Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate

[DanTex]

43. You're an engineer? Really?

Because I find it hard to believe that anyone who has even cracked a book on statistics would think it's a good idea to throw the US into the same pool of data as El Salvador and Somalia, do a simple uncontrolled univariate regression, and then jump to the conclusion that gun ownership doesn't increase the homicide rate, all the while refusing to even look at the peer reviewed studies done by qualified professionals that come to the opposite conclusion.

You seem to have some kind of allergy to legitimate peer-reviewed scientific research. If you restrict the data set to a group of similar countries -- first world nations -- then you get a clear positive correlation between guns and homicide. If you do a multivariate time-series analysis at the county level in the US, there is a clear positive correlation. There is also clear evidence of a mechanism -- it is known that gun assaults are much more likely to result in death than non-gun assaults.

If you are actually an engineer, that bodes very poorly for our educational system. As a scientist, I shudder at the thought that someone claiming to be an engineer would draw a simple univariate correlation and then bury their head into the sand the way you are doing. There's a reason that this kind of crap doesn't appear in peer reviewed journals.