likelihood of homicide or suicide.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485564/

There have also been peer-reviewed studies looking into the relationship between gun availability and homicide rates here in the US, such as this one:

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates,
and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy
for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using
county- and state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun
prevalence as between +0.1 and + 0.3. All of the effect of gun prevalence is on gun homicide rates.
Under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual marginal social cost of household gun
ownership is in the range $100 to $1800.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JPubE_guns_2006FINAL.pdf

[gejohnston]

90. a left wing libertarian similar to Nader

and peer reviewed doesn't mean flawless, it just means it was fit to print. This study missed the point because it was looking for guns. Rural areas have higher gun ownership in most places of the world. Rural areas have higher suicide rates, including places were gun ownership is equally rare or non existent such as Japan an and South Korea. While it did find a correlation, it did not find a cause.

I already explained to you why Guns and Ammo magazine sales was a poor proxy. One is changes in gun ownership would be among casual gun owners, who don't read gun magazines. Another was that GA wasn't measuring up to new competition, and the company had to buy back copies and give them to doctors offices and barber shops to please advertisers. They bought them from areas where sales were slow. Cook would have no way of knowing that at the time.
Why isn't this published in a criminology journal? Why haven't suicide or homicide (faster than it already does) rates drop in Australia?

Edit to add from a locked thread

How about, say, Canada?

The point is not that we should be profiling future criminals. The point is that the background check system alone does not do an adequate job of keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people.

It is true that you can commit murder with a rope or a pillow, but obviously, it is much easier to do with a gun. Which is way, as demonstrated by every other developed nation except for the US, when you restrict access to guns, you end up with less homicides.

When it comes to Mikey, who views the obese, any physical handicap, and anyone over 60 as among those who should not be allowed to own a gun, the USSR comparison is not paranoid. In Canada, convicted felons may legally own firearms as long as the trial judge doesn't issue a prohibition order and they are not on parole. Prohibition orders are usually issued for violent offences. Iverglas, of all people, ranted that or blanket ban would violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Not being a Canadian lawyer, I have no idea. She said she was. Canadian laws in the 1930s, and the short lived long gun registry in the 1940s, were about immigrants. Their 1977 law was about political violence by Quebec separatists and Mohawks who wanted to take their country back from some developer wanting to build a golf course.
BTW, it is "fewer homicides" not "less homicides".

[busterbrown]

87. Thanks, does this not mean that those who run this site feel so strongly about their own guns that

they are willing to underestimate the damage the NRA is doing to progressive causes?
My God, their awful lies and insults concerning Obama's policies are worse than most tea bagger
attacks. The hideous support of the NRA to anti Obama rhetoric can jeopardize every thing that
we on the left stand for including healthcare coverage,educational support, climate change, over turning
Citizens United, Dodd Frank, the list is endless. We on the left have no business linking arms with those
who's philosophies run totally opposite of ours. Let them go back to their own right wing sites where they
will be embraced with open arms.

[Berserker]

88. Are you calling me a right-wing troll?

Guns are one topic where DU permits unvarnished right-wing propaganda to be posted (such as this OP). As a result, a lot of trolls have figured out that as long as they stick to guns only, they can last quite a long time pushing a right-wing ideology. Of course, every now and then some of the trolls will let their guard down and start making right-wing posts about other things and then get banned.

That is a very offensive statement that better be backed up with facts. The gungeon is not as interesting as you are. Do you think you are above the rules of DU? Are you so righteous that when you see a post you disagree with you resort to name calling and false accusations against me a long time member?
I will not alert on your post I want others to see the bullshit you spread.

[DanTex]

89. If you think I'm violating the rules, go ahead and alert.

The fact is, you posted a piece of pseudoscience from a right-wing law review and presented it as a "Harvard study". And, yes, it is pseudoscience, and yes the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy is a right-wing law review.

Why you would do something like that is anyone's guess. Maybe you are pushing right-wing propaganda. Maybe you are just clueless. Who knows?

[russ1943]

69. psuedoscience is generous description

Dan you are to be commended for your research and patience.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/20/1112227/-Politicizing-the-tragedy

Yes, it's an article by two right-wing libertarians, published in a journal run by libertarian/right-wing students, the Spring 2007 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Neither author has any affiliation with Harvard, whatsoever.
Don B. Kates is a lawyer associated with the libertarian Pacific Research Institute, San Francisco. Gary Mauser is a retired psychology professor from Simon Fraser University, associated with the libertarian Simon Fraser Institute, Vancouver, Canada. Mauser has published umpteen similar articles, most of them widely debunked, as with this one.
To take just one debunking:
Most incompetent pro-gun "researchers" tend to try to use at least slightly subtle methods for distorting and misrepresenting data. [...] But Kates and Mauser raise the bar by simply using false data. It makes propagandizing so much easier! As has been pointed out on this board before, the authors quote the homicide rate of Luxembourg as 9.01/100K. Of course, as anyone even marginally knowledgeable about international crime statistics knows, this is completely out of the question, unless there were some kind of anomalous mass killing in that year. It is common knowledge that the only first-world nation with a homicide rate even close to that is the USA (which, not coincidentally, has far higher gun ownership than any other first-world nation).
The REAL HARVARD School of Public Health, Harvard Injury Control Research Center http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html

has numerous peer reviewed academic studies published in a variety of professional Journals contradicting most all of the conclusions Kates, Mauser, Lott, Kopel et al present as facts.

[gejohnston]

70. Actually, Lott was peer reviewed

and he has detractors and supporters. I have never seen Hemenway published outside of Harvard Injury Control Center publication, which receives grants from the same foundation that keeps Brady Campaign afloat. What I find amusing, are the claims that Hemenway "a respected scientist" while declaring an award winning professional criminologist who published contradictory findings in peer review criminology publications that is not connected to his place of employment as a "pro gun ideologue". No, I'm not talking about Lott. BTW, in academic circles, it is counter, not debunked. Just because someone does a study using different methods and gets a different results is not a debunking.

Hemenway is an economist who takes money from gun control groups, so what's your point? I think that puts him in league with climate change deniers and other shills.

BTW, Kates is not a right wing libertarian, if anything he could be described as a left wing libertarian who criticizes the NRA as much as he does the Brady Campaign.

[DanTex]

79. Agreed.

Most of all, it is a testament to the stunningly low intellectual standards of the NRA crowd that this article gets posted over and over, hailed as a "Harvard study".

[4th law of robotics]

82. I've yet to meet a grabber that would even listen to facts that didn't support their cause

let alone be swayed by them.

We need to remember that we aren't dealing with a mere difference of opinion or varying interpretation of the law here.

The willful manipulation or removal of facts to support the central tenet that is always right and cannot be changed, that is a sign of a religion.

You may as well use radio-carbon dating to convince a young earth type that his faith is wrong. Not gonna work.

[DWC]

85. Excellent FACTUAL OP! Semper Fi n/t