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dryadgrlI have mixed emotions about guns, but a lot of clarity about gun violence. I live in a city with a lot of it and often think about violence including my own safety and that of my son. And I'm really angry and exhausted by the rhetoric people are shouting at each other the last couple of days. So I've been doing some research about the connections between guns and homicide.
There are more gun owners and gun homicide in the US than anywhere else in the world by the numbers (which are all over FB right now). Comparing total deaths of the US and the UK or Finland or Switzerland or even Isreal is crap - they all have tiny populations compared to the US so that numbers don't mean anything - and the certainly don't inherently mean that the US is the most violent country in the world. Or do they? We don't know by those numbers.
So I started looking at things like gun ownership per capita and other ways of equalizing the statistics. Some one else thought of the same thing....
"Poverty and failing institutions appear to be much better predictors of homicide than gun ownership. Murder rates are higher in neighborhoods of America that are poorer and less educated, regardless of gun culture..." does a lot of looking at the kinds of statistics I was looking for.
There is also the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) statistics that is sited in the List of Countries by Intentional Homicide Rate List which shows just that a list of countries by intentional homicide rates per 100,000. But it coems with a disclaimer...
"The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.[1] The legal definition of "intentional homicide" differs among countries. Intentional homicide may or may not include infanticide, assisted suicide or euthanasia. Intentional homicide demographics are affected by changes in trauma care, leading to changed lethality of violent assaults, so the intentional homicide rate may not necessarily indicate the overall level of societal violence.[2] They may also be underreported for political reasons.[3][4] Another problem for the comparability of the following figures is that some data may include attempts. In general the values in these lists should not include attempts except when mentioned otherwise."
In other words they don't really know. In fact that's what I came up against a lot in this research. Most suggestions were to narrow the data to first world countries so that the reproting could be more accurate and maybe I will at some stage look for more. But I just wanted to say that the causes or correlations are not as clear as many make them seem, especially in places like FaceBok where you get a picture or a short blurb in which to commnicate something complex.
There are more gun owners and gun homicide in the US than anywhere else in the world by the numbers (which are all over FB right now). Comparing total deaths of the US and the UK or Finland or Switzerland or even Isreal is crap - they all have tiny populations compared to the US so that numbers don't mean anything - and the certainly don't inherently mean that the US is the most violent country in the world. Or do they? We don't know by those numbers.
So I started looking at things like gun ownership per capita and other ways of equalizing the statistics. Some one else thought of the same thing....
"Poverty and failing institutions appear to be much better predictors of homicide than gun ownership. Murder rates are higher in neighborhoods of America that are poorer and less educated, regardless of gun culture..." does a lot of looking at the kinds of statistics I was looking for.
There is also the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) statistics that is sited in the List of Countries by Intentional Homicide Rate List which shows just that a list of countries by intentional homicide rates per 100,000. But it coems with a disclaimer...
"The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.[1] The legal definition of "intentional homicide" differs among countries. Intentional homicide may or may not include infanticide, assisted suicide or euthanasia. Intentional homicide demographics are affected by changes in trauma care, leading to changed lethality of violent assaults, so the intentional homicide rate may not necessarily indicate the overall level of societal violence.[2] They may also be underreported for political reasons.[3][4] Another problem for the comparability of the following figures is that some data may include attempts. In general the values in these lists should not include attempts except when mentioned otherwise."
In other words they don't really know. In fact that's what I came up against a lot in this research. Most suggestions were to narrow the data to first world countries so that the reproting could be more accurate and maybe I will at some stage look for more. But I just wanted to say that the causes or correlations are not as clear as many make them seem, especially in places like FaceBok where you get a picture or a short blurb in which to commnicate something complex.
