Gun Suicides Plummet in State After New Licensing Law, Skyrocket After Law Repealed in Other State

[Kang Colby]

48. I find it shocking that anyone would buy into this easily refutable "study"

but then I remember how strong confirmation bias is. Gun control advocates are true believers, thus anything that confirms that belief is held up as gospel. Regardless of where it came from.

Who authored this study? Daniel Webster. Daniel Webster has spent his entire professional career in gun control advocacy. http://www.experts.scival.com/jhu/expert.asp?u_id=970

Where does Daniel Webster work? Oh, the *Bloomberg* School of Public Health. A gun control advocate, working in a public health school that is named after the world's most wealthy gun control baron...former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I don't post "studies" from the NRA for the same reason I would hope gun control advocates would question their own "studies". I haven't read the actual "study" in this case because I can't find it, but Daniel Webster's group often uses basic statistics to cherry pick correlations that align with the gun control world view.

I will present the actual Connecticut suicide data and some basic calculations I performed with Excel. The raw data was taken from here:http://www.ct.gov/ocme/cwp/view.asp?a=2165&q=295126

I adjusted for population changes each year, and the source of the data was taken from here: https://www.google.com/#q=Conneticut+population

The statistics below show the change in the population adjusted suicide rate year over year. For example, between 1990 and 1991 there was a 5.73% increase in the population adjusted suicide rate and between 1991 and 1992 there was a 14.36% decrease in the population adjusted suicide rate.

Additionally, I included summary statistics for 1995-2014 to evaluate the effectiveness of the purchase permit program implemented in 1995 as to align with the "study". I thought it was responsible to include earlier years in the PY change data to show fluctuations prior to the implementation of the gun control law.

PY Change = Change From Prior Year

Year PY Change
1991 5.73%
1992 -14.36%
1993 2.26%
1994 0.32%
1995 1.26%
1996 -10.56%
1997 -0.69%
1998 -5.94%
1999 5.20%
2000 6.66%
2001 -7.40%
2002 -0.35%
2003 -2.09%
2004 12.46%
2005 -7.47%
2006 -5.98%
2007 -7.42%
2008 16.79%
2009 3.92%
2010 12.58%
2011 3.63%
2012 0.27%
2013 -11.29%
2014 6.97%

Geometric Mean Yearly Increase (Compound Annual Growth Rate): .23% (1995-2014)
Mean Yearly Increase: .53% (1995-2014)
Total Increase in the Population Adjusted Suicide Rate (1995-2014) 3.36%

So what did we learn? Total population adjusted suicides increased between 1995-2014 3.36%.

So let me get this straight, suicides go up .23% per year on average, and somehow this is supposed to illustrate that gun control lowers the suicide rate? Looking at this you could come away thinking that gun control increased the population adjusted suicide rate 3.36% between 1995-2014. Now, you'd be wrong, but you would't be any more wrong than the gun control "researchers".